BEIRUT — Thought you might like to see a portrait of the south I did for the Newark Star-Ledger. I have to say I was very pleased with the editing process and these guys gave great play for a story that I would have thought most American media were no longer following much.

HORRORS OF WAR LINGER IN LEBANON
MAROUAHINE, Lebanon — For 34 days this summer, the Israeli and Hezbollah rockets and mortars whistled through the little villages like this one all across Southern Lebanon. More than 1,000 people, including many Lebanese women and children, were killed. Farther north, concrete cities were flattened. And then, the war ended on Aug. 14.

Or did it?

Nearly two months after a fragile cease-fire was announced and nine days after Israeli promised it had withdrawn the last of its troops from Lebanon, citizens in these southern villages are skeptical. And angry.

You will have to enter some demographic information to see the whole story, but it’s not too odious a requirement.

Technorati Tags: Cluster Bombs, Current Affairs, Israel, Journalism, Lebanon, Middle East

Posted by Christopher at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Google This | Technorati

An unexploded cluster bomb lies in a field near a private house in Majd es-Slim, southern Lebanon. It’s about the size of a D-cell battery.
© 2006 Chris Allbritton, all rights reserved.

MAJD ES-SLIM, Southern Lebanon — Ali Herz didn’t think he had anything to worry about when he went to check on his neighbor’s house in the southern town of Majd es-Slim. After all, the cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel was two days old and it seemed to be holding.

But as he pushed open the heavy black iron gate to enter the garden that morning, something happened. A sharp explosion threw him backward as shrapnel peppered his legs, face and chest. Conscious but in pain, he started to cry out for help to anyone in the area.

“I thought that my legs might have been cut off and I felt something had been knocked out of my mouth,” he said almost a month later as he sat in his parents’ home. He suffered a wound to his head and he couldn’t open his eyes, “because of the blood.”

Herz, 26, a mechanic, had stumbled across what may be the biggest danger facing residents of southern Lebanon now that the war is over: unexploded cluster bombs. According to the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre Southern Lebanon (MACCSL), there are up to 1 million of the tiny but deadly unexploded munitions littering the south, many of them American made. Herz was one of the lucky ones. As of Sept. 21, in addition to Herz, 89 people have been wounded, and 14 killed, according to center spokeswoman Dalya Farran in Tyre, the headquarters for the center.

Cluster bombs work by launching a container of sub-munitions or “bomblets” against a target. When the container-which can be delivered either via airplane, artillery or rocket-bursts open in air, dozens or hundreds of smaller sub-munitions are scattered over a wide area. A ribbon attached to the arming pin deploys, both stabilizing the bomblet and arming it. When it strikes the ground, the trigger slams into the detonator like a firing pin on a pistol, causing the bomblet to explode. In some cases, a shaped charge in the bottom, like a miniature version of what is found in the IEDs in Iraq, increases the lethality of the bomblet.

Most of the cluster bomblets identified so far have been American made, Farran said. The munitions include American m42s, m77s, m85s and Chinese-made MZD-2s. Some of the m85 munitions are Israeli copies of American designs, she added, but she wasn’t sure of the numbers.

A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces said, when asked to comment on Israeli use of cluster bombs, “All the weapons and munitions used by the IDF are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards.”

He declined to comment further.

Although there is no international ban on cluster weapons in general, the United States has strict rules about the use of its cluster munitions against civilian targets as laid out by the Arms Export Control Act. Additionally, the U.S. and Israel reportedly have secret agreements about their use, according to a report in the New York Times. The State Department has opened an investigation into whether the use of cluster bombs by the Israelis violates either the AECA or the secret agreements.

“What we’re doing is seeking more information regarding alleged improper use of cluster munitions by the Israelis,” said Nancy Beck, a department spokeswoman. “Based on the information that we gather we will take appropriate measures, if required by the Arms Export Control Act.”

The IDF spokesman also declined to comment about the State Department investigation.

While the investigation is ongoing, a shipment of M-26 artillery rockets-cluster weapons-has been held up, according to the New York Times.

