Little Stories, Big Picture

2009-06-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

This version of the blog is no longer.

Go to www.tfitzsimons.com/blog to find all these posts and more!

Arab Democracy

2009-06-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

Voting in Aley, southeast of Beirut

Lebanese voters in Baabda district, southeast of Beirut.

2009-05-30T05:09:00.000-07:00

Wine Festival, Diamond Museum, May 30, 2009

Dinner in Beirut, May 29, 2009.

2009-05-23T18:58:00.000-07:00

The Ten Bells, London
May 23, 2009

Pabbo Camp

2009-04-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

Pabbo Camp

September 1, 2009

by Tim Fitzsimons

You can hear darkness coming at Pabbo. By 7 pm, life there slowly lowers to a whisper as the sound of crickets grows and distant thunder thuds dully across the plains. When darkness falls, the women—tired from spending their day hunched over their washing, cooking, and cleaning—retire to their round huts where they sleep side by side with their children.

Life at Pabbo Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, in Amoro district in Northern Uganda, is a lesson in waiting. The camp was created by the Ugandan government in 1995 near the height of the violence caused by the Lord’s Resistance Army as it rampaged across Acholiland, kidnapping children and forcing them into military service and sexual slavery. A 2006 ceasefire ended the violence, but thousands of children still remain in captivity with Joseph Kony’s LRA.

Most Pabbo residents receive little dependable information about the operations of the LRA and as such live in a state of continued paranoia of what life is like outside the camp. Some in Pabbo venture so far as saying that the strength of the LRA is in the millions, while the majority of outside observers peg the number of combatants from several hundred to five thousand. Still, the LRA’s successful twenty-year-plus campaign of violence has altered the landscape and the psychology of the north and has forced many of its residents away from their farms and into these camps.

The people of Pabbo occupy a strange position politically: they express an intense fear of LRA violence, yet they also voice their deep distrust of the Kampala government headed by President Yoweri Museveni, who took control via a military coup in 1986 by overthrowing Tito Okello, a member of the Acholi tribe. The Lord’s Resistance Army was, until the 1990s, one player in the greater insurgency fueled by the political tension of this north/south divide.

But by 1994, with little success to show for in its campaign to overthrow the government, the LRA turned its brutality on its own people, accusing them of sympathizing with Kampala. The deep emotional and physical toll of a barbaric campaign waged by conscripted children on their own parents and brethren means that the LRA and its victims are often connected by more than the crimes committed, and that blame is muddled and intertwined. The people of the north are both terrified of their own kin and fearful of any attempt to extinguish them, which feeds the tense limbo that pervades camps like Pabbo.

Pabbo is a bleak and boring place. Unlike many of the other IDP camps in northern Uganda, this sprawling settlement is poorly planned and overcrowded. Huts are jumbled too closely together, which causes streams of sewage and rainwater to cut half-meter deep gorges through the camp’s paths. Latrines and water pumps are well maintained, but only after cholera and other diseases swept through the camp and rallied international NGOs to swoop in. The Catholic health clinic next to the church is no longer packed, but little else of Pabbo’s day-to-day life has changed since the violence ended.

Located just 30 miles from the Sudanese border, Pabbo was once a small village along the main highway to Juba. After seeing its population swell to over 60,000 during the height of the conflict, the camp today still has limited access to running water, sanitary facilities, and scant electricity is powered by pricey solar panels, diesel generators, and car batteries. A private company installed two cell phone towers in the camp, and the residents lucky enough to procure a cell phone rely on charging stations where it can cost up to 1,000 Ugandan shillings ($0.60) to replenish their batteries. Aside from these phones, most Pabbo residents have little two-way contact with the rest of Uganda, or the rest of the world. Most information comes from radio stations that broadcast English-language news updates and government HIV prevention advertisements.

Fire swept Pabbo in 2004 and burnt down many of the huts, leaving six thousand residents homeless. Some have replaced their thatched roofs with UN tarps, leaving the landscape of the camp a hodgepodge of shredded plastic, grass, and tin. According to Pabbo residents, the fire—which was fueled by the camp’s congestion—was caused by witchcraft.

More than just the physical infrastructure of the camp is in disrepair. The ancient bond between the Acholi people and the land of northern Uganda has been broken, perhaps permanently, as many are unlikely to go back to their ancestral homes where their families farmed for centuries. In fact, many IDP camp residents no longer remember where their homes once were. The problem is so pervasive that the subcounty office in Pabbo runs a land wrangling court to settle border disputes for those who have chosen to return home.

While some older residents remember life before the LRA, they are outnumbered by the large number of Pabbo residents born in the camp during the conflict. These young Acholi boys and girls have been totally removed from the agrarian upbringing that their parents knew. The population of the camp is young and has little connection to the land.

While LRA violence has been on hold for several years and some people have left for satellite camps and farms, most of Pabbo’s 40,000 remaining residents seem to be in no great hurry to leave. Although life as an internally displaced person is squalid, camp residents enjoy religious congregations (including a large and active Catholic church), relatively accessible medical facilities, and a thriving market. Several prominent NGOs have offices in Pabbo and the World Food Programme still occasionally distributes cooking oil and food. Many Pabbo residents say that the threat of random violence keeps them in the cramped camp conditions, but others theorize that the aforementioned community services, which are not easily accessible to rural farmers, exert the greatest pull on IDPs to stay put.

The appeal of these services can be best observed on Sundays, when a thousand of the camp’s residents change out of their torn rags for ruffled pink polyester dresses and white Oxford shirts adorned with sashes bearing the cross. Parades of children march proudly while singing the songs of Jesus. For many camp residents, this is by a long measure the most exciting event of the week.

In addition, residents can purchase much of the same food they once had to work the land to obtain. Millet, maize flour, greens, cassava, beans, and other staples are today readily available at Pabbo’s market – a stark comparison to the recent past when regional violence and acute overcrowding caused severe food shortages in Uganda’s camps.

As the oft-cited exemplar of Uganda’s IDP camp “problem,” Pabbo has served as a barometer for problems that afflict other camps, as disease outbreaks have tended to strike Pabbo first. Yet today the camp is thriving, with commerce seeing an uptick over the past year even while thousands of residents have left Pabbo for satellite camps closer to their ancestral lands. Conspiracy theories fly among Pabbo residents, Western NGO workers, and others about why more are not leaving (and even why Uganda’s camps exist in the first place), but for many camp residents, the reason is simple: Pabbo is safety and the bush is danger.

Traffic continues to bounce along the one lane dirt road to Sudan, and life in Pabbo trundles on. Signs of urbanization and stability are growing in the camp, linked as the place is to the brutal conflict that confined the IDPs in such terrible conditions for so long. But as time passes over Pabbo, its residents may look back and wonder when their IDP camp—a product of chaos and violence—ceased to be a temporary refuge and began to be their home.

Memo to Iraq

2009-03-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

MEMO TO IRAQ
by Tim Fitzsimons

May 17, 2008

This month we celebrated the five-year anniversary of George W. Bush’s triumphant landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off of California, where, a mere six weeks into the War in Iraq, he declared in front of a staged rally of sailors that “[i]n the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

Mr. Bush was correct; the goals had been realized: we had quickly toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, established control over the country, and few at home in America had been asked to do more than bat an eye.

