Random Thoughts from Lebanon

I am at present in Oman, part way through a 10 day tour which includes Muscat, Salalah and more remote areas. Hence, the lack of postings recently. What a contrast Oman is to the rest of the Gulf. In many ways Oman today reminds me of Bahrain and Dubai when I first knew them almost 40 years ago. Everything still seems to close for a siesta between 1 and 4 pm, even the shopping centres – very civilized and so different to Dubai. The tallest building is a mere 12 floors and most are no more than three or four stories. Oman is one of the few places in the area where you will find citizens actually working in jobs other than the civil service and, maybe, banks and they outnumber foreigners four to one in the country, again a contrast to the UAE, where there are some four foreigners to every citizen.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese political crisis runs on. The election of a new president, scheduled for tomorrow, is certain to be postponed yet again and a French Foreign Ministry official has been outspoken enough to blame the lack of progress on the Lebanese political leaders themselves, rather than the outside influences that usually said to be the culprits.

Amr Moussa has now returned to Beirut to conduct what may well be make or break negotiations on the Arab League initiative. If he fails, it is likely that it will be

Amer Mousa, Secretary General of the Arab League has postponed his planned visit to Beirut, due to have started tomorrow. Presumably his asssistant who has been in Beirut for several days had not been able to pave the way for agreement on the election of the president on 26 February. No doubt the parliamentary session will be postponed yet again.

Arrived in Cyprus last night and will be staying in Nicosia until 24 Feb.

Meanwhile, the following was published on the website Ya Lubnan today

Breaking News: Lebanon army intervenes to end clashes in Beirut

Sunday, 17 February, 2008 @ 12:49 AM

Beirut – Lebanese army troops intervened to restore order as pro-government and opposition supporters engaged in fist fights and beat each other with sticks in Ras el-Nabaa,

a Muslim neighborhood of Beirut late Saturday, police and TV stations reported.

Gunfire was heard in the melee but it was not clear who fired and there was no immediate word on casualties from the police.

Television footage showed scores of riot police backed by helmeted troops manning armored carriers taking up positions. At least two persons were shown injured in the footage.

Aljadeed TV showed a man, his right cheek bloodied, speaking on a mobile phone. Paramedics carried another man on a stretcher into an ambulance. The station read out names of 11 people reportedly injured in the clashes and said several cars were damaged. They are as follows.

Mohammad Tabbara, Firas Al-Halabi, Hassan Dogan, Saad Mansour, Hassan Mansour, Khader Al-Turk, Ahmed Morsi, Ahmad al-Halabi, Mohammed Wahby, Hassan Arnaout, Ziad Shehab

The total number of wounded was 14 and all have reportedly been taken to nearby hospitals

State-run National News Agency reported trouble in other Beirut neighborhoods and they are:

Khandaq al Ghameek, Barbeer, Beshara el Khoury , Mazraa

Such clashes have become common in recent weeks as tensions escalate between rival Lebanese camps and the country’s 15-month-old political crisis deepens.

The Beirut neighborhood of Ras el-Nabaa where the scuffle erupted late Saturday has in the last four days been the scene of sporadic clashes between supporters of the pro-Western government and the pro-Syrian, Hezbollah-led opposition.

Clashes Saturday spread to three nearby neighborhoods, according to TV reports, but ended within a couple of hours.

The neighborhoods involved have a mix of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, whose loyalties are split along the political divide. Shiites support the pro-Syrian opposition as the militant Shiite Hezbollah group does, while Sunnis support the U.S.-backed government.

Hezbollah’s al-Manar television later said that followers of a pro-government group tried to storm an opposition’s office at Ras el-Nabaa but the report could not be independently verified.

A Shiite opposition protest over electricity cuts in south Beirut neighborhoods last month degenerated into a riot, prompting troops to open fire. Seven people were killed in that violence.

Update – 1: 00 AM Sunday

According to the Sunday An Nahar daily the number of wounded has risen to 20 . Most of the wounded were taken to the nearby al Maqassed hospital

Several apartments and cars in Ras el Nabbaa and Beshara el Khoury were set ablaze
The army intervened and ended the clashes and the situation is currently under control

Both Hezbollah and Amal have denied that their members were involved in these clashes , despite the fact that all the reports blamed them for initiating the riots.

Lebanese army soldiers, are seen through a broken car windshield as they secure a road in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008. A Lebanese man passes by a car with a broken windshield as they secure a road in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008.Sources: AP, IHT, Ya Libnan

The following article appeared in the Beirut Daily Star today and may be of interest.

A new struggle for life after war in Tyre
Southern town suffers strains from political crisis in Beirut as it tries to recover from 2006 conflict


Saturday, February 16, 2008

Rebecca Murray

Inter Press

TYRE: The solemn black-clad crowd rallied in Tyre’s downtown for the Muslim commemoration of Ashoura, which marks the battlefield death of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, and an enduring symbol of resistance for the Shiites in Lebanon. The population here is mostly Shiite Muslims.

A few blocks away along the Mediterranean shore, a small, rapt audience watched Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah sermonize on a cafe television. On a veranda next door, bar worker Hussein and his friends drank beer and soaked in the sun.