Since 1976, Israel has been the single biggest recipient of American foreign aid, according to the World Policy Institute in New York. From 2001-2005, Israel received $10.5 billion in Foreign Military Financing- congressionally appropriated grants given to foreign governments to finance the purchase of American-made weapons, services and training-and $6.3 billion worth of direct U.S. arms sales.

“Being able to purchase arms from the United States, at least under U.S. law, is not a right,” said another State Department official who requested anonymity in order to discuss the investigation. “If we find that that these weapons are not used for the appropriate purposes, the U.S. may decide not to sell or provide weapons in the future.”

In 1982, Congress cut off the sale of cluster bombs to Israel, following an inquiry that showed they had been improperly used against civilian targets in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year. President Reagan lifted the ban six years later.

It was these mines and unexploded munitions left over from the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982, as well as those planted by various warring factions in Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, that MACCSL was formed to deal with. “But after the war, we discovered we had a huge problem with cluster bombs,” said the U.N.’s Farran.

Despite the IDF’s official statement, there are signs that some within the Israeli military establishment have had second thoughts about the use of the weapons. In an article in Ha’aretz, Israel’s leading left-leaning daily newspaper, an unnamed commander in the IDF’s MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) unit expressed regret at the use of the cluster bombs.

“In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs,” the commander is quoted as saying. “What we did there was crazy and monstrous.”

In the closing days of the war, he said, his unit launched up to 1,800 cluster rockets into southern Lebanon containing up to 1.2 million bomblets. The U.N. also estimates that another 32,000 artillery shells with cluster munitions were fired, adding more unexploded bomblets to the area. An unknown number of cluster bombs were dropped from the air. Farran saiid more than 1 million unexploded bomblets could still be on the ground.

And that’s one of the main problems. No one is really sure just how many strikes there were — “Each day the new targets are adding up,” said Farran.

As of Sept. 26, survey and emergency ordnance disposal teams had found 590 confirmed cluster bomb strikes, she said. A single strike could be one attack on a house or a village or area.

The official failure rate of the bomblets is 10 percent, said Farran, which means that 1 in 10 bomblets will fail to explode on impact but remain armed. However, she said the survey and emergency ordnance disposal teams had found that almost 40 percent of the recovered bomblets had failed. Taking the numbers from the IDF, that means there are still up to 480,000 unexploded bomblets from the IDF’s rockets, she said. And that doesn’t include cluster bombs dropped from airplanes or fired from artillery.

Those on the ground doing the dangerous job of clearing the bomblets agree.

“I’ve never seen so much like this,” said Magnus Bengtsson, the supervisor on an EOD team clearing cluster bomblets from a neighborhood in the small town of Hanaouay, 5.5 miles southeast of Tyre and eight miles from the Israeli border. “It’s more than I expected.”

Bengtsson and his team are with the Swedish Rescue Services Agency, a group the UN contracted for mine clearing but which has been pressed into service to help with the immediate danger. As he walked through an empty field the size of a soccer pitch, Bengtsson pointed to a small, D cell-battery sized object on the ground. It’s an American-made m77, he said, which is designed to take out both people and armored vehicles, including tanks. The shaped charge can penetrate up to 5 inches of armor, and the casing is scored so it sends out deadly shrapnel to a radius of about 20 feet.

Bengtsson and other groups tasked by the MACCSL with collecting and disposing of the unexploded munitions are concentrating on the roads and homes in the affected villages right now. After that, they will start a phase known as battle area clearance (BAC) that will attempt to clear all the bomblets from the agricultural fields throughout the entire south. It’s a job the UN hopes will be completed by the end of 2007.

There is no blanket ban on cluster munitions, but the Geneva Conventions forbid their use against civilian targets. When asked if he had seen any evidence that Hezbollah had been firing Katyusha rockets from Hanaouay and drawing Israeli fire, Bengtsson, who served in the Swedish army in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq as a demolitions expert, shook his head no.

Residents of the south are grateful to the UN and its EOD teams, but they worry that a delay in getting to all the bomblets will lead to the loss of tobacco and olive harvests, the mainstay crops of the south.

“We hope they can clear the fields because we rely on them,” said Ali’s mother, Mariam Herz. “We lost the season for the tobacco … and we had a few cows that were killed.”