Since we won that first fight, however, we have lost the war of words and images. In the wake of “Mission Accomplished,” we have seen the horrifying pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, a cell phone video of Saddam Hussein’s botched and barbaric hanging, and front page after front page plastered with images of decapitations and blood running through the streets of Baghdad.

Somehow, despite the fact that this war has gone on for longer than the Civil War and both World Wars, we as a nation have failed to seriously question its continuation. One of the two main candidates for president seeks simply to end American casualties, since he has rightly identified that as the only factor that concerns most of us. We have not been paying close enough attention to the war over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, the one that we are losing most terribly. They will always remember.

But we won the War for Iraq. Mission accomplished.

***

Nine months ago, as I was rumbling down the "green tunnel," a tree-lined main throughway in the Kashmir valley, my translator Shabir pointed down a road that flicked by and told me that it led to his village.

I had heard about that village before. He had already explained to me what life was like when the Indian army would conduct a "crackdown," the English word that embodied the brutality of the conflict in that beautiful region of northwest India. In a crackdown, the army would surround a village, corral all of its residents, line up the men old enough to be "insurgents," blindfold them, and then walk down the line with an informer, who would silently finger the accused. Those unlucky enough to be chosen would be whisked away and “disappeared,” never to be seen again.

Recently, the BBC reported that mass graves had been discovered in the valley, suspected to be some of the sites where those disappeared people were finally put to rest.

Kashmir was my introduction to India. Before my flight from New Delhi even touched down on the tarmac at Srinagar airport, I could see hundreds of camouflaged tents behind tall fences surrounding the airport. When I stepped off of the plane, I saw military trucks and barbed wire, and men with machine guns in hand. We were frisked twice before we were permitted to leave the airport, and we were the only ones there. The height of the conflict has long since passed, but so much remains.

As we drove around Srinagar pursuing our story, our car would be pulled over every few hours by the Central Reserve Police Force, and we would both be frisked. Shabir would always get particularly incensed, but never to the police. He would wait until we were speeding away before letting slip some of the rare four letter words he reserved for the “occupiers.”

When Shabir and I would talk about the conflict between Kashmir, India, and Pakistan, he would gaze out of the car window and his mannerisms would change. His emotions would deaden, and he would speak in a sort of robotic way that showed he found the question too difficult to answer fully:

"I think Kashmir should be part of Pakistan," he would say, looking away.
"Why? You already said that you think being part of India makes Kashmir prosperous," I would ask, slowly.
"But you know," (and here he would begin to get especially uncomfortable), "I can't want to go to India. Pakistan is a country for Muslims, and we in Kashmir are Muslim."

But his true feelings shone through his explanation. A day or two before, when he had explained what a crackdown was, I had asked him if it had ever happened in his village when he was a kid. "Yes," he had said simply, "many times." His employer had told me that his village was a hotbed of insurgent activity in the 1990s, so I already knew. Shabir remembered the conflict well. India to him was forever seared into his mind as the force that disappeared all those people from his village, causing so much pain to so many people.

And with that, I learned that the cost of insurgency and counter-insurgency is not one that fades with age. Pay close attention.

This article was published on May 17, 2008 in the Tufts Daily.

Iraqi Refugees in Jordan

2009-02-27T08:10:00.000-08:00

Iraq Refugees in Jordan from Institute For Global Leadership on Vimeo.

This video was presented to the Tufts University ALLIES (Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services) Second Annual Intellectual Roundtable on October 30, 2008.

As a postscript to the video, Asel and his family were resettled in Massachusetts in December 2008. Asel and his brothers are currently enrolled in school, and looking forward to applying to college.

Paradise on Earth, Lost.

2009-02-26T19:11:00.000-08:00

(This article was written in August 2007.)

by Tim Fitzsimons

Forty-one years ago, George Harrison was paddled out into the center of Dal Lake in Kashmir by Lassa, a shikara walla. While he floated under the moonlight, he strummed his guitar, singing along with Ravi Shankar, the Kashmiri sitar player. Several years later, in the same houseboat where Harrison vacationed in 1966, Nelson Rockefeller spent a summer holiday taking in the beautiful mountain scenery. Today, Lassa still paddles his flat-bottomed shikara canoe, but the houseboat, neglected and rotten, has sunk to its gunwales.

**

Several centuries prior to Mr. Harrison’s ride, a Mughal emperor chose to call Kashmir “Paradise on Earth,” or so says the lore. Nobody seems to actually know—or care—whether or not an emperor coined the term. The nickname, today repeated abundantly in tourism pamphlets and by Kashmiris themselves, stuck.

Kashmir was once among the top tourist destinations in India, attracting a quarter of all overseas visitors in 1988, according to the president of the Hotel Association of Kashmir. Tourism had grown to 20 percent of the region’s economy. And then the insurgency began.

The eruption of violence following the contested elections of 1989 put an abrupt end to Kashmir’s tourism boom. The tourist infrastructure crumbled as barbed wire went up and the army settled in for the long run. Newly built hotels and houseboats sat empty for years, and the only visitors to these places of lodging were journalists covering the violence that was tearing the valley apart. A state of relative anarchy in the city of Srinagar allowed for land-grabbers and squatters to further and further encroach their homes into the lake, which polluted and strained Srinagar’s most recognizable landmark. Today, the Dal’s water is stagnant and full of trash, sewage, and weeds; a more accurate name for Dal Lake might be “Dal Swamp.”

Today, the overwhelming violence of the 1990s has passed and the tourism business in Kashmir is limping back to the table. The industry is trying its best to promote Kashmir as a tourist destination, but the odds are stacked against them. The insurgency seems to have left a lasting impression in the minds of foreign tourists, who were the biggest spenders in Kashmir and who have yet to return. The economy has backpedaled and is now agriculture-based. The seasonal injection of foreign capital has almost completely dried up.

Some Indian tourists are coming back, but by the most optimistic figures it is barely 6 percent of the gross domestic product of the region. Their effect, whether it is real or imaginary, has been to reinforce in the minds of the Kashmiri tourism industry the belief that Kashmir is a tourist’s pariah, shunned by the rest of the world.

THE DAL
Dal Lake is famed for its houseboats, which range from floating palaces to dilapidated, cracked hovels. The houseboats are still a chief form of lodging for travelers in Kashmir, but their condition is worsening and little is being done to renovate or grow the industry. Many of the boats, once the jewel of the industry’s image, are now structurally in disrepair, with the only remaining woodcarver too elderly to practice his craft, and the boats too expensive to maintain. Some boats literally sit on the bottom of the disgusting lake, roofs or windows still peeking above the surface.

Foreign tourists used to come to the houseboats and stay for weeks, according to Rashid Koull, the general secretary of the Houseboat Owners’ Association. Business was brisk. Now, after ten years of sitting empty in the Dal’s increasingly corrosive waters, their hulls are covered in slimy black rot. Azim Tuman, the chairman of the Association, pointed sadly under the floorboards of the Venezia, where a particularly mushy piece of wood had been patched several times. “One day, it will break and the boat will sink,” he said, with an air of resignation.

Mr. Tuman expects that within ten years nobody will remember how to build a houseboat, and that within fifteen to twenty years, the whole houseboat industry will have fallen apart. Simply, the boats cost too much to repair when nobody is staying in them.

The houseboat industry is only receiving dodgy support from the government. The Owner’s Association is in debt to the federal government because of a loan granted to help beautify the boats, but since the tourism industry has been stuck in something close to neutral for eighteen years, it has yet to recover enough to repay its debts.

