Robert Fisk: Everyone is frightened
Robert Fisk, unrivaled correspondent in Beirut for The Independent newspaper, wrote on Saturday: “I am talking into blackness because there is no electricity in Beirut. And everyone, of course, is frightened. A president was supposed to be elected today. He [n.b., and why not she? The Lebanese constitution says the president must be a Maronite, but not that the president must be a man!] was not elected. The corniche outside my home is empty. No one wants to walk beside the sea … We are all afraid … It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to be in a country that sits on plate glass. It is impossible to be certain if the glass will break. When a constitution breaks – as it is beginning to break in Lebanon – you never know when the glass will give way. People are moving out of their homes, just as they have moved out of their homes in Baghdad … So what can a Middle East correspondent write on a Saturday morning except that the world in the Middle East is growing darker and darker by the hour. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Iraq. ‘Palestine’. Lebanon. From the borders of Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean, we – we Westerners that is – are creating (as I have said before) a hell disaster. Next week, we are supposed to believe in peace in Annapolis, between the colourless American apparatchik and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister who has no more interest in a Palestinian state than his predecessor Ariel Sharon. [n.b., Fisk may not be right on this. Remember Azmi Bishara wrote in 1999 that a two-state solution is becoming an Israeli demand -- basically, to preserve a Jewish majority in Israel.] …
Robert Fisk’s latest essay reporting from Lebanon is here.
A month ago, Fisk reported that arms were pouring into Lebanon — a sure sign of an impending fight: “Lebanon is peopled with ghosts. But the phantoms now returning to haunt this damaged country –the militias which tore it apart more than 30 years ago – are real. Guns are flooding back into the country – $800 for an AK-47, $3,700 for a brand-new French Famas – as Lebanon security apparatus hunt desperately for the leadership of the new and secret armies … What now worries the Lebanese authorities, however, is the sheer scale of weaponry arriving in Lebanon. It appears to include new Glock pistols (asking price $1,000). There are growing fears, moreover, that many of these guns are from the vast stock of 190,000 rifles and pistols which the US military ‘lost’ when they handed them out to Iraqi police officers without registering their numbers or destination. The American weapons included 125,000 Glock pistols. The Lebanese-Iraqi connection is anyway well established. A growing number of suicide bombers in Iraq come from the Lebanese cities of Tripoli and Sidon. Fouad Siniora’s Lebanese government – supplied by the US with recent shipments of new weapons for the official Lebanese army – has now admitted that militias are also being created among Muslim pro-government groups. Widespread reports that Saad Hariri – son of the assassinated ex-Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri – has himself created an embryo militia have been officially denied. But a number of armed Hariri supporters initially opened fire into the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian camp after its takeover by pro-Al-Qaida gunmen last April. Hariri’s men also have forces in Beirut (supposedly unarmed) and again this is denied. The Fatah Al-Islam rebels who took over Nahr el-Bared last April – 400 died in the 206-day siege by the army, 168 of them soldiers – also used new weapons, including sniper rifles. In a gloomy ceremony last week, the military buried 98 of the 222 Muslim fighters who died, in a mass grave in Tripoli. They included Palestinians but also men from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, Tunis and Algeria … Siniora’s government is well aware of the dangers that these new developments represent – ’such a situation could lead to a new civil war’, one minister said of the military training taking place in Lebanon – in a country in which only the Hezbollah militia, classed as a ‘resistance’ movement, hitherto had permission to bear arms. [n.b., the UN Security Council Resolution 1701 tried to put a stop to that.] But Hezbollah too has been re-arming; not only with rockets but with small arms that could only be used in street fighting … Military outposts manned by Palestinian gunmen loyal to Syria have reappeared in the Bekaa, closely watched by a Lebanese army which was severely blooded in the Nahr El-Bared fighting. Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, one of the most senior – and wisest – Shi’ite clerics in Lebanon, warned last Friday: ‘Rearming as well as the tense and sectarianism-loaded political rhetoric, all threaten Lebanon’s diversity and expose Lebanon to divisions’. Fadlallah stated that the US – which supports Hariri – wished to divide the country. The American plan to chop up Iraq, it seems, is another ghost that has crept silently into Lebanon. Robert Fisk’s report in The Independent on 19 October is here.
All this reinforces suspicions, again, that the situation in Lebanon, and with Syria, may overshadow the (faltering) Israeli-Palestinian talks that are supposed to start in a day or two in Annapolis.
Tags: Annapolis conference, Lebanon