A
Front-Row Seat For
This Lebanese Tragedy
By Robert Fisk
22 May, 2007
The
Independent
There
is something obscene about watching the siege of Nahr el-Bared. The
old Palestinian camp - home to 30,000 lost souls who will never go “home”
- basks in the Mediterranean sunlight beyond a cluster of orange orchards.
Soldiers of the Lebanese army, having retaken their positions on the
main road north, idle their time aboard their old personnel carriers.
And we - we representatives of the world’s press - sit equally
idly atop a half-built apartment block, basking in the little garden
or sipping cups of scalding tea beside the satellite dishes where the
titans of television stride by in their blue space suits and helmets.
And then comes the crackle-crackle
of rifle fire and a shoal of bullets drifts out of the camp. A Lebanese
army tank fires a shell in return and we feel the faint shock wave from
the camp. How many are dead? We don’t know. How many are wounded?
The Red Cross cannot yet enter to find out. We are back at another of
those tragic Lebanese stage shows: the siege of Palestinians.
Only this time, of course,
we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the camp, in many cases shooting at
Sunni Muslim soldiers who are standing in a Sunni Muslim village. It
was a Lebanese colleague who seemed to put his finger on it all. “Syria
is showing that Lebanon doesn’t have to be Christians versus Muslims
or Shia versus Sunnis,” he said. “It can be Sunnis versus
Sunnis. And the Lebanese army can’t storm into Nahr el-Bared.
That would be a step far greater than this government can take.”
And there is the rub. To
get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the army has to enter the camp. So
the group remains, as potent as it was on Sunday when it staged its
mini-revolution in Tripoli and ended up with its dead fighters burning
in blazing apartment blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on the
streets.
And yes, it is difficult
not to feel Syria’s hands these days. Fouad Siniora’s government,
surrounded in its little “green zone” in central Beirut,
is being drained of power. The army is more and more running Lebanon,
ever more tested because it, too, of course, contains Lebanon’s
Sunnis and Shia and Maronites and Druze. What fractures, what greater
strains can be put on this little country as Siniora still pleads for
a UN tribunal to try those who murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri
in 2005?
We read through the list
of army dead. Most of the names appear to be Sunni. And we glance up
to the fleecy clouds and across the mountain range to where the Syrian
border lies scarcely 10 miles away. Not difficult to reach Nahr el-Barad
from the frontier. Not difficult to resupply. The geography makes a
kind of political sense up here. And just up the road is the Syrian
frontier post.
The soldiers are polite,
courteous with journalists. This must be one of the few countries in
the world where soldiers treat journalists as old friends, where they
blithely allow them to broadcast from in front of their positions, borrowing
their newspapers, sharing cigarettes, chatting, believing that we have
our job to do. But more and more we are wondering if we are not cataloguing
the sad disintegration of this country. The Lebanese army is on the
streets of Beirut to defend Siniora, on the streets of Sidon to prevent
sectarian disturbances, on the roads of southern Lebanon watching the
Israeli frontier and now, up here in the far north, besieging the poor
and the beaten Palestinians of Nahr el-Bared and the dangerous little
groupuscule which may - or may not - be taking its orders from Damascus.
The journey back to Beirut
is now littered with checkpoints and even the capital has become dangerous
once more. In Ashrafieh in the early hours, a bomb explosion - we could
hear it all over the city - killed a Christian woman. No suspects, of
course. There never are. Posters still demand the truth of Hariri’s
murder. Other posters demand the truth of an earlier prime ministerial
murder, that of Rashid Karami. Several, just the down the road from
our little roof proudly carry the portrait of Saddam Hussein. “Martyr
of ‘Al-Adha’,” they proclaim, marking the date of
his execution. So even Iraq’s collapse now touches us all here
in our Sunni village where the Sunni dictator of Iraq is honoured rather
than loathed.
A flurry of rockets rumbled
over the camp before dusk. The soldiers scarcely bothered to look. And
across the orange orchards and the deserted tenement streets of Nahr
el-Bared, the sea froths and sparkles as if we were all on holiday,
as this nation trembles beneath our feet.
© 2007 The Independent
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