Shikaras are a mainstay of both Dal’s local economy and its tourism industry (and the logo of the Jammu & Kashmir Tourism Office). The small, hand-paddled wooden canoes come in every variety and were a favorite among tourists who wanted to take a lazy float around the lake; some of the boats also still serve their original purpose: transportation. Everyone from early morning fishers and seaweed gatherers to children on their way to school use shikaras as a means of transport.

A few shikaras still paddle around the lake laden with tourists, and some lucky houseboats find themselves booked during the high travel season, but this is not the norm. While the houseboats accumulate dust and rot, most shikaras bob empty in the lake, save a few morose shikara wallahs attempting to balance their books.

GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT
Kashmir’s new development strategy can be summarized in five words: “five star and golf courses.” Contrary to the traditional mainstays of the Valley’s tourism industry, the focus is now on luring back high-spending foreign tourists with the trappings of an international leisure destination. So far, it is an experimental business model.

“We need more five-star hotels,” said Farooq Shah, the Director of Tourism of J&K State. Under construction on a hill on the outskirts of Srinagar is the city’s second five-star hotel. To one side, a mountain soars into the clouds, to the other, Dal Lake shimmers with Srinagar city spread out behind it. The developed plans to sell the rights to the hotel to Marriott or Hyatt, or another western hotel chain. Other similar deals are in the works.

However, the tourism economy of Kashmir’s early days was one based on simpler pleasures, not five star restaurants with complimentary massages. Even the fanciest houseboats are not like five star hotels, and less-than-deluxe boats and guesthouses made up the majority of lodging options. This new development plan represents a distinct shift in the focus of Kashmir’s tourism development.

When asked why tourists should travel to Kashmir, Mr. Shah explained that by visiting Kashmir a tourist could experience “nature at its best,” specifically citing Kashmir’s famous lakes and waterways as one aspect of that natural splendor. Lake Dal, Kashmir’s most famous body of water, could be seen as a scream of disagreement. The lake is, in many places, a cesspool filled with trash, abandoned glassware, algae bloom, seaweed, and carp plump from feasting on a bountiful supply of human sewage.

The president of the Houseboat Owner’s Association, Mr. M. Azim Tuman, explained that the houseboats contribute less to the overall pollution of the Dal than the hotels and homes of the city, citing a government study that said the boats put roughly 3% of the pollution into the lake while the surrounding homes and hotels provide the lion’s share. He boasted that the waste his houseboats produce makes the Dal’s fish fatter.

Others in the tourism industry are not trying to contribute to the diet of the Dal’s carp. Carin Fischer, a German environmental consultant based in New Delhi, has experimented successfully with eco-tourism in the far northeastern Arunchal Pradesh state of India, which also has a military presence and stunning natural beauty. Her organization, using grant money, has provided training and planning free of charge to a village that then used its skills to set up a money-making business that would draw foreigners to stay in a traditional village with little impact on the environment. Ms. Fischer looks to replicate her success in the mountains of Kashmir, and hopefully through tourism and the economy it will create, discourage villagers from participating in the illegal logging industry that is felling the protected trees of Gulmarg. Ms. Fischer suspects that some of the trouble she has been having in setting up her project has been due to the Police Chief in the district, who she believes is involved in the illegal logging industry there.

Unfortunately, Kashmir’s spoilt environment goes even further than simply unbridled logging in remote corners of the state. In Pahalgan, a controversial amusement park financed by the Jammu & Kashmir Bank sits in the center of a valley that is world-renowned for its scenic natural beauty. And in Gulmarg, another such valley, cement hotel blocks that resemble spaceships (or trendy 1970s ski resorts) are being thrown up with reckless abandon.

Kashmir’s increasingly destroyed environment is far from the only adversary in its quest to reestablish itself as one of the world’s vacation hotspots. The enormous and pervasive presence of Indian paramilitary police will continue to frighten away foreigners as long as Srinagar looks like a war zone. While some foreign tourists are returning to the region, those who have chosen not to return speak more loudly than the handful that have.

THE CENTRAL RESERVE POLICE FORCE
Spiked vehicle barriers and stray rolls of razor wire, rusty from years of disuse, litter the streets of Srinagar. Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front graffiti peek out from behind hasty paint jobs near military complexes, and enormous convoys, rumbling around town in a symbolic show of force, regularly disrupt traffic. Protests and strikes always threaten to escalate into violence. Random “reminder” attacks plunge the city into lockdown. Nobody celebrates Indian Independence Day

Whether the situation has improved from the mid-1990s, when Srinagar was a war zone, is not up for debate. Undoubtedly, the situation today looks much better in the eyes of Kashmiris, but in the eyes of foreigners, it looks like the threat of danger and violence are imminent.

Politicians, politicos, and tourism industry talking heads claim that the situation in Kashmir is improving and that travel advisories are the true reason why foreign tourists have yet to return. When prodded about the universally-intrusive paramilitary presence in the state and reduced levels of violence, the Minister of Flood Control and Tourism in the Secretariat of Jammu & Kashmir State, would only state that the state government “is taking measures in [the] direction” of reducing force levels.

Statistically, it may be true that tourists are as safe in Kashmir as in any other region of the world, but in cases such as these, appearances and feelings often count for more than hard facts.
Kashmir is still a region under occupation where machine gun-wielding paramilitary police exercise their authority with varying degrees of tact. Foreign tourists are harassed extensively alongside Kashmiri citizens, many times with no apparent motivation or purpose other than, it would seem, to lend an unfriendly impression that would discourage further foreign tourism. The situation is not normal there, foreign tourists have not returned in any noticeable numbers, and the status quo of militarization seems to be more entrenched than the casual observer might guess.

The harassment lends the impression that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) are not interested in seeing normalcy reestablished in the valley, where their presence has become ubiquitous and their authority unchecked. In a region where the force-to-civilian ration is about twelve-to-one, the military establishment in Kashmir is an industry, and it seems to be there to stay. Soldiers stand guard on every street corner and every sidewalk, on every hill, on the shores of the Dal, and everywhere in between. The invasiveness of security checks has a distinct air of an attempt to reestablish lost authority, but confidence and respect for the CRPF is not increasing.

These checks are conducted everywhere at all hours of the day and night, and an unofficial military curfew keeps people in their homes after sundown. The Kashmiri population scorns the CRPF as meddlesome foreigners, and their presence keeps the ire of Kashmiris stoked, which further fuels the tension that pulses through the city and sometimes bursts out.

The direct effect that the police and military presence has on the tourism industry is varied. In Gulmarg, a mountain resort west of Srinagar, the paramilitary presence is not pervasive. The town is well known for its skiing and not for its militancy, so the checkpoints and roadblocks of the valley are few and far between. The shadow of the militancy still looms in the minds of foreign tourists, according to Mr. Dar, a ski instructor and tourism coordinator at the resort. In the winter, during the ski season, the fresh powder on the ungroomed slopes is never too crowded. But in Pahalgam, a mountain town that is also part of the Kashmiri tourist repertoire, military encampments are everywhere, as are checkpoints and the CRPF. The difference between the two is that this town is a Hindu pilgrimage site, so the central government provides extensively for their protection.

Also, conspiracy theories are rife in Srinagar about the true motives and the culprits behind the more recent attacks, since they bear little resemblance to the insurgent attacks of the 1990s and because they seem to have little political impact. Some interviewees even went as far as naming specific Indian states—namely those bordering Kashmir and the Himalayas—as possibly in cahoots to use media attention to ensure that Kashmir does not benefit from mountain tourism on their behalf.

