Stewart Innes travelled to the south Lebanon region of Shebaa farms with Nicolas Rothwell of the Australian to look into the tense border region still under Israeli control.
Photos by Stewart Innes
“Liberated Region – Enter Peacefully and Safely,” reads the smart new sign erected by the Hezbollah guerrillas just below the ruins of Beaufort Castle, deep in the border country of South Lebanon. A grand boast, and even now, four years after Israel abandoned its buffer zone in the southern ranges of Lebanon, the note of pride is still audible in the voices of the Shia Muslim population here as they recall their “victory over Zionism”.
The whole region still remains on military alert: the stand-off between the Israeli Army, who peer down from their positions on the frontier heights, and the shadowy fighters of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed “Party of God,” lends a surreal tension to daily life. Town squares are draped with urgent, uplifting slogans; triumphal music plays through the side-streets on market days. On the winding roads, information placards record successful attacks against Israeli positions while little squads of uniformed children, the “Scouts of the Islamic Message,” patrol neat check-points, distributing boiled sweets and political manifestoes.
Yet behind the martial atmospherics, new challenges lurk. The south is the poorest part of Lebanon, and its prospects are bleak, despite the creation of several national and international co-ordinating bodies to direct aid and investment its way. The regional economy is based on agriculture and on remittances from locals working in the Arab countries of the Gulf. Politicians in Beirut have much more pressing problems coping with the rivalries and power-plays of the country’s looming election season.
How to make progress, when unemployment is estimated at 80 per cent of the regional workforce, when half a million uncleared mines still dot the rural landscape, and much of the adult population has emigrated? United Nations Development Program officials give vague briefings about capacity building, and the local political chieftain, Nabih Berri, head of the Shia Amal party and Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, makes periodic, mood-boosting visits, but the truth is plain: the south is, to all intents and purposes, another country.
The traders in Nabatiyeh, the south’s main town, know this well. Beirut’s glistening boulevards and skyscrapers, only 100 kms up the highway, could be on another planet:
“The south’s still very much a backwater,” says Raia Ibrahim, who hand-sews lacy decorations to fit round political and religious posters: “We lost many years to fighting, we lost many of our young men: we’re only now really getting used to peace, and beginning to believe we can have security.”
Globalization has also worked its standard woes. Farmer Gamel Midlish is furious with the national government for allowing cheap food imports: “All the growers here are up in arms,” he says, “But no one listens in the capital. This is the most difficult economic situation we’ve ever faced. Of course we’re happy to be rid of our Israeli occupiers and that dreadful colonialism – but now we need someone to bring in money, to make us rich.”
It’s a familiar post-liberation dilemma: what next, once a resistance movement has achieved its initial aims? For more than two decades, the Shia Muslims of south Lebanon have been steeped in an intense brew of religious identity politics. Its grip remains strong, though tempered by a characteristically Lebanese twist of tolerance.
Marie Saileh, a Maronite Christian woman from Nabatiyeh, describes her experience of living amidst a strongly conservative majority community: “Everyone respects me, and no one bothers me, I can go about dressed as I want, doing what I want. The Shia are peaceful and easy-going about others amongst them: what was driving them was the desire to liberate their country, to be independent and respected - and also a constant fear of Israel, which still exists, and which seems to be at the heart of their idea of themselves.”
Hezbollah, though, has been artfully transforming itself into a social and political movement while maintaining its military mission. The signs of this new purpose are plain. Medical clinics and social services offices dot the towns of the south, while Hezbollah-run “Mehdi schools” offer a distinctly Koranic education. This can lead to a certain self-sustaining kind of ideological fervour: young children lounging in the main squares of Nabatiyeh surround the CD shops and sound systems, where driving music is being pumped out. The songs extoll the virtues of Hezbollah’s clerical leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: “Oh Nasrallah, our troops are with you, and with all your men – you’re so dedicated, you won’t leave a single Zionist alive….”
In fact, the hostilities between Hezbollah and the Israelis are at a low ebb, though officials in Jerusalem are convinced the “Party of God” is now behind many of the most serious attacks on the West Bank. Hezbollah is said to operate underground training camps in the south, and to have stockpiled several thousand Iranian-made missiles capable of reaching Israeli cities – but the frontier zone has been relatively tranquil. In May, Hezbollah fighters staged an ambush on an Israeli commando patrol, wounding 13 and killing one soldier; in July, just after the assassination of a prominent Hezbollah leader in Beirut, a sniper shot dead two Israelis while they were repairing a remote antenna mast.
This attack in turn provoked an Israeli assault on a Hizbollah post. Stretched between the two sides, perched in precarious observation posts, is the thin, light-blue line of UNIFIL, the 2,000-strong armed observer mission of the United Nations. In the border zone’s chief flashpoint area, the Shebaa Farms, a stretch of a few square kilometers of Lebanese territory still held by Israel, UNIFIL’s Indian battalion go for evening hikes, and gaze out at the rocky hillside traversed by ditches and barbed wire coils. Goats and donkeys meander through this no-mans-land; Lebanese policemen in their dappled blue camouflage make the occasional uneasy visit of their own, although the national army stays far away from the southern border.
Shebaa itself, a sleepy town perched on the lip of a ravine, boasts the familiar essentials of rural South Lebanese life; patisseries, and lotto stores, posters of “martyred” young Hezbollah men, a church, a smart new Saudi-financed mosque. High above the town, on the slopes leading up towards the massif of Mount Hermon, an Israeli radar post glints in the late sun.
From this vantage, the region’s patchwork falls into place. The disputed border runs right along a track used by the local farmers to reach Kfar Chouba, where cards are played and young boys lounge in the skeletons of bullet-scarred buildings. They stare out across four different worlds: the folds of south Lebanon stretch down towards the Mediterranean, and the coastal city of Tyre. Beyond the Golan Heights, shimmering in the distance, Syrian land begins. The Shebaa Farms tract just below marks occupied Lebanese territory, while the spur of Metulla, girded by neat white houses, forms the northmost point of Israel. A glance is enough to explain the need for peace: geography compels interdependence.
Yet geography also explains the bleak economics of the South today. Who can the inland farmers trade with, when their Israeli neighbours are enemies, and the border with Syria is closed off by a security zone? They are locked in a private world, prisoners of the militancy that first set them free. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the South’s dilemma is the evidence of the land’s fertility that confronts the most casual observer. Just across the frontier lie the irrigated fields of Israel – the fruits of heavy agricultural investment, green with rich crops and tightly patterned orchards. An alternative future, mockingly close at hand.
(Copyright © 2003 Stewart Innes. All rights reserved)