Fact-finding group in Beirut
Lebanese people oppose ‘U.S. terrorist government’
By
LeiLani Dowell
Beirut, Lebanon
Published Sep 14, 2006 8:27 AM
A fact-finding
delegation organized by the Campaign for Accountability arrived in war-torn
Beirut, Lebanon, on Sept. 11. It consisted of LeiLani Dowell, a managing editor
of Workers World newspaper; Sara Flounders, co-director of the International
Action Center, and Samia Halaby of the Defend Palestine Committee. They will be
visiting the devastated country from Sept. 11-17. Below are excerpts from
Dowell’s
first report.
Beirut, Lebanon, September 2006.
WW photo: LeiLani Dowell
|
Monday, Sept.
11
We arrived in Beirut today after flying into Amman, Jordan, on
Sunday. The first signs as we walked into the terminal in Amman were those of
greeters waiting to receive people off our flight from DynCorp International and
BlackWater USA—the same mercenary corporations that the rich hired in New
Orleans to protect their property after Katrina.
[Mercenaries from both
BlackWater USA and DynCorp International have been used by the U.S. military all
over the globe, including Iraq. Mercenaries from DynCorp International were also
alleged to be part of a prostitution ring in Bosnia, yet to this day the company
has received over $2 billion in payments from the Department of Defense. When
four mercenaries for BlackWater USA were killed in Fallujah, the U.S. occupiers
used their deaths as an excuse to unleash a brutal attack on the city. In that
and a later invasion, U.S. troops destroyed most of Fallujah, which remains in
ruins today. Only half of the original population has
returned.—Editor]
Today, we went to the neighborhood of Haret Hreik
in South Beirut, a large Shiite community, where Hezbollah has strong support
and where the Hezbollah television station Al Manar was housed.
Israel
razed Al Manar in their first days of bombing, as well as most of the
neighborhood of seven- or eight-story apartment buildings, to the ground. Huge
cra ters were all that remain of many buildings—craters created not by the
excavation of the debris, but by the magnitude and force of the bombs
dropped.
The woman we are staying with told us that Israeli planes dropped
flyers telling the people to flee their homes before the bombing began. When we
asked her whether she had copies of the flyer, she said no. Like many other
people, she was too afraid to leave the house because Israel was randomly
targeting people on the street.
Later, when thousands of bombs rained
down, people began fleeing the neighborhood. Today we could see men, women and
children returning to the area to sort through the rubble for anything they
could find that remained of their homes. The destruction is devastating in a way
that I can’t even put into words.
However, the work of cleaning out
the debris—a monumental task with all the devastation—has already
been undertaken by Hezbollah. The resistance movement has crews in the area,
loading debris onto trucks and cleaning out shattered apartments.
We
watched several workers carefully removing furniture from an apartment on the
fifth floor of a ruined building, as a service to the family that resided there.
And with all this work going on, workers today had hosed down a large area and
were setting up plastic lawn chairs and speakers for a religious event they were
having tonight. We were told that Hez bollah organized it so that the
neighborhood could feel like it was getting back to its life.
We passed
one of the many highway overpasses that had been bombed during the Israeli
assault. While traffic was definitely slower because of the damage, what we
noticed was that the area beneath the break had already been cleaned. People
were sitting around it, even selling their wares to cars that passed by.
The images of a trip I took to New Orleans after Katrina came to my mind
over and over—where, in the same amount of time, nothing had been done to
restore the area for the people who lived there; and where, one year later,
little to nothing has been done in impoverished areas like the Lower Ninth Ward.
We were able to talk to some of the workers and neighborhood residents.
What struck me the most about our conversations is that every single person told
us, “The Lebanese people are not against the people of the United States.
We know the difference between the people of the U.S. and its government, and it
is its terrorist government that we are against.”
There is a clear
understanding that this most recent attack of Israel on Lebanon was sanctioned
and funded by the U.S.
Hezbollah has adopted the slogan “The Divine
Victory,” and beautiful signs can be seen throughout Beirut with this
message in English and Arabic. Some of the billboards are emblazoned with
pictures of katusha rockets, some with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
Other
billboards emphasized the overwhelming civilian toll with pictures of wounded
children and the Israeli term that they only struck “extremely accurate
targets.”
On top of the ruins of bombed-out apartments and other
buildings, signs read “Made in USA” and “The New Middle
Beast.”
It appears that the “Divine Victory” slogan
serves not only as a reminder of the great triumph that the Lebanese resistance
movement has just won, but also as motivation for the ongoing struggle, the
struggle against imperialism that the resistance movement here is confident will
be won.
Tony Blair was in Beirut today and protests were scheduled. There
is a demonstration being called to mark the anniversary of the massacre at the
Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, in Beirut, on Friday, Sept.
15.
For updates, see eyewitnesslebanon.blogspot.com.
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