According to Sheikh Rafiq, a shawl salesman at the Boulevard Shopping Center on Boulevard Road in Srinagar, his daily intake in the late 1980s was nearly 20,000 Rupees (today, about USD $500), and today he is lucky to receive even Rs 5000 (USD $125). He managed to survive through the militancy period by using his savings, but he was forced to relocate to Delhi, where business was tepid at best. He has now returned to Srinagar, his home, only to find that business here is still stale. Indian tourists are coming back in large numbers, he said, but they only pay in installments, whereas foreign tourists used to pay in one lump sum. Additionally, he was only able to return because the military vacated the shopping complex they had been occupying since the insurgency began.

**

So where does this leave Kashmir’s tourism industry? In no good place, if history is any judge. Tourism, even after years of relative calm, is slow to pick up again. Kashmir’s image has mutated from one of beauty and tranquility to one of war and death.

The government insists that this will change. However, the problem is exactly what the government insists: Kashmir is safe, but it looks dangerous to the foreign eye, one ignorant of what Kashmir was like during the height of its violence. Unfortunately, though it has surely calmed, it is still far from peaceful.

Just recently, in July 2006, a series of grenade attacks killed eight tourists and created a scare that emptied hotels and resorts for about a month. The Tourist Reception Center was bombed to the ground in April 2005 as well. Even more recently, in summer 2007, an explosion on a bus carrying tourists killed five and scared away many more, even though it turned out to have been caused by a gas leak and not by a bomb or an attack. The specter of insurgency is enough to empty the hotels.

Mr. H. U. Mir, President of the Kashmir Hotel & Restaurant Association, went even further than the Minister of Tourism and Flood Control. “This is paradise on earth,” he droned unconvincingly from behind his dark sunglasses, as the room’s electricity flickered off, Indian soldiers glared down the dusty sidewalk below, auto rickshaws dodged roadblocks, and pedestrians stepped over razor wire.

“Things are completely normal here,” chimed in the secretary general, Siraj Ahmad. “This is paradise on earth,” he insisted, “this is what you want.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Mir and Mr. Ahmad and all Kashmiris, paradise has been lost.

Lebanese Paintball Craze Springs from Harsh Reality

2009-02-16T21:41:00.000-08:00

by Alice Fordham and Tim Fitzsimons, Special to the Globe and Mail

The patch of wasteland in the Hezbollah stronghold of south Beirut has a sign outside reading Special Forces. Inside, the ground is strewn with razor wire, crawling with uniformed youths and ringing with shots.

But it's not the Lebanese army at work: It's ultra-realistic paintball.

Lebanon's teenagers have grown up with war - among other conflicts the civil war that ripped the country apart until 1990, Syrian occupation until 2005 and the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006 - but that hasn't put them off the latest Lebanese craze.

Open for five months, Special Forces is across the road from the square where the militant Islamist political group Hezbollah held a triumphant rally earlier this year, in the heart of the huge suburb of Dahiyeh. The area is patrolled not by Lebanese police, but by Hezbollah.

Special Forces is far from the only paintball company to have opened in Lebanon this year - they often have names like Terror Tactics - but it is particularly popular, said co-owner Mohammad Biab, 24, because it is so realistic.

"Experienced people," he said, smiling, "helped the design to look like a real battlefield."

It is a sprawling patch of rubble, set among bombed-out apartment blocks, casualties of the war between Hezbollah and Israel. But nearby, too, are the new buildings that have sprung up as a result of massive Hezbollah regeneration of the area, which has produced the kind of stability that fosters leisure activities like paintball.

The open-air combat zone has a large dug-out trench to crawl through, barrels to hide behind and strings of real razor wire that inexperienced combatants trip over because the visors on their helmets are nearly opaque.

Mr. Biab gives lectures on tactics before each round, and during play sits on a platform, shouting "go, go," and peppering slow players with "bullets." Every effort, he said, has been made to make the uniforms authentic and to ensure the imported guns look as realistic as possible.

Special Forces is booked up for weeks and people come from all over Lebanon, from Sunni and Christian areas and others besides, Mr. Biab said. Although in the streets outside, many women are veiled and modestly dressed, he said that gangs of girls and mixed groups often come, put on camouflage and stage shootouts.

Hadi, 20, a perspiring customer who travelled from central Beirut to be here, was fresh from his second tour of the combat zone. He said that he liked paintball because "instead of being aggressive on the streets, I can use some weapons here and have fun and I am not hurting people."

But it is not just profit that is motivating Mr. Biab and co-owner Louai Helbawi.

He believes that through paintball he can create in Lebanon a nation ready to defend itself. "The other side," he said, referring to Israel, "is an enemy whose people have to serve one month each year in the army, so the whole environment is prepared for war. So we have to make people prepared for war."

When other nations hear about the realism of the paintball in Lebanon, he hopes, they will know that this is a nation that knows how to defend itself.

Customers come for entertainment, said Mr. Diab, "but the hidden idea behind this is political."

However, he said, the tactics of paintball do not foster an aggressive attitude to battle. "The first time you go out and carry a gun," he said, "the main object that directly comes into your head is that you have to defend yourself from bullets.

"Then afterwards," he added, as Hadi and his friends kicked off their boots like old soldiers, "comes the entertainment."

This article was published in the Globe and Mail on October 28, 2008.

Picture This: How Images from gaza got from Ordinary People to Us

2009-01-27T00:28:00.000-08:00

Picture This
How images from Gaza got from ordinary people to us
Tim Fitzsimons, Special to NOW Extra , January 27, 2009

As the bombardment of Gaza began last month, an Israeli media blackout denying journalists access to the Strip held firm. And yet, global criticism of Israeli action crescendoed as image after heartbreaking image was published in the media.

As there were no - or very few - journalists in Gaza, the images of the carnage often came from ordinary people. Many reached the world via a new website: Demotix.com.

This London-based company has created considerable buzz by allowing anyone to upload their pictures of anywhere, connecting the street to the mainstream by allowing media outlets to buy pictures taken by ordinary people. Citizen journalism just got organized and - maybe - profitable.

Jonnie Leger, Director of Sales at Demotix Images, told NOW Extra that “during the Gaza conflict, when foreign reporters couldn’t get into the territory, our contributors were giving amazing content.” Indeed, working with citizen journalists resulted in unexpected convergence when Israelis and Palestinians were covering opposite sides of the same events, “we got the same story told by different reporters on the same day — the photos are the same.” The agency received - and sold - images from inside Gaza because its citizens were able to skirt the Israeli media blackout cutting off access to the Strip.

And even before the assault began, several Palestinians were underground, digging out of the Strip. Rare images of these burrowers floated out onto the global newswire via Demotix as talk of tunnels and smuggling began to fray the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

It is not only from hard-to-reach places like Gaza that citizen journalists can sell images. As newspapers and television networks face declining revenues and close foreign bureaus, many are looking for ways to capitalize on the power of the internet and an undiminished demand for foreign reportage. Turi Munthe, the founder and CEO of Demotix, saw an opportunity and in early 2008 started the company.

For the past year, Demotix has advertised on social networking sites and searched for promising photographers on flickr.com, a photo-sharing website with a devoted following. Today, Demotix boasts over two thousand regular contributors, and emerged from “stealth beta” mode to become official in August last year.

