Official Delegation Report 3

Southern Lebanon: Thursday October 3

It took us an hour and a half to drive from our overnight stay in Mia Mia to the Village of Khiam in the Southeast corner of Lebanon. We drove through several small towns and villages adorned with photos of various Muslims clerics such as Ayatollah Khomeini or various personages from the Civil War period, such as Nabih Berri, head of the Amal movement. The area is dominated by the Beaufort Castle, built by the Crusaders but occupied in turn by Lebanese, Palestinian and Israeli military outposts.

As we turned off the narrow two way highway to ascend to Khiam, poles every hundred meters had large colored portraits of various “martyrs” who had been killed in resistance to Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon. Large character posters hung over the streets. The bright yellow flags of Hizbollah and the dark green flags of Amal flapped from commercial buildings, poles and houses.

It was farmer’s market day in Khiam as our two-car convoy slowly wound its way through the village and up to the Khiam detention center, located atop a rise overlooking the village and surrounding area. We noticed Druze among the shoppers. Established by the French as a military barracks, the Khiam center was used later by the Lebanese for the same purpose. After the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon in 1982, Khiam became in 1984 a major detention and interrogation center. While operations at Khiam were under immediate control of its Lebanese allies, primary responsibility for what happened there clearly rested with the Israelis who visited periodically and militarily dominated the region.

When we arrived we were immediately escorted to a conference room for our meeting with Sheikh Nabil Kawouk. Elias Abu Saba described the Sheikh as the chief political spokesperson for Hizbollah in Southern Lebanon. A news article about him in the next day’s “Daily Star” that included reference to our visit described Kawouk as “Hizbollah’s commander in the South.”

We were seated at two rows of tables with pink tablecloths forming an “L” at the end of a large rectangular conference room. Each place for us had a cold juice and bottled water. No Smoking signs were posted on the walls. The area in the center created by the “L” was busy with a half dozen or ten photographers, television cameramen and reporters. We had been asked the previous day if we had any objection to the press covering our visit and forewarned that Hizbollah would use our visit for its own public relations purposes.

Kawouk greeted us “In the name of God the most merciful we welcome you; in the name of Jesus Christ the prophet we welcome you; and in the name of Hizbollah the Lebanese Resistance Movement we welcome you as witnesses to the Israeli aggression and occupation.” He spoke for ten minutes or more, calmly and forcefully laying out Hizbollah's views about the emergence of Hizbollah and the effect of Israel’s occupation of Southern Lebanon. He clearly is an accomplished public speaker.

Sheikh Kawouk said that “Israel has left its fingerprints all over the Mid East region,” and observed “Israel unfortunately invaded and occupied Lebanon with a Green Light from the US.” The Sheikh was adamant in distinguishing between “the American people and the American Administration.” But he was unrelenting in laying out his observations that “Israel used weapons even prohibited by US law,” and that “the American Administration sided blindly with Israel, protected Sharon against charges he faced for his war crimes, and blindly sided with all aspects of Israeli's occupation of Lebanon.”

After responding to a few questions it was clear the time for the interview was over. The Sheikh arose and was escorted out of the room, pausing for photos with those who asked. We were invited to watch a 10 minute video tape about the liberation of the Khiam prison. Elias provided a soft-spoken translation of the Arabic narration of the film. It began with a somewhat crude and propagandistic description of the cruel and inhumane purposes to which the facility had been put during the Israeli occupation. (It reminded me of a black and white film I had seen at the Chu Chi tunnels in Vietnam, that left me feeling very uneasy.)

The film concluded, however, with raw video footage taken by several individuals with cameras after Israel unilaterally pulled back from Southern Lebanon in 1985. The South Lebanese Army forces had abruptly abandoned the facility, leaving the inmates locked in the cells. The image of hundreds of Lebanese rushing through the gate and down the hallways of the prison, opened to the sky, with the camera jostling and images bouncing about, was at first jarring and somewhat confusing. People banged the locks with large metal objects or tried to pry the doors open with metal poles. In several pictures, people fumbled desperately with keys trying to unlock the doors. Prisoners’ hands squeezed through the narrow slot with the sliding door of heavy metal doors. Others pressed their faces to the bars, kissing the prisoners who were shouting and pushing towards the light. Women were in the second wave entering the prison yard and hallways.

Soon, prisoners flowed out of the cells, immediately grabbed and hugged and kissed by their liberators. Husbands, sons, fathers and brothers were greeted by friends, wives, mothers and daughters. One man swung another in circles, embracing him tightly under the arms and kissing him on first one cheek then the other. Women scattered rice in greeting and celebration for their release.

