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 مقالاتRobert Fisk في الإندبندنت .. كلما احترقت مدينة ذرف التماسيح الدموع ..
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THE INDEPENDENT
Robert Fisk: A Nato-led force would be in Israel's interests, but not Lebanon's
Every foreign army - including the Israelis - comes to grief in Lebanon.
So, how come George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara - after their inevitable disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq - believe that a Nato-led force is going to survive on the south Lebanese border? The Israelis would obviously enjoy watching its deployment - it will be time for the West to take the casualties - but Hizbollah is likely to view its arrival as a proxy Israeli army. It is, after all, supposed to be a "buffer" force to protect Israel - not, as the Lebanese have quickly noted, to protect Lebanon - and the last Nato army that came to this country was literally blasted out of its mission by suicide bombers.
How blithely the US and British governments have erased the narrative of the old Multinational Force - the MNF - which arrived in Beirut to escort Palestinian guerrillas out of Lebanon in August of 1982 and then, after the massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinian guerrillas at the Sabra and Chatila camps by Israel's proxy Lebanese militia, returned to protect the survivors and extend the sovereignty of the Lebanese government.
Does that sound familiar? And they also came to train the Lebanese army - one of the missions being foisted on the new Bush-Blair army - and they failed. Blown up by suicide bombers at their Beirut headquarters with the loss of 241 American lives, the US Marines retreated into the ground, digging earthworks beneath Beirut airport.
And there they lived until the newly-trained Lebanese army broke apart in February 1984 - at which point, President Ronald Reagan decided to "redeploy" his troops offshore. Like other famous historical redeployments - Napoleon's redeployment from Moscow, for example, or Custer's last redeployment - it represented a national disaster, a colossal blow to US prestige in the region and a warning that such Lebanese adventures always end in tears. The French left shortly afterwards. So did the Italians. A company of British troops had been the first to scuttle out.
So, how come anyone believes that the next foreign army to arrive in the Lebanese meat-grinder is going to be any more successful? True, the MNF was not backed by a UN Security Council resolution. But since when were Hizbollah susceptible to the UN? They have already failed to disarm - as they were required to under UN resolution 1559 - and one of the world's toughest guerrilla armies is not going to hand over its guns to Nato generals. But most of the force will be Muslim, we are told. This may be true, and the Turks are already unwisely agreeing to participate. But are the Lebanese going to accept the descendants of the hated Ottoman empire? Will the the Shia south of Lebanon accept Sunni Muslim soldiers?
Indeed, how come the people of southern Lebanon have not been consulted about the army which is supposed to live in their lands? Because, of course, it is not coming for them. It will come because the Israelis and the Americans want it there to help reshape the Middle East. This no doubt makes sense in Washington - where self-delusion rules diplomacy almost as much as it does in Israel - but America's dreams usually become the Middle East's nightmares.
And this time, we will watch a Nato-led army's disintegration at close quarters. South-west Afghan-istan and Iraq are now so dangerous that no reporters can witness the carnage being perpetrated as a result of our hopeless projects. But, in Lebanon, it's going to be live-time coverage of a disaster that can only be avoided by the one diplomatic step Messrs Bush and Blair refuse to take: by talking to Damascus.
So when this latest foreign army arrives, count the days - or hours - to the first attack upon it. Then we'll hear all over again that we are fighting evil, that "they" - Hizbollah or Palestinian guerrillas, or anyone else planning to destroy "our" army - hate our values; and then, of course, we'll be told that this is all part of the "War on Terror" - the nonsense which Israel has been peddling. And then perhaps we'll remember what George Bush senior said after Hizbollah's allies suicide-bombed the Marines in 1982, that American policy would not be swayed by a bunch of "insidious terrorist cowards".
And we all know what happened then. Or have we forgotten?
Day 20
* Lebanese dead - at least 577 confirmed, could be up to 750. Israeli dead - 51.
* Israel bombs and shells southern Lebanon despite announced halt in air raids.
* Rescue workers find 28 bodies buried for days in destroyed buildings in three Lebanese villages.
* UN postpones a meeting on Lebanon peacekeeping force indefinitely.
* Bush says he will seek UN action this week to end the fighting.
* Clashes near Aita Al-Shaab leave four Hizbollah fighters dead and three Israelis wounded
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Re: مقالاتRobert Fisk في الإندبندنت .. كلما احترقت مدينة ذرف التماسيح الدموع .. (Re: القلب النابض)
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3\8\06
THE
INDEPENDENT
Robert Fisk: Entire Lebanese family killed in Israeli attack on hospital
An attack on a hospital, the killing of an entire Lebanese family, the seizure of five men in Baalbek and a new civilian death toll - 468 men, women and children - marked the 22nd day of Israel's latest war on Lebanon. The Israelis claimed that helicopter-borne soldiers had seized senior Hizbollah leaders although one of them turned out to be a local Baalbek grocer. In a village near the city, Israeli air strikes killed the local mayor's son and brother and five children in their family.