Before founding Demotix, Munthe worked at the Royal United Services Insititute, the world’s oldest defense and security think tank, where he studied radicalization. He was also a journalist and spent time reporting in Beirut and the Middle East, where he found himself drawn “further and further toward civil society.”

But he became disenchanted by the mainstream media and its decline, telling NOW Extra that he watched the media, “commit a quite efficient harakiri over the past few years,” as outlets shut down foreign bureaus and slashed staff rosters.

Munthe saw an opportunity to link media outlets with an increasingly dependable and sophisticated network of independent photojournalists, and Demotix was born. Although determinedly a global company, the Middle East has provided its biggest hit - with Gaza, and there is talk of an Arabic website.

Aside from a desire to bolster the ailing news industry, Munthe “sought to create a social enterprise, a business model that can do good.” Munthe’s experiences have led him to believe that the more closed and blocked a society’s media is, “the more likely you are to be dealing with issues of eventual serious radicalization...When you put a society into a pressure cooker and you heat it up, things pop.”

Hence, Demotix’s moral underpinnings: “If you can get street reporters published and give them a bit of a megaphone, it’s slightly harder for governments to come and crack down on them.”

Other companies have experimented with concepts like Munthe’s with varying degrees of success. In 2006 the Calgary, Canada-based Istockphoto.com created a successful stock photography agency by using the internet to connect independent photographers, was purchased by Getty Images for $50M.

On the news side, organizations such as CNN, al-Jazeera, The New York Times, and others have slowly increased the amount of “citizen journalism” they include in their regular coverage, but it has been dependent on the charity of photographers and their willingness to surrender their copyright. This stemmed from the idea that citizen journalism was something “unprofessional” that could easily be compromised by biased providers. But as the technology of the cameraphone improved and proliferated, the acceptability of “user generated content,” or UGC, increased.

Demotix created a paying market for the photographers whose citizen journalism has been used as free material by news agencies for years. Now, Demotix sells those images to those same outlets for mainstream prices, passing half the money on to the photographers.

One problem posed by the market is danger for journalists sending valuable images from oppressive regimes. Clearly, Demotix needs images from, say, Myanmar and Syria as much as from Lebanon and London, but journalists in those places can face severe punishments. So, Demotix has incorporated layers of security that strip the metadata (hidden information incorporated into an image’s file data) from submissions. Proxy servers are also used if the user would like to cover their tracks and prevent internet tracing from following too closely.

Following submission, Demotix works closely with its contributors to ensure that a tightly edited package is presented for sale, and that any doubts about the images are eliminated. Jonnie Leger explained that all content is treated the same way that images from a professional photojournalist would be, and that “unless I’m 100% sure this is real, I can’t push it out to the press.” Leger ensures the legitimacy of the UGC by keeping in close contact with photographers throughout the process.

Swayed by the story, this sometime photographer signed up with Demotix and can report that there is a simple signup process and straightforward privacy agreement. Within a few minutes, I was uploading my first story. The beta version of the site still is a bit choppy in places, but it works well and efficiently.

The online submission form makes tagging and organizing photos by story easy. Anyone can search the site for a story, and after submission photos are updated into a section of recently submitted content. No takers yet, but it is good to be part of a community in the business of telling their stories to the world.

Hezbollah: Party of God

2009-01-27T00:22:00.000-08:00

(This multimedia presentation was published in Autumn 2007.)

HEZBOLLAH: Party of God from Institute For Global Leadership on Vimeo.

Watching the World Change

2009-01-26T22:03:00.001-08:00

This is a photo taken the moment that Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.

Curiously, the expressions on the onlookers' faces were neither of joy nor fear, but rather studious observation, as if looking away would have revealed that the moment was just an illusion.

Straight from the Notebook

2009-01-25T17:45:00.000-08:00

I've typed up some notes from an interview I conducted with a thorougly defeated man. He was an Iraqi refugee living in Amman, and he was a Sabean. His comments underscore the sectarian cleavages that have grown in Iraq, as well as the despair that has enveloped those who were chased from the country. These notes are fully unedited, from the original broken English and Arabic translation, but I think by reading them this way you get a better sense of how the interview went.

The man was short and had a sad, handsome face. His hair was graying and he was slight in size and stature. His young children darted in and out of the room as we conducted the interview. They inched along, backs to the wall, eyes fixed on me because I was an outsider.

--------------------------------------------

Back to Amman - 8/13/09

Before the war -
name-Nasser Mosat
AGE-45

When he came to Jordan...
he is Sabean

We are 18,000 in the whole world, because its few and theyre well-educated, education of children. "Our religion depends on peace + knowledge in life,"

They're an ancient religion, before Islam, Christianity, before Jews...
Iraq is their real country

John the Baptist - they baptized Jesus. Muslims don't accept anything different, anything diff. is wrong

Sheikhs are politicians, they want to control other people

Before 2003 before no tension - his opinion there was gvmt to protect them

-->more about muslims *how it changed how people

whole family killed in iraq. bro, sis, mother, killed by mehdi army, doesn't care about ngos
he doesn't like to ask

got $ from Care, never uses
he has bad things, missile killed his 13 other family members
"I'm not Iraqi anymore"

existed before war
"militias told me to leave iraq + i said i'm not iraqi anymore."

before the war a lot of missionaries tried to convert them to islam
-->palpable tension between the sects in iraq

"we leave death in iraq, to a slow death in jordan"

he never goes to ask for handouts because its not what i want "it's not who i am."

"my future is finished, i have just the future of my children."

made interview w/ aus. resettlement. waited 8 months for response from Australia.

Thinks it will be 1 year for Australia, even w/ answer they must wait one more year.

Doesn't understand why its so late. They must find some solution for us.

Muslims can go back to Iraq when better Sabeans must stay in Jordan or trans to another country. I hope there are some place for us to go, they must.

"I'm out of patience and out of money," just wants a peaceful place for kids and family
employment

When the UN called about resettlement@UNHCR, they sat for 5 hours and interviewer began to cry
she asked where does he want to go, australia
they asked w/ which party they worked w/
they bribed the un and if you work for someone big or bribe you get processed more quickly

all savings are gone. -now getting help, gets some help from relatives
spends $500/mo w/ good health
$600/mo 5 person family

prices of food have gone up. heard australia better than other countries

harder for him to move to australia than others
These people, our religion don't want material possession. Simple peaceful life

"I've lost most of my life and I can't make it up. I'm now just living for my kids."

Hezbollah's New Face

2008-11-22T16:08:00.000-08:00

BEIRUT - 16 July 2008

The media circus staged last week by Hezbollah is what should be remembered as their true victory from the prisoner swap.

Over the past few months, as rumblings of a Syrian-Israeli peace deal grew louder, Hezbollah greatly strengthened its presence in Lebanon. In May, the group demonstrated its military dominance when it took over West Beirut, and in July, its media advantage with the prisoner swap. Its events and coverage of the prisoner exchange were designed to reorient public opinion away from considering Hezbollah a fringe group and instead toward seeing it as a party that represents the Lebanese people.

Following closely on the heels of the Mediterranean love-fest with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris, during which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Michel Sleiman were closer to each other than they will probably ever be again, this past week’s events show how much distance there really is between the two countries.