“From 1980 I used to come here and drink beer on the beach,” said Hussein, who was born in the South but grew up in Beirut. “This town is [Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri’s party] Amal, and Hizbullah does not ask us about this.”

Tyre enjoys a reputation as a laid back summer resort with a “liberal” lifestyle in the heart of South Lebanon – with its striking Roman ruins, ancient Christian fishing harbor, and bustling beachfront lined with restaurants, coffee shops and bars.

But during the off-season – and compounded by the negative impact of the 2006 war with Israel, the ongoing political crises in Beirut and skyrocketing prices nationwide – the town’s family-owned retail shops and businesses, farmers and fishermen barely make a living.

“Nearly all people here work two jobs,” says Chawki Ghandour, local branch manager for the Bank of Beirut. “And most depend on funds sent from their family members working abroad.”

Ten miles south of the Tyre waterfront lies the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeeping headquarters at Naqourra, and Israel’s border just beyond. On the hills and on the coastal plain in between are acres of citrus and banana plantations, and the villages where the Hizbullah party draws some of its strongest support.

Under fierce bombardment in 2006, many villagers fled to Tyre’s plush Rest House resort and the surrounding Palestinian refugee camps for relative safety, before heading up the dangerous coastal road north to Sidon. “During the war my family home was bombed, and they went to Beirut,” says Hassan Lehaf, the charismatic owner of Skandars bar. “I stayed here, and there were journalists sleeping here. Every night under bombing we would think it was our last, and we’d bring all the bottles out onto the bar.”

While Tyre itself was spared most of the violence, by the end of the 34-day conflict the civilian casualty count was way over 1,000. Vast swathes of infrastructure were destroyed, and an estimated hundreds of thousands of unexploded cluster munitions lay indiscriminately scattered across the South.

Since then, in accordance with United Nations Resolution 1701, UNIFIL has upgraded to nearly 15,000 strong. It is deployed with the newly arrived Lebanese Army below the landmark Litani River, and alongside the hundreds of operational foreign de-miners and charity workers. These are the South’s current, albeit temporary, main employers, and the source of a considerable cash infusion into its ailing economy.

Daoud, a soft-spoken man in his twenties, worked with the commercial Armor Group until it wrapped up its de-mining operations in Lebanon last December. He and many colleagues at the local Red Cross were snapped up to work as medics on ordnance clearance teams, while hundreds more were recruited for the hazardous work of searching for deadly munitions. They are paid $800 to $1,000 a month, a windfall salary in the South, where average take-home wages otherwise are about the national minimum of $200 a month.

But with a December deadline to finish all cluster munitions clearance, and with only a few companies staying on for further mine removal, most medics and searchers like Daoud will be out of a job.

“I have work, but it’s little work,” he says. He has a $350-a-month job as a guard at a national telecommunications company. “Everyone has another job, not just me,” he says. “Mine action is a good job for one year, but people don’t give up their original jobs.”

During Tyre’s summer weekends, the beachside cabanas are filled with families seeking refuge from the humid heat, while the scantily clad lie poolside at the exclusive Rest House resort. At night Skandars is a perennial favorite for international workers and Lebanese visiting from Beirut or abroad, and packed with bodies drinking and swaying to loud dance music. Others dance energetically elsewhere to Arabic singers on stage, while the many locals who frown on alcohol congregate at the coffee bars.

Outside in the honking traffic, white UN cars tangle with mopeds and pickup trucks. Those too poor to enter a venue sit along the promenade to watch. “The economic situation is linked to the political situation – if the political situation is resolved, then the economy will improve,” says Tyre’s mayor, Abdel-Mohsen al-Husseini. “Right now many people are buying just the necessities – if they need water, they will buy one bottle instead of two.”

There is consensus that Hizbullah, with wide support in Tyre, does not want to start a conflict over alcohol, and is instead working to keep the internal peace. Hizbullah’s major concern is the multitude of outside threats: the national political unrest, recent attacks on UN peacekeepers and the possibility of another war with Israel are already exacerbating heightened tensions.

For the past two weekends a small group of youths have burned tires in Tyre’s streets, in solidarity with Beirut’s violent protests over electricity cuts in the southern suburbs. Although co-opted by political parties, the message is resonant in the South where the price of electricity is high. Tyre’s severe power cuts can last all day during winter months.

Medhi moved back to Tyre from the US a few years ago to start a seafront cafe serving cake and cappuccinos out of his childhood home. “We have the highest phone costs in the world, the highest electricity costs,” he says. “I pay more for electricity in two months than for all the employees that I have. How do I survive? I don’t know – the street is not as good as it looks.”

“The wealth from UNIFIL is not being evenly spread,” Medhi continues. “When I opened my business I had peacekeepers come here, but after the Spanish bombing it stopped.” He pauses thoughtfully. “Where the wealth is spread is with the de-miners. They just took two of my employees. I told them to be careful,” he adds.