The battle for Lebanon was fast moving out of control last night. Lebanese troops abandoned many of their checkpoints and European diplomats were warning their colleagues that militiamen were taking over the positions. Up to 8,000 Israeli troops were reported to have crossed the border by last night in what was publicised as a military advance towards the Litani river. But far more soldiers would be needed to secure so large an area of southern Lebanon.
The Israelis sent paratroopers to attack an Iranian-financed hospital in Baalbek in the hope of capturing wounded Hizbollah fighters but, after an hour's battle, got their hands on only five men whom the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, later called "tasty fish". The operation suggests what Hizbollah has all along said was the purpose of the Israeli campaign: to swap prisoners and to exchange Hizbollah fighters for the two Israeli soldiers who were captured on the border on 12 July.
Hizbollah continued to fire dozens of missiles over the border into Israel, killing one Israeli and wounding 21, with Israeli artillery firing shells back into Lebanon at the rate of one every two minutes. For the first time, a Hizbollah rocket struck the West Bank as well as the Israeli town of Beit Shean, the longest-range missile to have been fired so far. Yet still the West seems unable to produce an end to a war which is clearly overwhelming both Hizbollah and the Israelis.
Hizbollah obviously has far more missiles than the Israelis believed - there is not a town in northern Israel which is safe from their fire - and the Israeli army apparently has no plan to defeat Hizbollah other than the old and hopeless policy of occupying southern Lebanon. If Hizbollah had planned this campaign months in advance - and if the Israelis did the same - then neither side left room for diplomacy.
The French have wisely said they will lead a peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon only after a ceasefire. And to be sure, they will not let this become a Nato-led army. France already has a company of 100 soldiers in the UN force in southern Lebanon, whose commander is himself French, but Paris, after watching the chaos in Iraq, has no illusions about Western armies in the Middle East.
Outside the shattered Dar al-Hikma hospital in Baalbek yesterday stood two burnt cars and a minivan, riddled with bullet-holes. Hizbollah, it seems, fought the Israelis there for more than an hour. The hospital, which includes several British-manufactured heart machines, was empty when the Israeli raid began and was partly destroyed in the fighting.
The Lebanese army, which has tried to stay out of the conflict - heaven knows what its 75,000 soldiers are supposed to do - was attacked again by the Israelis yesterday when they fired a missile into a car which they claimed was carrying a Hizbollah leader. They were wrong. The soldier inside died instantly, joining the 11 other Lebanese troops proclaimed as "martyrs" by the government from a logistics unit killed in an Israeli air raid two weeks ago.
The obscene score-card for death in this latest war now stands as follows: 508 Lebanese civilians, 46 Hizbollah guerrillas, 26 Lebanese soldiers, 36 Israeli soldiers and 19 Israeli civilians.
In other words, Hizbollah is killing more Israeli soldiers than civilians and the Israelis are killing far more Lebanese civilians than they are guerrillas. The Lebanese Red Cross has found 40 more civilian dead in the south of the country in the past two days, many of them with wounds suggesting they might have survived had medical help been available.
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Re: مقالاتRobert Fisk في الإندبندنت .. كلما احترقت مدينة ذرف التماسيح الدموع .. (Re: القلب النابض)
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06\08\07
THE
INDEPENDENT
Robert Fisk: This draft shows who is running America's policy... Israel
So the great and the good on the East River laboured at the United Nations Security Council - and brought forth a lemon. You could almost hear the Lebanese groan at this draft resolution, a document of such bias and mendacity that a close Lebanese friend read carefully through it yesterday, cursed and uttered the immortal question: "Don't these #######s learn anything from history?"
And there it all was again, the warmed-up peace proposals of Israel's 1982 invasion, full of buffer zones and disarmament and "strict respect by all parties" - a rousing chortle here, no doubt, from Hizbollah members - and the need for Lebanese sovereignty. It didn't even demand the withdrawal of Israeli forces, a point that Walid Moallem, Syria's Foreign Minister - and the man the Americans will eventually have to negotiate with - seized upon with more than alacrity. It was a dead UN resolution without a total Israeli retreat, he said on a strategic trip to Beirut.