All of the important members of the Lebanese government were on hand at Beirut airport to laud the return of the prisoners – including a visibly unenthusiastic Prime Minister Siniora – as Hezbollah claimed victory and draped the day’s festivities in their flag. The images of the President giving a rousing speech praising the resistance contrasted sharply with the message from Paris, which was one of international cooperation.

Hezbollah’s motivation behind the theatrics was twofold: first, to give its supporters, still hurting from the 2006 war, an opportunity to thumb their noses at Israel; and second, to place into the news cycle the image of a nation rallying behind an event that was simultaneously Lebanon’s and Hezbollah’s.

Hezbollah had to make as much as possible out of the prisoner event, as its May campaign in Beirut and elsewhere left a negative image in the minds of Lebanese and people around the world. Their ability to stage the event and roll out all important members of government was largely based on the May events and the unity government that the resistance is now a part of.

It jumbled the party’s political imagery with that of the Lebanese state, further blurring the line between the two entities. The event’s posters and advertisements had a custom-made logo, the stage entrance of Kuntar and the others looked like they must have spent some time practicing in Israeli prison, and Nasrallah’s brief, security-blanketed appearance gave special weight to the day’s festivities. Their celebration was, by far, the most organized and well-executed enterprise to hit the streets of Beirut for some time.

Hezbollah’s tight visuals and sweeping camera montages held the attention of a news-addicted nation for an entire day, with everyone’s eyes fixed firmly on the pomp and symbol-laden circumstance of the party’s grand nationalization campaign. The degree to which Hezbollah endeavored – with success – to portray last week’s Hezbollah celebration as an event being celebrated by all Lebanese is impressive.

However, the fact remains that the prisoner swap was at least as much about Israeli domestic politics than it is about the strength of the weapons of the resistance. Ehud Olmert, buffeted by scandal and his botched handling of domestic and international affairs, has been grasping at anything to improve his image so that he can avoid the disintegration of his coalition. Israeli public opinion demanded from the unpopular Premier that the two soldiers be returned in accordance with Israeli military custom and Jewish tradition, and Hezbollah successfully kept silent about their deaths for nearly two years, so it had the upper hand in bargaining.

According to the posters strung up at the Naqoura border crossing, “Freedom is guaranteed by Nasrallah, and Humiliation is guaranteed by Olmert.” The words were in English, intended to be impress upon outside observers what a feat the group had accomplished. The various elements of the celebrations show that Hezbollah is intent on expanding beyond the hearts and the minds of the adoring supporters in the suburbs, who need no further proof. The next challenge for the group is bringing even broader support to their side. And with the possibility of peace between Israel and Syria hovering over the Levant, Hezbollah has to keep its image Lebanese.

Sabeans fleeing persecution in Iraq find cold refuge in reluctant Jordan

2008-11-19T13:09:00.000-08:00

AMMAN -- Asel didn’t come to Jordan because he wanted to. Neither did his parents. They, like so many others, stole out of their native Iraq at the last minute, when word came that gangs were coming to kill their family.

Since that fateful morning in 2004, Asel, his two brothers, and his parents have been in Jordan passing time waiting for something that might enable them to end their limbo and move on. They won’t to go back to Iraq, so great was the trauma that caused them to leave.

They were targeted because they are Sabean, a small religious group in Iraq who trace their creed back to the teachings of St. John the Baptist. In the turbulent days years since the beginning of the US-led war in Iraq, Asel’s family and many Sabeans received death threats demanding ransom and conversion. His brother’s botched kidnapping shook his family, but not until the warnings of imminent death did they decide to flee. So sudden was their escape that the family brought no clothes and made no preparations for their arrival in Amman.

In Jordan’s capital, Asel’s family has made al-Hashemi al Shemali their home. There, in a neighborhood previously inhabited by poor Palestinians, countless Iraqi families live in what could best be described as impoverished purgatory. They fear that the simplest trouble could mean a one-way ticket back to Iraq, which for many would mean a death sentence. So they stay, silently.

Asel tried to convey the overwhelming boredom that has plagued his four-year stay in Amman. He and his other Iraqi friends described day after day of never leaving their apartments, unable to work, openly play, or even attend school. (Only last year, the Jordanian government opened public schools to Iraqi refugees, and many are unsure whether they will be able to return for the coming school year.) Books and television have been Asel’s sole sources of entertainment for four years, during which he has only been able to complete two years of schooling, one public, and one parochial.

But they do have satellite television. Holed up in their small apartment, the two eldest brothers have watched enough American movies to fill in their remaining gaps in English. Asel, with little formal English education, ably served as this reporter’s translator. Their family, though very poor, is not unique. According to a study of Iraqis in Jordan conducted in May 2007 by Fafo, a Norwegian research institute, nearly 95% of Iraqis in the country have access to satellite television in their homes. But day-to-day living expenses, exacerbated by recent inflation in food and fuel prices, are the most difficult ones for them to manage. TV, filled with hundreds more channels than the one Iraqis previously knew, has proven to be this family’s one escape.

Unlike other refugee crises of the past several decades, the plight of Iraqis in Jordan is not one characterized by starvation or widespread homelessness. Rather, it is a muffled crisis that involves political and economic insecurity of a large, previously middle class group that has been forced into the underbelly of an unwelcoming society, where they have no rights, and no guarantee that they will not be sent back to their homeland, where many of them fear death. Many watch silently as family members slowly expire, unable to obtain the medications that, lacking Jordanian citizenship, are too expensive for them to obtain.

This fear of deportation is what keeps people like Asel and his family inside, shying away from extended periods walking in the street. They do go out, but the slim chance that the police will stop them for some transgression is enough to keep them home most of the day. According to the UNHCR in Amman, there is an unspoken rule that Jordanian police ignore the status of Iraqis, but stories of forced deportation are rife among refugee communities.

Not all Iraqis in Jordan are like Asel’s family, however. One man who works in the main produce market near the King Hussein Mosque came during the first Iran-Iraq war and has stayed, unhindered, until 2003. The recent deluge of Iraqis from the new Gulf War, and the ensuing political pressures on Iraqi communities from the Jordanian government, forced him to obtain an asylum seeker certificate from the UNHCR. This man still sends money home to his two wives and family in Basra.

There is a movement to diagnose the problem of the Iraqi refugee crisis in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, with the intention of finding a silver bullet. With such a varied and unconventional refugee population, policymakers have struggled to find solutions. Their predicament is completely dependent on external factors, and few will consider returning before a significant improvement in the security situation. Others vow they will never return, because for them, Iraq will never be the same.

Their situation has been improved by some ad hoc measures, such as the Jordanian government’s decision to allow Iraqi children to attend public schools, but such changes do nothing to speed up the process of resettlement by foreign governments, or to bring increased stability to Iraq. One measure that would likely ease the strain on Iraqi families in Jordan, the provision of work permits, is met by universal condemnation by a government fearful of alienating a population facing high unemployment rates. Even the granting of official recognition is too much for the Jordanian government, who fear a repeat of the normalization of the Palestinian refugee population.

But aside from work, what most Sabeans hope most for is a way to leave Jordan, and to begin a new life in the US, Britain, Australia, or Sweden. Political forces have forced them out of Iraq, and political forces keep them in limbo, and so they continue to wait.

Published July 5, 2008 in the Daily Star, Beirut.

watching the bailout go up in flames

2008-09-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON - Ron Paul gave a blistering speech denouncing the bill before sitting back in his seat. He looked very smug and spent the next few minutes his cell phone. He did not have a blackberry.