“Allahu Akbar,” “God is greater!” was shouted again and again by liberators and liberated alike.

Elias’ voice cracked as he tried to translate the Arabic for our hearing. Zach later commented that the sheer joy at the release of the prisoners was palpable and transcended the specifics any politics, ethnicity or religion. We sat stunned and silent as one of the local men pushed the button in a matter of fact manner to stop the film.

The Biblical call for release of the captives had never had more power.

After a few moments as we stood from our chairs and gathered our cameras and notebooks, we drifted with few comments out of the reception hall. Ali, a former detainee, was to give us a tour of the prison. For the next 30 minutes we walked from building to building, poking our heads into cells stripped bare but for graffiti on the walls, peering through small slotted doors into isolation cells, squinting in the bright sunlight at simple signs reading “Room used for Electric Torture,” “Sleeping Area for Traitors who ran the prison,” etc.

Ali said that the facility had been built by the French in 1932, used as a military barracks by the Lebanese in 1943, and after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was turned into a detention and interrogation center in 1984. It continued in this use until 2000 when Prime Minister Barak pulled Israeli troops out of Lebanon.

Ali was jailed at Khiam when he was 15 years old. He was detained for three years. Ali spoke in a soft voice, that Fr. Tomeh translated from Arabic for our hearing. Ali often dipped his head slightly to touch the top of his nose with his left thumb. I noticed a scar there. As he spoke, he touched or rubbed the fingers of his right hand with his left. At one cell he showed how round copper rings at the end of two wires were placed over the fingers during electric shock treatments. Detainees were then splashed with cold water. He says 10 died from torture and twelve others later died in hospitals from their torture at Khiam.

More than 3,000 had been detained at Khiam, including women, the elderly and children. They were allowed outside to enjoy the sunlight for ten minutes every ten days. A separate section was used for women detainees. The history of the facility is divided into two periods - pre-International Red Cross visit (1984-1995) and post-International Red Cross visit 1995-2000. Before the IRC visit, for example, there were no visits and only religious books allowed. After the IRC visited the facility, and in response to stinging reports by international human rights organizations, the Khiam facility began to permit parental visits, enlarged the area of both solidarity and collective detention cells.

The jailers roughly reflected the demographics of the area, with 70% of them Muslim “mercenaries of Israel.”

Ali concluded his presentation by thanking us for our support, “morally, and by prayer or other means.” He said, “We are thankful to God and for the blood of the martyrs… because of the blood of the martyrs, the Israelis left, victory was at hand, the detainees were liberated and Lebanon was victorious.”

PostScript:
Reflecting on Sheikh Kapaau’s comments and the raw human drama of the liberation of Khiam, I was reminded of Thomas Friedman’s analysis of the naïve and ill-informed assumptions about the Mid East that guided and enabled the Reagan Administration as it sent US Marines into Beirut during the Civil War in Lebanon. They soon were withdrawn, battered and bewildered after 60 people were killed in a suicide bombing of the US Embassy and 241 Marines slaughtered in a suicide bombing of their barracks in Beirut.

Quoting a Lebanese friend, Friedman wrote: “The Lebanese, like all Mid Easterners, are a people with a vivid imagination. That is why a great power should never wink at anyone in the Middle East. Small winks speak big things there. You wink at Ariel Sharon and he goes all the way to Beirut. You wink at Amin Gemayel and he tries to invade the Shiite suburbs of Beirut. They all want America’s license, its resources and its green lights. And they all want to implicate you in their schemes. They like you big, but they want to send you back small; they like you a virgin; but they want to send you back a whore.”

In Friedman’s own terms, “… the United States found its power check in a thousand different ways, but as the marine encounter with Lebanon demonstrated, it had not yet generated a vision of the world, or of the exercise of power and diplomacy, that was as subtle, nuanced, and cunning as the world itself. The world had changed, and America was not ready when it did.” (From Beirut to Jerusalem, p.209 & p.206)

Friedman writes about the USA’s “arrogance of power.” Bush’s move to war against Iraq seems a bullying move, rooted in the arrogance of power and similarly shallow in terms of its understanding of Mid East politics. It is short-sighted in terms of a war’s likely destabilizing affect on the Mid East region. And it is utterly naïve in terms of its likely impact on the perception of the US by many people in the Mid East and elsewhere.

The potential blowback against the US and its interests and people is enormous and daunting - though that seems of little concern to Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, Wolfewitz and Bush.

Scott Kennedy
Delegation Leader