A close analysis of the American-French draft - the fingerprints of John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, were almost smudging the paragraphs - showed just who is running Washington's Middle East policy: Israel. And one wondered how even Tony Blair would want to associate himself with this nonsense. It made no reference to the obscenely disproportionate violence employed by Israel - just a sleek reference to "hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides" - and it made only passing reference to Hizbollah's demand that it would only release the two Israeli soldiers it captured on 12 July in return for Lebanese and other Arab prisoners in Israeli jails.
The Security Council said it was "mindful of the sensitivity of the issue of prisoners and encouraging the efforts aimed at settling the issue [sic] of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel". I bet Hizbollah were impressed by the "mindful" bit, not to mention the "sensitivity" and the soft, slippery word "settle" - an issue which can be "settled" in maybe 20 years' time. Then came the real coup de grâce. A demand for the "total cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks" and the "immediate cessation" by Israel of "all offensive military operations". Bit of a problem there, as Hizbollah spotted at once. They have to lay down their arms.
Had the council demanded an immediate resolution on the future of the Shebaa farms, the Israeli-occupied territory which once belonged to mandate Lebanon - and for whose "liberation" the Hizbollah have fought - the whole fandango might have stood a chance. After all, Shebaa is the only raison d'être that the Hizbollah can produce for continuing their reckless, ruthless, illegal war across the UN blue line in southern Lebanon. But the UN document wished only to see a delineation of Lebanon's borders "including in the Shebaa farms area". There was even a wonderful paragraph - Number 9 for aficionados of UN bumf - which "calls on all parties to co-operate ... with the Security Council". So the Hizbollah are to co-operate, are they, with the austere diplomats of this august and wise body? Isn't that exalting a guerrilla army a little bit more upmarket than it deserves?
No one was fooled and few disagreed with Syria's Walid Moallem when he said the UN's draft resolution was "a recipe for continuing the war". As both the Hizbollah and the Israelis did yesterday, the former killing 13 Israelis and the latter bombing houses in Ansar - once an Israeli POW camp - which destroyed five more Lebanese civilian lives. Mohamed Fneish, a Hizbollah government minister - who scarcely represents all Lebanese but talks as if he does - thundered away about how "we" [presumably the Hizbollah, rather than the Lebanese] will abide by it [the resolution] on condition that no Israeli soldiers remains inside Lebanese land."
There were more Israeli air attacks on Beirut's southern suburbs yesterday - though heaven knows what is left there to destroy - ensuring that even more Shia Muslim civilians will remain refugees. Fearful that the Israelis will bomb their trucks and claim they were carrying missiles, the garbage collectors of this city have abandoned their vehicles and the familiar 1982 stench of burning rubbish now drifts through the evening streets. Petrol is now so scarce that a tank-full yesterday cost £250.
About the only gift to Lebanon in the UN resolution was the expressed need to provide the UN with remaining Israeli maps of landmines in Lebanon. But Israel has again dropped lethal ordnance all over southern Lebanon. Oh yes, and as usual, the UN draft on these ambitious, hopelessly conceived ideas "decides to remain actively seized of the matter". You bet it does. And so, as they say, the war goes on.
What the UN wants...
* A full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks and the cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations;
* Israel and Lebanon to support a permanent ceasefire and a long-term solution based on the following principles and elements:
* Strict respect by all parties for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Israel and Lebanon;
* Full respect for the Blue Line by both parties;
* Delineation of the international borders of Lebanon, especially in those areas where the border is disputed or uncertain, including in the Shebaa farms area;
* Security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani river of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Lebanese armed and security forces, and of UN-mandated international forces;
* Full implementation of the relevant provisions ... that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon;
* Deployment of an international force in Lebanon;
* The Secretary General to develop, in liaison with key international actors and the concerned parties, proposals to implement the relevant provisions ... and to present those proposals to the Security Council within 30 days;
* The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), upon cessation of hostilities, to monitor its implementation and extend assistance to ensure humanitarian access to civilians and the safe return of displaced persons;
* The government of Lebanon to ensure arms or related material are not imported into Lebanon without its consent and requests UNIFIL, conditions permitting, to assist the government of Lebanon at its request;
* The Secretary-General to report to the Council within one week on the implementation and provide any relevant information in light of the Council's intention to adopt a further resolution.
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Re: مقالاتRobert Fisk في الإندبندنت .. كلما احترقت مدينة ذرف التماسيح الدموع .. (Re: القلب النابض)
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Robert Fisk: Crocodile tears of leaders as city burns
Published: 08 August 2006
Shortly after 4am, the fly-like buzz of an Israeli drone came out of the sky over my home. Coded MK by the manufacturers, Lebanese mothers have sought to lessen their children's fears of this ominous creature by transliterating it as "Um Kamel", the Mother of Kamel. It is looking for targets and at night, like all the massacres being perpetrated by the Israeli air force across southern Lebanon, you usually cannot see it.
