Why
My Landlord Is
Expecting The Worst
By Robert Fisk
01 August,2007
The
Independent
I
returned home to Beirut this week to find my landlord, Mustafa, welding
an armoured door on to the entrance of his ground-floor flat. "There
are many thieves nowadays, Mr Robert," he pleaded with me. "They
will come to my house first - they will not reach your apartment."
Well, I don't really want
an armoured door on my home. But have things deteriorated this far in
Beirut? I pondered what to say to Mustafa. Truly, I could not repeat
the latest mantra of the late Tony Blair - south of the Lebanese border
and talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - that he had "a
sense of possibilities".
All of us in Lebanon have
a "sense of possibilities" right now - and they are all bad.
The Lebanese army - still fighting its way into the Palestinian Nahr
el-Bared refugee camp in the north of the country more than a month
after the minister of defence announced total victory over the army's
"Fatah al-Islam" opponents - is about the only institution
still working in this country. Yesterday morning's Beirut newspapers
carried front-page pictures of Lebanese soldiers aboard an armoured
personnel carrier, all making "victory" signs to photographers.
But victory over whom? Day
after day, we've been watching the US air force C-130s arriving at Beirut's
Rafiq Hariri International Airport - named after the man whose assassination
on 14 February detonated the latest tragedy of Lebanon - with their
cargoes of weapons for the Lebanese army. Would that they had arrived
a year ago, many Lebanese say, when Israel was destroying much of Lebanon.
But of course, a year ago, the American air force C-130s were arriving
in Israel with weapons to be used against Lebanon, including cluster
munitions which have contaminated 36.6 million square metres of Lebanon.
The United Nations (my favourite
donkey, which always clip-clops into the killing fields when the United
States get stuck) reports that 23 Lebanese civilians have been killed
by these wretched weapons since last year's war, and 203 wounded. In
a truly pitiful remark, the UN Secretary-General stated last month:
"I regret to have to report that, despite a number of attempts
by UN senior officials to obtain information regarding the firing data
of cluster munitions utilised (sic) during last summer's conflict, Israel
has yet to provide this critical data." To which my reaction is:
why not ask Washington for the information? Surely a UN official could
take the Amtrak out of New York and pick up the figures from the Pentagon?
But it is all much worse
than this. The Lebanese army has been reporting to the UN a whole series
of violations of its country's sovereignty, from Israelis - whose daily
over-flights are in total contravention of UN resolutions - to new Palestinian
militant bases inside Lebanese territory.
Take, for example, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and "Fatah
Intifada", two institutions much loved of Damascus. According to
the Lebanese authorities, the PFLP-GC has set up camps in Jubayla and
Ain al-Bayda - its 100 guerrillas in these locations dressed in uniforms
that look suspiciously like those of the Lebanese army itself - while
in Ossaya, the PFLP-GC has installed eight rocket launchers (of 12 and
40 barrels) pointing towards Rayak air base, from which the Lebanese
air force has been flying Kiowa helicopters to the Nahr el-Bared siege.
Other Palestinian units have been reinforcing positions at Wadi al-Asswad,
Balta, Helwa and Deir al-Achayer, with at least 500 men and anti-tank
artillery and anti-aircraft guns. Under UN resolutions, Palestinians
outside the refugee camps should have been totally disarmed.
The UN's reports to New York
are of the deepest pessimism. The Blue Line - the so-called frontier
between Lebanon and Israel which does not include the Shebaa farms area,
occupied by Israel but originally belonging to Lebanon - is "tense
and fragile". Hizbollah - which provoked last year's war by capturing
two Israeli soldiers on the Israeli side of the border - continues to
monitor the UN peacekeeping army's activities, "including through
the taking of photographs and filming".
Needless to say, the Syrians
- whose strong-boned hand is seen behind so many acts of Lebanese mayhem
- have protested their innocence, and even asked for European technology
to assist them in preventing arms smuggling from Lebanon into Syria.
Let me repeat this: from Lebanon into Syria. Yet another UN report states
that arms continue to flow in the other direction and that tribal and
family ties between the authorities in Lebanon and Syria make arms smuggling
easy. So much for the French decision - back in the aftermath of the
First World War - to chop Lebanon off from Syria and make it a separate
country.
And now the latest UN report
on the enquiry into Hariri's assassination talks of the "deterioration
in the political and security environment". The UN cops have now
produced confidential reports of 2,400 pages into Hariri's murder and
other bombings in Lebanon. The crime scene investigation alone - the
roadway outside the derelict Saint Georges hotel on which Hariri and
21 others were blown to pieces - has itself produced 10,000 pages of
information.
The UN believes that the
man who claimed in a videotape that he was to kill himself in the suicide
bombing - Ahmad Abu Adass - was murdered before the assassination and
that another man, apparently non-Lebanese (from his teeth, the UN investigators
concluded he was born in a more arid country than Lebanon), drove the
Mitsubishi truck containing the 1,800kg of explosives that killed Hariri.
The UN knows that he was aged 20 to 25, that he had short dark hair,
that he lived in "an urban environment" for the first 10 years
of his earthly life and in the country for the rest.
And the UN has discovered
much, much more. But the news is all bad. Across the Middle East, it
is all bad. From the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan to the hell-disaster
in Iraq, from the mini-civil war in the Pakistani north-west frontier
to the chaos of Gaza and the occupied West Bank. This is not a time
for a "sense of possibilities". My landlord is right. Weld
the iron door to the entrance of our homes.
© 2007 Independent News
and Media Limited
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