Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

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Villagers Cheer as Lebanese Army Marches Into the South by Robert F Worth

NY Times 19 Aug 2006

 

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Aug. 18 — Villagers danced in the streets and threw rice on Friday as the Lebanese Army’s soldiers reached the southern border with Israel for the first time in decades, and Hezbollah volunteers handed out grants of $12,000 — in stacks of American dollars — as part of its vigorous campaign to help families whose houses were destroyed over the past month.


Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

In Qana, Lebanon, 29 people were buried on Friday.

Families and friends of victims marched through Srifa, Lebanon, one of many mass funeral processions occuring throughout the south as bodies are uncovered from the rubble.

Joseph Barrak/AFP — Getty Images — Lebanese soldiers arriving in the Lebanese village of Shebaa.

Mass funerals were held across southern Lebanon for hundreds of people killed in the bombings, including scores of Hezbollah fighters who were hailed as heroes and martyrs. Ambulances, sirens wailing, made way for funeral processions, and the stench of death pervaded the streets. In Tyre, almost 200 bodies were dug up from a temporary mass grave and reburied individually.

The funerals, mostly arranged by Hezbollah, illustrated the group’s near-total power over southern Lebanon and underscored the uncertainty of the Lebanese Army’s new mission there. Israel and the United States have said they expect the Lebanese Army to disarm Hezbollah under the terms of a United Nations Security Council resolution.

But even as southern residents cheered the arriving soldiers, Hezbollah banners waved nearby. The group’s members have said they have no intention of giving up their weapons for now. Lebanese government officials have made clear that the 15,000 soldiers being sent to southern Lebanon will not search for weapons. The United Nations peacekeeping troops expected to join the Lebanese Army will not do any disarmament either, United Nations officials say.

At the United Nations on Friday, diplomats scrambled to meet a deadline of getting the first 3,500-troop detachment of that force on the ground in 10 days, and Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary general, appealed for more input from Europe.

On Thursday, France disappointed planners by committing only 200 soldiers, far fewer than expected, while the countries offering frontline mechanized units were Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia, all Muslim, and Nepal, which is largely Hindu.

“That is enormously helpful and a major contribution,” Mr. Malloch Brown said, “but we want this force that we deploy to have a kind of multinational, multilateral character so that it enjoys the confidence of both sides.”

Whatever the fate of its weapons, Hezbollah has already asserted itself politically across the south, distributing food and aid in advance of the international relief agencies that are also in the area.

Hezbollah took its aid program a step further on Friday, making good on a pledge by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, its leader, to provide cash payments to displaced families. With more than 200,000 residents of the capital’s Shiite southern suburbs already back in the area, the group on Friday began giving out the grants of $12,000 — an enormous sum in Lebanon, where an apartment large enough for a small family can be rented for $300 a month.

Lebanese political figures have begun reacting to Hezbollah’s new popularity, breaking the facade of national unity that largely held during the month of war with Israel. On Thursday, the Druse leader Walid Jumblatt, speaking at a news conference at his headquarters, said, “Hezbollah must decide once and for all whether it is a Lebanese organization or a tool of Syria and Iran.”

Mr. Jumblatt, a leader of the fragile secular coalition that holds a narrow majority in the Lebanese Parliament, ridiculed the new arrangement in the south, saying it had not changed Hezbollah’s role. “At any time Israel can launch a pre-emptive attack, and now, as the Lebanese state, we are responsible for the south,” he said. “And the Lebanese Army in such a case will just vanish in a couple of hours.”

But Mr. Jumblatt stopped short of forcefully calling for Hezbollah’s disarmament, saying instead that he favoured “dialogue.” That hesitation appeared to reflect the weakness of the secular majority and its vulnerability to accusations that it is too close to Israel and the United States.

Instead, Mr. Jumblatt reserved his harshest words for Syria, as did Saad Hariri, the leader of the secular parliamentary majority. In a speech this week, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria suggested that Lebanon’s secular leaders favored Israel.

In his own speech, Mr. Hariri lashed out at the Syrian government, accusing it of using Lebanon’s tragedy to score political points. “The regime in Syria is trading in the blood of the children of Qana, the children of Gaza, and the children of Baghdad,” Mr. Hariri, the son of the assassinated former prime minister Rafik Hariri, said in a speech to hundreds of supporters.

In a sense, the recriminations represented a return to usual in Lebanon, after a month of unaccustomed unity forged by the Israeli bombing.

There were other signs that life was edging back toward normality, at least in the capital. A few civilian flights resumed Thursday at Beirut’s international airport for the first time since July 13, when Israeli bombs punched holes in the runways. The Israeli military is still coordinating the flights, but airport officials have said regular flights could start next week.

Beirut’s downtown, largely vacant over the past month, now has a trickle of pedestrians during the day, and shops and restaurants are reopening.

“Everything is coming back to life,” said Farah Ambriss, 24, as she walked to meet friends for lunch at an outdoor table on al Maarad Street. “But we are still afraid because Israeli troops are still in the south.”

Nearby, the owner of Duo, one of the street’s restaurants, stood outside its glass doors and sandstone pillars, greeting customers. The interior was almost full, but the outdoor tables were empty. “I’ve had 100 people a day for lunch since the cease-fire, said the owner, who gave only his first name, Pierre. “Usually we get 500.”

Most people are pessimistic, he said. “The fighting could start again any time,” he said. “There’s no clear solution; it’s still gray, neither white nor black.”

Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Tyre for this article.

One comment on “Villagers Cheer as Lebanese Army Marches Into the South by Robert F Worth

  1. Pingback: Mission & Justice

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