The latest model can even fire missiles. Well, it flew around for a few minutes before it moved south-west over the city in search of other prey. Then an hour later came the hiss of jets and five massive blasts as the southern suburbs received their 29th air raid. The Israelis must be convinced that beneath the rubble of their previous strikes, the Hizbollah have secret bunkers to direct their war in the south, that Hizbollah's television station - its four-storey headquarters a pancaked pile of rubble - must be staying on air because it has ever-deeper studios beneath the debris. I doubt it.
After dawn, I drive out to see friends in the suburbs, among the few Shias not to have abandoned their homes. Hassan and Abbas live in two decaying blocks of chipped stone stairs and damp walls; each lives with only two other families in these rotting eight-storey tenements, their neighbours having sought refuge with Lebanon's 700,000 internal refugees - another 200,000 have fled abroad - in the Druze Chouf mountains or the Christian mountains to the north or in Beirut's slum parks and crowded schools.
"I don't have any other place to go," Hassan tells me mournfully as his two-year-old plays tug of war with a toy Pink Panther. "In the Chouf now, a two-room flat costs $800." Well, the Druze are certainly making money, I say to myself. "Nobody is coming to our help"
We glower at Al Manar, Hizbollah's TV station, in the corner of the room, whose Hizbollah announcer is proclaiming the merits - and demerits - of the Arab foreign ministers meeting to start shortly in Beirut. These wealthy princes and emirs of the Gulf and the utterly boring Amr Moussa of Egypt roared and strutted upon the stage, remaining silent only when Fouad Siniora - Lebanon's sweet Prime Minister - went through another of his public weeping sessions and demanded an immediate ceasefire. Lebanon's proposals must be added to the UN draft resolution, he said between sobs, sniffles and whimpers. Shebaa Farms must be returned to Lebanon. The Israelis must leave Lebanon. Only then can Hizbollah abide by UN Security Council resolution 1559 and lay down its arms.
The ministers decided to send a delegation to the UN in New York - which will have Washington shaking in its boots - and the Saudis agreed to an Arab summit in Mecca, but one which should not be rushed because it must be carefully prepared - which sounded very like George W Bush's equally mendacious remark that a ceasefire had to be carefully prepared. And that will have them shaking in the shoes in Tel Aviv.
It was preposterous, scandalous, shameful to listen to these robed apparatchiks - most of them are paid, armed or otherwise supported by the West - shed their crocodile tears before a nation on its knees. The Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, had already said in Cairo that the Beirut meeting "is a clear message to the world to demonstrate Arab solidarity with the Lebanese people". In the southern suburbs - where they do not take this nonsense seriously - Abbas was telling me of a female neighbour who had supported the rival Shia Amal movement until her house was destroyed by the Israelis. "She told us, 'We are all Hizbollahi now'," And I recall that less than three years ago, we - we Westerners, we brave believers in human rights - were saying that we were all New Yorkers now.
What sent Fouad Sinioura into his bout of crying was a report that 40 Lebanese civilians had been massacred in the village of Houla by an Israeli air strike - 18 people were confirmed buried in one house. Two other buildings in the village collapsed. Yet there are far more terrible fears that hundreds more may lay dead in the ruins of their homes after the Israelis had blasted their villages, hill towns and hamlets.
According to the UN, 22,000 Lebanese are still - dead or alive - in the 38 most southern villages, out of an original population of 913,000. In Mays al-Jabal, for example, 400 civilians are believed to have stayed out of 10,000, though no one knows their fate. The Lebanese death toll - including the conservative figure for Houla - is 932, almost all civilians, although it may well have reached more than 1,000. There are 3,293 wounded.
At lunchtime, I paid a call on Suheil Natour, a Palestinian official in the little Mar Elias camp. His people - the Palestinians and their descendants of the 1948 flight from Palestine - are now hosting thousands of Shia refugees from southern Lebanon, just as those refugees' grandparents once hosted the Palestinians of 1948. This irony is not lost on Natour who points out that the Shias - the largest single community in Lebanon - are now spread over all the country after their flight. "What kind of Lebanon will emerge from this?" he asks me. "How many months have to pass before the Shias feel they belong to the areas of Lebanon to which they have fled - rather than to the wreckage of the homes they were forced out of by the Israelis?"
And when I go home, I find my landlord has treble locked the iron front door of my apartment block, just in case the refugees decide that they belong to his building - or that his building belongs to them.