Today, Ali Herz walks slowly with a limp, and when he shows his legs and chest, the shrapnel wounds are so numerous he looks like he suffers from chicken pox. He still has two pieces of shrapnel in his left thigh, he said, and he has to put cushions between his knees in order to sleep. He cannot work because he has to get under cars, something his injuries prevent him from doing.

Still, he worries about others and the remaining bombs. “After I hear an explosion,” he said, “I want to go and see if anyone’s been hurt because I don’t want anyone to go through what I’ve been through.”

NOTE: If you’d like to reprint this in your publication, please contact me for negotiation of fees. If you’d like to donate, please hit the link below or to the right.

Technorati Tags: Middle East, Military, Lebanon, Israel, Cluster Bombs, Current Affairs

Posted by Christopher at 5:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | Google This | Technorati

BEIRUT — Hello everyone. Long time, eh? Sorry for the radio silence, but I really had to step away from the blog for a while. Emotionally, it was too much to do one’s best to cover the war here fairly while still maintaining a sense of truth, only to be flayed by people who accuse me of shilling for Hezbollah. Khalas, enough.

One thing I’ve learned from this war is that when it comes to Israeli-Arab relations, most people don’t want the truth: they want words that conform to their preconceived notions. I.e., that Israel is a aggressive, colonial construct with designs on the Litani’s water, or that Hezbollah is full of bloodthirsty savages who don’t deserve to live.

Neither or these caricatures is, of course, accurate. But subtlety doesn’t seem to have much place in the blogosphere anymore, where you get the most attention and the most hits by putting out whatever half-assed opinion one can muster. You only have to shout loudly enough and play to whatever audience you want to get the attention. Blogging these days seems to resemble bad vaudeville rather than thoughtful commentary.

I never wanted that from blogs. I had a vision of blogs standing alongside the so-called mainstream media and being the garnish of a well-balanced media diet, as I said in a lot of radio interviews. I never thought of blogs as a replacement or actively hostile to the Big Guys. Considering my background, that would be ridiculous. I’m a journalist. I’m a proud mainstream media journalist. My background is with the Associated Press, the New York Daily News and TIME Magazine. I’m very proud to be associated with such publications now and in the past and I’m proud of the work they’ve done, with or without my contribution.

But now, it seems the blogosphere has become more concerned with “gotcha” politics and “fact checking your ass,” mantras by armchair photo analysts who have no clue about what happens in a war or how photographs are made and distributed. They just want to score points in what seems to be, at best, a debating club rather than real life and death situations. Congratulations, your team won. Yay. People are still dead, you know. It’s happened in Iraq and it’s happened here, and I don’t really feel like being part of that culture any more.

That said, I’m also proud of the work done on this blog, even in this war, despite some commentators saying I know nothing of Israel or that I only wrote what my “minders” let me. (For the record, there was never any “minder” from Hezbollah that I saw, and certainly not attached to me. Any reticence I exhibited was based on my my own judgment of the situation.)

Which brings up one of the frustrating things about reporting here — or anywhere in the Middle East, for that matter: knowing things but being unable to say them openly. Somethings have to be kept back for security reasons or you don’t want people to know you’ve been to places that would get you in hot water. The Israelis, for example, don’t much like seeing a passport with a lot of stamps from Arab states in it. They’ll hassle you. Hezbollah, likewise, probably wouldn’t look too kindly on a reporter who’d openly been to Israel.

This was a major obstacle in this war for me, but I’d hoped that my reputation and past record — which has been one of honesty, fairness and, yes, accuracy — would have carried me through. That was not the case, however, and a bunch of angry pro-Israel readers who didn’t know my work accused me of saying things that I didn’t know to be true. This is not accurate on their part. When I say something on this blog, it’s backed up by reporting. I may not always be able to openly source it — the rules of protecting sources or myself don’t change simply because the work is online — but I know what I’m talking about. Readers can accept that or not; I really don’t care any more.

Which is why I took a break. I got tired of defending myself to anklebiters who frankly had no idea what they were talking about. I got tired of going out every day, risking the life of my driver, translator and myself, only to be told I can’t do anything put parrot Hezbollah propaganda. It was insulting and it pissed me off. To all you people who think you could do better in a war zone, bring it on.

This will be the last entry on B2I Edition du Liban for a while. I’m working on a novel now and I want to focus on that and my other, professional work. I’m also going to focus on rebuilding a life here and taking care of the people I love. Something’s got to give and the blog — or what’s left of it — is it. I have realized that life is short.

To everyone who wrote asking if I was OK, thank you for your concern. It means a lot. But farewell, for now.

Posted by Christopher at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (82) | Google This | Technorati

BEIRUT — I’ve been back in Beirut for a few days now and I’m realizing just how difficult this war has been to cover from a journalistic standpoint. Thanks to the seemingly random nature of air-strikes (yes, I know they’re not really random) and the secretive nature of Hezbollah, getting close to the action has been exceedingly difficult. Hezbollah doesn’t allow reporters to tag along with them and getting to close to the receiving end of an Israeli artillery barrage is ill-advised. So it’s difficult to say what is really going on militarily. Perhaps some of the reporters who are embedded with the IDF can say, assuming the military censors let enough stuff through.

Anyway, in Beirut, the situation is growing dire. According to Nabil el-Jisr, coordinator for the Higher Relief Commission, Lebanon’s power plants have cut down on production in order to stretch out the fuel left in the country, but most estimates gives us about a week of diesel fuel for generators and about the same for gasoline supplies, even with rationing. Three-hour waits in lines get you 10 liters of gasoline these days. I stupidly rented a car after having no end of troubles with hiring drivers, but now I just mainly leave it parked in an attempt to save fuel.

There are almost 1 million people displaced, and no one has any real idea of where they are or what’s going to happen to them. El-Jisr said yesterday that about 250,000 were outside the country, but that still leaves 700,000 or so living in schools, shelters, parks or private homes of generous Lebanese. How long will they stay? Where will they go after the fighting stops? (A number of villages in the south are gone, simply wiped off the map, or with a high percentage of ruined houses.) So far, no one has any answers.

Further complicating matters is the cultural clash. Most of the displaced now squatting in various Beirut locales are poor, traditional Shi’ites. (Some Christians, too, but not many.) There’s a growing tension between Sunnis and Shi’ites, and I encountered growing resentment — and outright classism — among Sunnis toward the Shi’ites. If this keeps up, Sunnis and Christians will be blaming “the Shi’ites” instead of Hezbollah for this war. And that’s a recipe for social conflict.

Down in Tyre, my colleagues are forced to walk in the city now, as no one is willing to take a car on the road, much less out of the city. The Israelis have dropped leaflets saying any vehicle seen moving will be assumed to be Hezbollah and destroyed. Note that all the cars we journalists drive are clearly marked with big “TV” on the sides and roofs delineating us as media. No matter to the Israelis, apparently.

The roads and bridges out of Tyre are blown up anyway. The last remaining dirt causeway that was the only means of getting food and other aid south of the Litani was bombed a couple of nights ago and the Israelis have threatened to blow up any bridge that’s built to replace it. Khaled Mansour, the spokesman for the U.N. in Lebanon, told me the organization is waiting for authorization from the IDF to build a bridge but so far, nothing.

It’s incredibly serious because according to Mansour, there are between 70,000 and 130,000 people still left south of the Litani river, mainly concentrated in Tyre and Rmaiche, a Christian village south of Bint Jbail. In Tyre, the markets are closed and the shelves are empty anyway. He said that while there is no starvation yet, “They’re running out of food very quickly.” WIthout a bridge over the Litani, it will be impossible to get food into the region.

I’ve submitted an essay to the Singapore Strait Times which should be published this Sunday. I’ll post the text or link when it’s available, but for now, an excerpt:

The war came quickly to Lebanon, like an angry storm from the south, just hours after the Shi’ite group Hezbollah snatched two Israeli soldiers in a daring cross-border raid July 12.

The Israeli response was swift and terrible. Roads, bridges, airports, the entire civilian infrastructure of Lebanon, which had worked so hard in 15 years to rebuild from a devastating civil war, was under assault because of the actions of an armed group inside its borders and a furious Israeli military that had been looking for a chance to get even ever since Hezbollah finally forced Israel from Lebanon in 2000.

Beirut, my home, changed overnight. Thousands of urbane, cosmopolitan people—Christians, Sunnis and Shi’ites alike—fled the country to Syria. Or at least they high-tailed it to the mountains. Within days, many came from the south to take their place. Mostly poor Shi’ites, they came by the hundreds of thousands. Filling abandoned buildings, schools and taken in by generous Lebanese families. After three weeks of fighting, between 800,000 and 900,000 people — again, mostly poor Shi’ites — have been pushed up cheek-to-jowl with upperclass Christians and Sunnis.

Also, here’s a piece I also did on the Rachidiye Palestinian camp, which lies just to the south of Tyre. In one of history’s bitter ironies, they’re taking in Lebanese refugees.

The Israelis have started shelling or bombing Dahiye again. While writing this, a massive blast rattled my windows. I can only hope that something can be done to stop this.

Posted by Christopher at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (43) | Google This | Technorati

TYRE — That’s what you hear when you go out in the south these days. Well, silence and the sounds of Israeli bombs and shells. Here’s an account of two days in the south:

ZEBQINE, southern Lebanon — In this village, 10 km southeast of Tyre, the only signs of life are two donkeys rooting for food amid the rubble.

Formerly grand houses are now collapsed into piles of concrete. Childrens’ toys and family books lie scattered under the August sun. The tobacco leaves, a mainstay crop in the region, still hang on the wires, long-since dried. But there are almost no people.

“About 70 percent or more of the people in the south are already gone,” said Khalid Mansour, the spokesman for the United Nations in Lebanon. “They’ve been displaced.”

From journeys through more than a dozen villages on Tuesday, it appears he’s right; southern Lebanon has been largely depopulated, as the remaining residents took advantage of a 48-hour lull in Israel’s three-week long attacks to flee their destroyed villages. Even in towns that have largely escaped the destruction visited on places such as Zebqine and Qana, there are very few signs of activity. Most storefronts are shuttered, but not all. Except for a thick coating of grime, some stores and cafés look like the owners just stepped away for a moment and would be right back. Homes are usually locked, but one can look in to see old place settings on the table, a land-based version of the legend of the Mary Celeste.

It looks like the end of the world.

In Bourj ech Chemali, just outside of Tyre, about 1,500 remain out of some 10,000 people, according to Ali Talib, 57, a long-time resident. In Tibnine itself, a town of about 10,000 people, only about 200 remain according to Lebanese internal security forces. And in the town of Haris, just before Tibnine, only 40 people out of 8,000 remain, according to a woman awaiting a ride to Beirut along with six of her family members.

In all, some 800,000 to 900,000 Lebanese have been forced north from their homes, said Astrid van Genderen Stort, the spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. About 150,000 are in Syria, but the rest are stuffed into schools, community centers or the private homes of generous Lebanese.
“The situation is becoming increasingly dire,” said Astrid van Genderen Stort, the spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. “Host families are sharing their homes with up to 30 or 40 people. It’s been three weeks. They’re eating into their own reserves.”

The only other comparable mass displacement in recent memory is Kosovo in 1998, she said, where 800,000 people were displaced in the span of a month. And as bad as the displacement was, problems continued after the cease-fire was announced.

As soon as the Serbian forces withdrew, most of the 800,000 poured back across the border to go home. “They were unstoppable,” van Genderen Stort said. For months, the United Nations and other international organizations had to deal with refugees returning to a devastated country, destroyed homes and dead relatives. Much the same will happen in Lebanon, she said.

But for now, the problem is getting the people out of harm’s way, and most of them have largely moved north to Sidon or Beirut. Those too poor or too sick haven’t made it that far, and have instead clustered in the larger towns of the south such as Tibnine, Qana or Tyre, where they squat in school and hospital basements without electricity, surrounded in Stygian blackness and bathed in their own sweat.

With the announcement on Monday of the 48-hour lull in air strikes, hundreds of people emerged from towns across the south. For many, it was their first contact with the outside world in almost three weeks.

Between 500 and 600 refugees made it from the destroyed town of Bint Jbail in the south to the Tibnine Government Hospital, where they boarded buses and headed north to Sidon. About 200 remained in the hospital’s basement Tuesday, said Lebanese internal security officials.

But not all have left. Two brothers, Ali and Hussein Talib, 57 and 54, have stayed in Bourj ech Chemali to keep their general store open. It was one of possibly two stores seen open in the backroads of the south all afternoon. They see their decision to stay open as a combination of duty and defiance.

“The first reason is to help the people who cannot find anything to eat,” said Ali, the older one. “The second reason is to boost their morale.”

My apologies for not posting more. I’ve been having to beg time on satellite modems to file and with only 5-10 minutes at a time to send and receive email, that doesn’t give a lot of time to write blog posts. That said, I’d like to address something.

On several right-wing blogs, including the National Review Online, a comment I made about Hezbollah’s security measures and their “hassling” of journalists has been taken to mean that we’re all Hezbollah stooges here … or something. This is not true.

What I wrote was this: “To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but I’m loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s passport, and they’ve already hassled a number of us and threatened one.”

Let’s set aside that the Lebanese Internal Security also has photocopies of our passports. The reason for the hassling and the threat was that a reporter had filmed or described either a launching site or Hezbollah positions. (I’m not sure which.) To the best of my knowledge, that’s been the extent of the hassling. I’m going to get in trouble for this, but I think it’s a reasonable restriction. This is the exact same restrictions placed on journalists by the Israeli army and by the Americans in Iraq. I don’t think threatening journalists is cool at all, and it certainly doesn’t endear me to them, but that has been the extent of Hezbollah’s interference in our coverage.

Why do I think it’s a reasonable restriction? Because I believe in staying neutral as a journalist. It’s not my job to help out the IDF or Hezbollah. Just as I wouldn’t give away Israeli positions, I won’t give away Hezbollah positions. By doing either, I threaten the neutrality that we depend on here for our access and our credibility. Morally, I also think by giving away positions that could get people killed, whether they’re Hezbollah or IDF soldiers, is to aid in the possibly killing of another human being. I’m really not comfortable doing that.

This is mostly academic, however. Most of the time, we never even see Hezbollah. They keep a very low profile and only come out when something happens, such as a bombing. Then the boys with the walkie-talkies appear and wave their arms and yell and generally push the reporters back until the firemen come in and put out the fire or recover bodies. That’s been the extent of my dealings with Hezbollah, and it’s been the case with probably 95 percent of the reporters here, too.

I do not have a Hezbollah “press pass,” as one commenter suggested. They do not hold my passport (they have a photocopy, presumably.) I have neither sought nor received permission from any Hezbollah people to cover anything. No one has prevented me from covering anything. The Palestinians in Rachidiye Refugee Camp did prevent me from taking pictures of their gunmen, although I could still interview them. Everything I’ve reported I’ve either seen with my own eyes, or it has come from trusted non-Hezbollah sources. Like the ambulance story. I spoke with the drivers and I saw the very ambulances. It was not faked, and it was definitely an Israeli missile of some kind that destroyed the ambulances.

As far as Qana, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what the scene was like, other than what my colleagues — who I trust — told me and what I saw on television. As for the death toll going down from 54 to 28, well, that happens. It was apparently a confusing time and the mortician at the al-Bass Government Hospital gave out some numbers that included people also killed that day but in other places. As for why it took so long to get there, well, the strike happened at night and no one travels much after dark here, certainly not in the middle of an Israeli bombardment. I don’t believe Qana was faked, as some bloggers are charging. People like Michelle Malkin are full of it and refuse to see anything with even a scintilla of objectivity or fairness. They are not journalists; they are jokes.

So that’s the latest. I’m having recurring problems finding drivers to take me around, but hopefully that can be solved. I’m also open to story ideas. What would people like to see while I’m in the south awaiting a coming Israeli invasion.

Posted by Christopher at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (81) | Google This | Technorati