The speaker struck her gavel and immediately the panels above the house gallery glowed with the names of every member. Little rectangles of red and green began to filter in next to each names, corresponding to their votes.

I was distracted, though. Next to me in the House gallery was a group of Amish people, all beards and black pantaloons. The men had suspenders and white shirts and the ladies had little starched translucent bonnets perched on their heads. Little did we all know, history was being made just in front of us.

It became clear that the votes weren't there when the clock expired and the speaker of the house didn't do anything. As Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank roamed around slowly, distractedly, disbelievingly, their eyes trained on the board, crowds remained around the voting computers on both the democrat and republican sides. The smiles slowly slid off their faces, and they began to scurry around waving their arms and trying to gather up more votes for the bill. Republicans began to shout to the speaker to call the vote to order, so the numbers would stand. They all continued to run around and click away on their blackberrys. The speaker announced that the bill had been defeated.

And then everyone split.

Outside the Capitol, members spoke to news crews that were hurtling toward the steps to get the scoop on the breaking story.

Then, the stock market crashed.

Back to the Holiday Inn

2008-08-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

BEIRUT - 4 August 2008

After a few hours at a bar with the other interns and paper staff, a friend suggested that we go to the old Holiday Inn, a monstrous, mortar-scarred, twenty-six story building that looms over Beirut’s newly gleaming downtown, waiting patiently for its makeover or demolition.

We hopped in a cab from Gemmayzeh and stopped at the bank next door and walked as inconspicuously as possible over the brightly-lit fence that surrounds the hotel.

As we walked across the bridge that, I can only imagine, was once filled with taxis dropping off fresh-faced family types and business men and Gulf tourists, I stared up at the blinking face of row after row of blown out windows, bullet holes and marks of war.

Only the cement remains. In the lobby, the doors and the walls are gone but the circular recesses in the ceiling told of chandeliers which surely once hung proudly.

It was very late so we quickly made our way up the stairs. They wrapped tightly and the walls were painted – or maybe singed – black. Grafitti had been scratched into the sides here and there, and every five or ten floors there was a rocket or mortar hole that had managed to penetrate the earthquake proof layers of cement and steel rods.

We stopped halfway and walked out onto a massive, empty floor where the only indications of its previous state were crumbled cement mounds along the floor that stood where walls once created a hallway. The tiles that surrounded where the windows once stood were blown off in explosion patterns, exposing the gray concrete underneath, and here and there a three foot hole had blown its way through the semi-intact wall. On the floor, occasional holes looked down to many other holes, likely from shells that passed through windows and then through the building itself.

We took a few photographs and continued up the stairs, sweating in the Beirut humidity, until we came out onto the complex of floors that I believe once held the revolving restaurant and other establishments. The enormous sunken circle in the cement remained, but everything else - the actual restaurant, for example - had disappeared. Maybe it had burned, maybe the pieces had been slowly looted over the fifteen-year civil war, or maybe something else happened. All that was left was the cement.

We continued up to the very top, where the helipad stands alongside foxholes from which snipers once shot at the city.

According to my guide book, the building was built to withstand a massive earthquake, so it is still structurally sound, despite all appearances. That's why the cement skeleton stands when everything else is gone.

The hotel was a crucial vantage point in the early days of the Lebanese Civil War. The district where it lies is adjacent to the Phoenicia and the Saint George, and these hotels all are in the middle ground between the Christian and Muslim sides of the city. As soon as fighting broke out, militias fought over these hotels and they constituted "battles" in the same way that Gettysburg and the Bulge were battles in ages past.

In 1991, at the end of the civil war, a retrospective by the Times gave this description:

In 1975, in what has been called the "war of the hotels," Muslim gunmen backed by Palestinian fighters engaged in room-to-room combat with Christian militiamen, finally evicting the Christians from the St. George (facing page, right in bottom picture), Phoenicia, Palm Beach and Normandie Hotels, as well as the Holiday Inn. It was one of the more extraordinary engagements of the civil war, with rival militiamen exchanging rockets and artillery from hotel rooftops.

For years before 1975, the lobby of the St. George saw world figures pass through it, and all rooms were booked solid year round. After dining at the hotel's recherche French-style restaurant, guests would walk to the rooftop Panache nightclub in the nearby Phoenicia Hotel. Half a mile away, up the hill in the Hamra shopping center, is the Commodore Hotel, once home to an international corps of journalists covering the war. It was destroyed from the inside four years ago when rival Muslim militiamen fought pitched battles in the lobby and in the rooms.

Old dispatches from the New York Times tell of how crucial the area was during the war:

HOTELS IN BEIRUT CAUGHT IN BATTLE; DEATH TOLL RISES; 52 Are Reported Killed-- Holiday Inn Complex Is Center of Clashes NEW TRUCE ANNOUNCED Agreement Is Reached in Cabinet but Two Sides Continue Fighting
By JAMES M. MARKHAM Special to The New York Times.
October 27, 1975
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Monday, Oct. 27--At least 52 people were reported killed yesterday as gun battles spread through Beirut's downtown hotel district, with the towering Holiday Inn complex becoming a strategic point of contention among warring leftist and rightist gangs.

TROOPS IN BEIRUT BATTLING GUNMEN; BIG HOTELS BURNED; Prime Minister Announces Another Cease-Fire, 14th in the Last 2 Months 235 DEAD IN 48 HOURS Government Says 2 Soldiers Are Killed, 4 Wounded and 3 Taken Captive Troops Battle Gunmen in Beirut as Big Hotels Burn
By JAMES M. MARKHAM Special to The New York Times
December 11, 1975
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Thursday, Dec. 11 Lebanese troops clashed with gunmen in Beirut hotel and commercial districts yesterday on the second day of their officially announced mission of separating warring Christian and Moslem factions.

And then later

BEIRUT LEFTISTS SEIZE HOLIDAY INN IN HEAVY ASSAULT; Hundreds Led by Armored Vehicle Capture Symbol of Rightist Defiance AT LEAST 43 ARE KILLED Other Heavy Fighting and Shelling Said to Continue in and Outside Capital BEIRUT LEFTISTS TAKE HOLIDAY INN
By JAMES M. MARKHAM Special to The New York Times
March 22, 1976
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Monday, March 22 Hundreds of Moslem and leftist gunmen, backed by armored vehicles yesterday drove right-wing. Phalangists from the towering, battered Holiday Inn, gaining an important military and psychological victory.

According to the reports from the next day, the Phalange counterattacked and took back the place.

I saw a photo a few days ago in the magazine Sowar. It was a collection of photos from the war and it had one of a French mercenary working for the Phalange playing the piano in that very same revolving restaurant at the Holiday Inn. It was strange to look at.

Hezbollah Prisoner Exchange

2008-07-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

Beirut - 16 July 2008

I began my day at four thirty in the morning. The electricity was out at the Orange House, but Poopy and Sour were barking and the two old ladies had emerged from their bedroom, bustling around in preparation for their daily sea-turtle regimen. I sat on the patio and thumbed through Fast Food Nation as the sun began to peek from around the banana leaves and orange trees. “That bird,” she told me, pointing up, “is the one that wakes me up every morning.”

It was five when we walked through their garden, over the disused train tracks, down the dirt road that cut through their orchard and unlocked the gate down to the beach. It was warm, just right, and strange looking crabs scrambled in terror from Poopy’s lazy march down the sand. We scoured one side of the beach, picking up random bits of trash that had washed in from other Mediterranean countries, and stared out at the wonderful mix of turquoise and purple that was slowly giving way to day.