Day 27
* Israeli attacks kill at least 45 people in Lebanon, mostly in eastern Bekaa Valley and border village of Houla. Five die in strike on crowded area in Shi'ite-dominated south Beirut. Israeli aircraft also hit last coastal crossing on Litani river between Sidon and Tyre.
* UN Security Council vote on a resolution to end conflict is delayed until tomorrow after Arab nations object to draft.
* Three Israeli soldiers are killed in battles with guerrillas in southern Lebanon. Hizbollah guerrillas fire rockets into northern Israel, wounding one.
* Lebanese health minister Mohammad Khalifeh says conflict has killed 925 people. About one-third of the dead have been children under the age of 13.
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Re: مقالاتRobert Fisk في الإندبندنت .. كلما احترقت مدينة ذرف التماسيح الدموع .. (Re: القلب النابض)
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Robert Fisk: What do you say to a man whose family is buried under the rubble?
Published: 09 August 2006
There were bulldozers turning over the tons of rubble, a cloud of dust and smoke a mile high over the smashed slums of Beirut's southern suburbs and a tall man in a grey T-shirt - a Brooklyn taxi driver, no less - standing on the verge of tears, staring at what may well be the grave of his grandfather, his uncle and aunt. Half the family home had been torn away and the entire block of civilian apartments next door had been smashed to the ground a few hours earlier by the two missiles that exploded in Asaad al-Assad Street.
What do you say to a man whose family is buried under the rubble? The last corpse had been a man whose face appeared etched in dust before the muck was removed and he turned out to be paper-thin - so perfectly had the falling concrete crushed him. Mohamed al-Husseini had left New York for a holiday with his young wife and infant child - they were safe in the centre of Beirut - because he wanted to see his family home and talk to the relatives he grew up with.
"Just look what the Israelis have done," he said, not taking his eyes off the floors of the apartments, now scarcely an inch between them. "I am confused. You know? I don't know what to do. I could go back to my wife and kid but the rest of my family is in there. They used to live in the south and they survived there. Then they come to Beirut and die here."
Mohamed al-Husseini's grandfather, Mohamed Yassin, is - let us not say "was" yet - 75. His uncle is Hussein Yassin, his aunt is called Hila. By last night, nothing had been found of them. And of those in the building next door?
At least 17 civilians were killed, many of them children. A 12-year-old boy called Hussein Ahmed Mohsen lay dead in the mortuary of the Mount Lebanon Hospital, along with a woman who died just after being rescued when the missiles collapsed her home just after 7.30 on Monday night. Almost all the occupants of this doomed building were members of the Rmeiti family - again, they were from the dangerous south - and 15 of the dead were from the same village.
It was a scene to provoke fury. One Hizbollah "watcher" demanded my press card and lost interest when he read it. But a Lebanese youth in a yellow shirt at the scene was grabbed by the same man, hauled away by his collar and handed over to a clutch of beefy, tall individuals who forced him into a car. Everyone now searches for spies, for the men - and women - who are reputed to "paint" the apartment blocks of Beirut for Israel's missile technology to lock on to their targets.
A sad, grim meeting in the same Mount Lebanon Hospital suggested that the house had not been "fingered" by anyone. I found Ali Rmeiti, an employee at Beirut airport, covered in bloody wounds, his face distorted, shaking his head in disbelief. "I was on the balcony with my wife, Huda, and three of our children ... I heard nothing - nothing. I didn't realise what happened. It was black. Then came the second blast and we were all blown into the street with the balcony."
Huda Rmeiti is lying next to her husband on a drip-feed, covered with even more bloody wounds than Ali. I know - and they do not - that three of their four children were killed.
And why was the building struck? The Israelis have slaughtered hundreds of civilians, attacking convoys of refugees they themselves ordered to leave. But Saadieh, Ali Rmeiti's sister-in-law, has a story which matches those of two other survivors. Before the missiles exploded, she said, an Israeli drone flew over the Shiyyah district, a pilotless reconnaissance aircraft which sends live pictures back to Tel Aviv. "Um Kamel", as the Lebanese call them, whined around for a time and then, without warning, someone drove down Assaad al-Assad street on a motorcycle and fired into the sky with a rifle opposite the Rmeiti home.
Then he left, some youth who wanted to prove his foolish manhood. You can't destroy drones with a rifle, as any Hizbollah member knows. But not long afterwards, the two missiles came streaking down on the homes of the innocent.
Perhaps there are two moral lessons from this, one obvious, the other familiar. Don't shoot at drones. And don't believe for a moment the Israelis will care about firing missiles into your home when their little toy spots a man with a gun
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القلب النابض
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست