The
Lebanese Fields
Sown With Cluster Bombs
By Patrick Cockburn
in Nabatiyeh
18 September 2006
The
Independent
The
war in Lebanon has not ended. Every day, some of the million bomblets
which were fired by Israeli artillery during the last three days of
the conflict kill four people in southern Lebanon and wound many more.
The casualty figures will
rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking
olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode
at the smallest movement. Lebanon's farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma:
to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to
rot in the fields.
In a coma in a hospital bed
in Nabatiyeh lies Hussein Ali Ahmad, a 70-year-old man from the village
of Yohmor. He was pruning an orange tree outside his house last week
when he dislodged a bomblet; it exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel
into his brain, lungs and kidneys. "I know he can hear me because
he squeezes my hand when I talk to him," said his daughter, Suwad,
as she sat beside her father's bed in the hospital.
At least 83 people have been
killed by cluster munitions since the ceasefire, according to independent
monitors.
Some Israeli officers are
protesting at the use of cluster bombs, each containing 644 small but
lethal bomblets, against civilian targets in Lebanon. A commander in
the MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) unit told the Israeli daily
Haaretz that the army had fired 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying 1.2
million bomblets over houses and fields. "In Lebanon, we covered
entire villages with cluster bombs," he said. "What we did
there was crazy and monstrous." What makes the cluster bombs so
dangerous is that 30 per cent of the bomblets do not detonate on impact.
They can lie for years - often difficult to see because of their small
size, on roofs, in gardens, in trees, beside roads or in rubbish - waiting
to explode when disturbed.
In Nabatiyeh, the modern
100-bed government hospital has received 19 victims of cluster bombs
since the end of the war. As we arrived, a new patient, Ahmad Sabah,
a laboratory technician at the hospital, was being rushed into the emergency
room. A burly man of 45, he was unconscious on a stretcher. Earlier
in the morning, he had gone up to the flat roof of his house to check
the water tank. While there, he must have touched a pile of logs he
was keeping for winter fires. Unknown to him, a bomblet had fallen into
the woodpile a month earlier. The logs shielded him from the full force
of the blast, but when we saw him, doctors were still trying to find
out the extent of his injuries.
"For us, the war is
still going on, though there was a cease-fire on 14 August," said
Dr Hassan Wazni, the director of the hospital. "If the cluster
bombs had all exploded at the time they landed, it would not be so bad,
but they are still killing and maiming people."
The bomblets may be small,
but they explode with devastating force. On the morning of the ceasefire,
Hadi Hatab, an 11-year old boy, was brought dying to the hospital. "He
must have been holding the bomb close to him," Dr Wazni said. "It
took off his hands and legs and the lower part of his body."
We went to Yohmor to find
where Hussein Ali Ahmad had received his terrible wounds while pruning
his orange tree. The village is at the end of a broken road, six miles
south of Nabatiyeh, and is overlooked by the ruins of Beaufort Castle,
a crusader fortress on a ridge above the deep valley along which the
Litani river runs.
Israeli bombs and shells
have turned about a third of the houses in Yohmor into concrete sandwiches,
one floor falling on top of another under the impact of explosions.
Some families camp in the ruins. Villagers said that they were most
worried by the cluster bombs still infesting their gardens, roofs and
fruit trees. In the village street, were the white vehicles of the Manchester-based
Mines Advisory Group (MAG), whose teams are trying to clear the bomblets.
It is not an easy job. Whenever
members of one of the MAG teams finds and removes a bomblet, they put
a stick, painted red on top and then yellow, in the ground. There are
so many of these sticks that it looks as if some sinister plant had
taken root and is flourishing in the village.
"The cluster bombs all
landed in the last days of the war," said Nuhar Hejazi, a surprisingly
cheerful 65-year-old woman. "There were 35 on the roof of our house
and 200 in our garden so we can't visit our olive trees." People
in Yohmor depend on their olive trees and the harvest should begin now
before the rains, but the trees are still full of bomblets. "My
husband and I make 20 cans of oil a year which we need to sell,"
Mrs Hejazi says. "Now we don't know what to do." The sheer
number of the bomblets makes it almost impossible to remove them all.
Frederic Gras, a de-mining
expert formerly in the French navy, who is leading the MAG teams in
Yohmor, says: "In the area north of the Litani river, you have
three or four people being killed every day by cluster bombs. The Israeli
army knows that 30 per cent of them do not explode at the time they
are fired so they become anti-personnel mines."
Why did the Israeli army
do it? The number of cluster bombs fired must have been greater than
1.2 million because, in addition to those fired in rockets, many more
were fired in 155mm artillery shells. One Israeli gunner said he had
been told to "flood" the area at which they were firing but
was given no specific targets. M. Gras, who personally defuses 160 to
180 bomblets a day, says this is the first time he seen cluster bombs
used against heavily populated villages.
An editorial in Haaretz said
that the mass use of this weapon by the Israeli Defence Forces was a
desperate last-minute attempt to stop Hizbollah's rocket fire into northern
Israel. Whatever the reason for the bombardment, the villagers in south
Lebanon will suffer death and injury from cluster bombs as they pick
their olives and oranges for years to come.
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited