War-scarred Lebanese slowly rebuilding lives

Aljazeera Magazine
Thursday, August 16, 2007
By Emma Sabry

“Nothing has improved for me in the last year,” Mokdad says. “I used to have my dignity, my home and now look at me… I even have to go outside to wash my dishes. This is no life.”

A year has passed since Rasmiyeh Mokdad’s home was destroyed by Israeli warplanes. And the Lebanese woman is still waiting to see it rebuilt.

Like hundreds of thousands of Lebanese villagers displaced by the 34-day-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which ended on August 14 last year, Mokdad lost hope of going back to her home before winter. “Four months ago they began the first phase of reconstruction but I think it will take at least another year before it is finished,” says the 53-year-old woman. “In the meantime, I have to live with my elderly parents in conditions not fit for a dog.”

Mokdad now lives in a rented storage room with her ailing 85-year-old father, who was wounded during the Israeli raid on their house, and her mother, who has just been transported to hospital with heart trouble. “Nothing has improved for me in the last year,” Mokdad says bitterly. “I used to have my dignity, my home and now look at me… I even have to go outside to wash my dishes. This is no life.”

Makdad’s village of Frun, about 75 kilometers southeast of Beirut, was among several towns in the south that bore the brunt of Israeli shelling during the war; almost all of the residential homes there have been leveled. Some of the battered infrastructure in Frun has been restored, but a few of the village’s 2,000 residents have returned. Reconstruction efforts are terribly slow due to bureaucratic red tape, de-mining operations and an eight-month-long political standoff between the Western-backed government and the Hezbollah-led opposition, according to an editorial on AFP.

The Lebanese government has promised to pay a total of 40,000 dollars to help Mokdad and her neighbors rebuild, but so far only half the money has been dispersed. The rest, Mokdad has been told, will be given later.

In surrounding villages, there are banners boasting of the aid Iran has given to rebuild roads, schools and medical facilities in southern Lebanon, where Tehran’s ally Hezbollah has a strong presence. In the village of Yohmor, which witnessed fierce clashes between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli forces during the conflict, the scars of the war are still apparent and bomb disposal experts from the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) are still searching for unexploded ordnance.

“We began clearing operations here on August 15 of last year and we have since removed about 6,500 cluster bombs in the Yohmor region alone,” said Youssef Hayek, a supervisor with MAG. “In one small field alone, we cleared 400 bombs.”

According to the UN Mine Action Coordination Center (MACC), about 126,000 unexploded sub-munitions, or bomblets, had been located and destroyed in Lebanon. The United Nations believes that of the cluster bomblets dropped by Israel over Lebanon during the war, up to one million failed to detonate. At least 28 people have been killed and 177 injured by the weapons since the conflict ended, according to the UN.

Until now, Israel refuses to cooperate in providing data on the location of areas where it dropped cluster bombs during the war. “In spite of repeated requests for information, Israel has not provided the required Strike Data -- location of intended target, quantity and type of ordnance dropped or fired -- that is required to quantify the problem," MAAC said in a statement on Tuesday.

The work of the Mines Advisory group in Yohmor is expected to be completed in four months, Youssef Hayek says, but that’s not soon enough for the residents to return.

“Three weeks ago they began laying the new foundations of the house after clearing all the rubble and cluster bombs but it will take a while before I can move back in with my mother,” says Saada Mohammed Dirani, 53, whose home and small shop were destroyed during the war.

Dirani said Hezbollah gave her 10,000 dollars to help her survive after the war. She also says that the government pledged 40,000 dollars to rebuild her house. But that’s a very small amount compared to what she lost. “My father built our house stone by stone with the sweat of his brow so that he could leave us something when he died,” she said. “All the money in the world can’t replace that.”

Dirani’s loss couldn’t be compared to the pain thousands of Lebanese endured during the war. Israel’s deadly air, sea and land offensive on Lebanon, which began on July 2006, claimed the lives of more than 1,200 mostly Lebanese civilians, and displaced one million people. A UN-brokered ceasefire ended the 34-day conflict on August 14 2006, with Hezbollah declaring a strategic victory over the Israelis, who failed to crush the resistance group or retrieve two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah fighters in a cross-border raid before the war (a pretext Israel used to attack Lebanon).

The economic fallout from last summer’s war has also been enormous. Tourists and foreign investors preferred to stay away from Lebanon for a second straight year, and the economy of the country -- which has a public debt of 41 billion dollars -- shrank by five percent. Material damage of Israel’s bombardment was estimated at 3.6 billion dollars, excluding lost revenues.

Across Lebanon, approximately 125,000 houses have been destroyed by Israeli bombardment much criticized at the time as disproportionate. Of the one million people displaced in Lebanon, an estimated 200,000 have still not been able to return home.

A relative peace between Israel and Hezbollah has existed in the past year, but the war left the Lebanese uncertain about their future, despite the fact that the majority of Lebanese and Arabs regard the war as a “divine victory” for Hezbollah, which is now celebrating the first anniversary of the war with an elaborate sound and light exhibit showcasing war booty to highlight Israel's "crushing defeat." 

But fears of another war grew after Sheikh Nasrallah threatened Israel not to attack Lebanon in a televised speech before a large rally in the capital on Tuesday. "If you, the Zionists, are considering attacking Lebanon, I am reserving a surprise for you that will change the fate of the war and the region," Sheikh Nasrallah told thousands of people attending the rally. "In the same way we were victorious in August 2006, I warn them that here in Lebanon there is a resistance, an army and a people... that reject humiliation and fear only God," he said.

Israel’s reaction to Nasrallah’s speech was strong. “We have to take Nasrallah seriously, he has never lied… If he says he has 2,000 rockets, I believe him,” Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a member of Israel’s powerful security cabinet, told army radio on Wednesday.

“A war on two fronts, in Lebanon and in Syria cannot be excluded,” Ben-Eliezer said.

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