Valentine’s Day. The third anniversary of the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, several times Prime Minister in Lebanon and generally credited as the driving force behind the reconstruction of the country after the 15 year civil war which ended in 1990. This even has been commemorated with a large gathering in Martyr’s Square in Beirut, inspite of heavy rain all day.

Also the day on which the funeral of Imad Mughniyeh, a senior Hizbollah official who was assassinated two days ago in Damascus, took place in Beirut.

Given the already tense situation prevailing in Lebanon, the coincidence of the two events in Beirut on the same day has given cause for concern but, so far, no clashes have been reported.

As if Lebanon did not have enough problems we were woken up just before 02.00 a m last night by a noise that sounded like automatic weapon fire. Looking out of the windows we could see no activity and eventually went back to bed. Next morning we discovered that we have been through an earthquake, registering 4.2 on the Richter scale – not that strong, but quite strong enough for someone who has never experienced an earthquake before!

At last, the fighting ceased, but not before some 1000 Lebanese civilians had been killed, hundreds of thousands left homeless and crippling damage had been inflicted on the country’s infrastructure. By that time, I was in Dar es Salaam for some consultancy work and it was not until 10 days later that I was able to contemplate returning to Tyre. Due to the continuation of the Israeli sea and air blockade, the only possible air route in was via Amman, from where MEA and Royal Jordanian Airlines were allowed to operate a shuttle service to Beirut. And so, on 26 August I set out from Dar es Salaam, via Dubai to Amman and Beirut. The journey from Beirut airport to the house, which had generally taken 50 minutes before the war, took 2.5 hours because of diversions, usually unsigned, around the damage to roads and bridges. The house had suffered no damage other than the front door but an apartment building about 700 metres away had been bombed and several buildings in the city had been destroyed. 

As I wrote this, some two months after the cease-fire, Tyre was enjoying something of a boom from the influx of United Nations forces and many aid agencies. The rubble of the destroyed and damaged buildings had been removed and roads were gradually being repaired, although some major bridges on the highways would take up to 2 years to rebuild. 

What did it all achieve?

I arrived at the Rest House at 07.15. On the way, there was a lone road sweeper at work; otherwise, the streets of Tyre were virtually deserted, although the quantity of laundry drying on balconies seemed to indicate that more people had remained in the city than was generally estimated. 

There were already quite a number of people waiting at the rest House, almost entirely Lebanese with dual nationality, mainly German. Designer jeans and T-shirts were much in evidence among the men but most of the women wore headscarves and long dresses. No one seemed to be organising anything and I learned from a German TV reporter that the departure of the ship from Cyprus had been delayed and that it was now expected to arrive at 11.00 a.m. instead of 8.00 a.m., and leave at 5 p.m. 

There seemed to be more journalists than potential evacuees at the Rest House at times and since there were only two real foreigners amongst the evacuees, an English teacher at the Evangelical School in Tyre and I, they gravitated to us. I was interviewed for BBC TV and Radio, ITN, Channel 4 and Sky News, plus the Daily Telegraph, Sun, Mirror and Mail. 

The ship finally arrived about 11.30 a.m. but had to unload humanitarian aid first. Finally, we left the Rest House in buses escorted by the Lebanese army, who also transported some people in their trucks. They even had their own video cameraman recording the event, no doubt for PR purposes. On arrival at the port, we discovered that the Princessa Marissa was lying offshore and that we would be taken out to her in the ship’s lifeboats. There was some Lebanese bureaucracy to deal with while our passports were checked against the lists of each nationality and we were given a voucher stamped by the official, which got us through the barrier and handed over to the German embassy staff, who were assisted by representatives of the Canadian and Australian governments. The Australians dealt with the British citizens and we were quickly into a lifeboat and on the way to the ship. Transferring to the ship was a bit difficult, but there were plenty of willing hands to help, especially with the luggage, children, and older people. Representatives of the German Red Cross were on hand to deal with medical problems. There were at least two wheel chair cases and two children with severe burns. 

By 14.00, I was on board and in my cabin. Since the boat could carry 800 passengers and the number of evacuees was not much more than 200, there was no problem with space. Shortly after boarding, I went to the bar and had a pint of Keo lager to cool me down. Lunch was soon offered and the ship sailed on time at 17.00.

Local TV reported that an evacuation ship, Princessa Marissa, would be in Tyre Monday morning. Later, when I was able to check email I found a message from the Foreign Office advising that a German chartered ship would be in Tyre Monday and would take any EU nationals wishing to leave to Cyprus. It advised those who wanted to leave to contact the embassy. I phoned the embassy, who knew nothing about it! This time they did call back within an hour to confirm, and give me contact details of the warden in Tyre who was co-ordinating the arrangements with the German embassy. 

While in town during the morning, we received some mazoot sent on a bus by a friend in Sidon. This gave us about 500 litres in the generator fuel tank, but we sent the containers back for another shipment  as, with no mains electricity, we were dependent on the generator for power. 

The Tyre warden, Cliff Clarke, called and confirmed that my name was on the list of those to be evacuated the next day. I was instructed me to be at the Rest House at 7.00 a.m. Monday although the sailing time was unknown. 

Spent the last night in the basement.