Fadi, the taxi driver from Beirut who was fixing for a journalist from the Frankfurter Allgemeie Zeitung, was there with us. He took out his Beiruti post-war traumatic stress disorder with a short bamboo rod on unlucky crabs. Meanwhile, we dug up turtle nests and fitting them with protective cages to discourage foxes and people.

The eggs were soft, and she only dug up enough to see that they were there before covering the hole up. The whole thing was done quickly enough. I went back to the house and continued to read the good parts of the book. It was peaceful, quiet, for a bit.

At breakfast I had toast with labneh and watched intently as flies feasted on poisoned sugar. I swiveled my head around and looked through the leaves of the trees and spotted UNIFIL helicopters zooming back and forth over the sea. By then, the cars had begun to zoom triumphantly south down the coast road to Naqoura, the border town with Israel where the day’s prisoner swap was happening. I went out to the road and watched as heavy Mercedes zoomed with young men hanging from the windows waving Amal and Hezbollah and SSNP flags, and they waved to my camera as I snapped photos of them.

I left Mansouri with the German and the cabbie and went back north to Beirut. Nobody was on the highway; a lot of people were taking the day off to celebrate.

I got dropped off at the Kuwaiti Embassy by the highway in a part of Beirut I didn’t know and I asked the incredulous embassy guards if they knew where Dahiyeh was. They squinted through the sun at me, listening hard, and after they deciphered what I was trying to say, they gesticulated wildly. Turn right, their hands said.

I walked some more, past the infamous Sabra Palestinian refugee camp, and past a few relics of the 2006 Israeli bombing (emphasis on few). I got a little lost, so I ducked into a juice shop as the electricity flickered out and the blenders sputtered to a halt.

I had a lemon ice slushie, and I sat sipping it and writing down thoughts. A sunglassed man was sitting at a table on the sidewalk, and I could see from inside that he had a thin, curled clear tube leading from under his collar to his ear. I only then realized that I was in the security zone, the area in the southern suburbs where Hezbollah reins supreme, checks passport, grants permission for access, and generally functions as an independent state.

I walked out, careful to check over my shoulder to be sure that he wasn’t slowly tagging along, and walked down toward the route indicated by the man at the embassy. I had my camera backpack and my camera slung over my shoulder, and soon I heard “Psst, psst” coming from a teenager wearing tight black clothes with a walkie talkie sticking out of his pocket. On his brown baseball cap, I could make out the faded image of the fist holding a rifle – the symbol of Hezbollah.

“Soura? Soura?,” he asked, and I knew he was talking about the camera. A few others swarmed up around him and stared at the scene, fingering their walkie-talkies. I had only experienced their tight control of images once in 2007, but then I was with a tour organized by the press office. I tried to explain that I was trying to find Jamya al-Qai’m. He looked at me bewildered. “Party?” I said, trying hard, “celebration? Nasrallah? Woo-hoo!?”

“Ahh, okay,” he said, getting it. He pointed with his walkie-talkie over toward the other side of the street where there stood a black structure that looked like a miniature air traffic control tower. As I walked across the street I looked around and noticed the dozens of men with brown hats and walkie-talkies that were watching me from stores, from balconies, from windows with the curtains suddenly pulled back. They were everywhere.

I stayed calm, knowing that you just need permission to be there, so I took out my passport and my press card and handed it to the man, trying to stay cool.

“American?” he asked, lip curling, as he looked down at my passport. “Yep,” I said, resigned. (I had failed once before in pretending to be Canadian in sticky situations, so I just decided to never do it again.)

“Daily Star?” “Yes, here for the celebrations.”

He took my camera and slung it over his shoulder and went to a telephone and talked quickly to someone. He came back and told me to show him what I had photos of, so I showed him the photos of the beach and the turtle nests. He seemed confused. I said “Sour,” and he relented.

He told me not to take any pictures of the neighborhood. I said I hadn’t, and I wouldn’t. But I told him that I wanted to get photos of the celebrations later in the day. “Okay,” he said, and then he walked away, with my camera over his shoulder. I followed him, a little worried. He brought me to the Hezbollah Media Relations Office, somewhere I had been before.

He pressed the button for the elevator and we stood as it rose up, silently, awkwardly, and he knocked hard on the door and we were let into the office. A stern, teacherly-looking woman looked at me, noticeably unhappy to see someone there. “Yes?”

They took my passport and photocopied it and she told me to go away and come back when the party had started. “Watch TV,” she instructed, “and come back when the helicopters land at Beirut airport.” As she was leaving the room I called out and told her that I had met her before, when my university had visited Dahiyeh last year, and she looked at me suspiciously. She didn’t remember. I asked for directions to Jamya al Qai’m, the mosque where the thing was supposed to happen and she wrote it for me on a piece of paper. She looked happy when I left. She had more important things to attend to - it was a big day.

I went out from the office and was immediately redetained by forgetful Hezbollah security forces, who gesticulated at each other wildly in Arabic as I stood, frustrated, waiting for them to work out the misunderstanding. “I’m going away. Going, away, this way, I swear, no pictures, leaving. Coffee. Where can I have coffee?”

They told me to go that way, and so I went. I sat in a long, handsome restaurant and drank many rounds of Turkish coffee as all the patrons watched Al Manar as the prisoner swap began.

A few of the wealthy people there waved Hezbollah flags as if they were at some sort of unenthusiastic baseball game. I watched as trucks laden with coffins draped in the Lebanese flag crossed the border in front of a bandstand that read, “Freedom is guaranteed by Hassan Nasrallah, Humilitation is guaranteed by Ehud Olmert.” I forgave them for their awkward construction and realized that the group was trying to move its message to people like me. Those who it had not already won over.

The whole entourage was there at Beirut airport to greet the prisoners when they arrived in the afternoon, including a visibly unhappy-to-be-there Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, whose new unity government included the celebrators. He gave the customary three cheek kisses stiffly, with little emotion. President Michel Suleiman, on the other hand, seemed very happy to be there.

Since the prisoners had landed, I left and walked back to where I was going. I’ll cut out all the boring repetition of the various circles I made trying to figure out how to get in. On the way, a boy of maybe ten years asked me “You are American?” and groaning, I said, “yes...”

“You love America?”

I thought to myself “I could explain my sense of nationalism to you, but you would not understand...”

He cut off my inner monologue with “And you love Israel?!”

“No, please, go away,” I said, looking around and seeking to avoid a scene.

I found the press tent eventually. It was a huge warehouse with the stylized portrait of Imad Mugniyeh, the recently assassinated Hezbollah terror mastermind. I was greeted with a smile by the sharply dressed media liaisons who took my bag, my press card, and asked me to sit down. They very quickly ran my name against a database and came back out, holding my press card (on which my name was misspelled) and asked “Are you still a student at Tufts University, or are you a journalist now?”

I gulped. I hadn’t told them anything about anything having to do with Tufts. But I had interviewed a Hezbollah MP in 2007 with a Tufts delegation. They had a good database, and they wanted me to know it.

“I’m still a student, but I’m just working at the Daily Star for the summer.”

“Okay, just one moment,” he said with a smile.

Someone brought me an Iranian-funded bottle of Tanourine mineral water and I sipped, waiting. They came back and tagged my camera and bag with security clearance slips and gave me a press pass which had a specially-designed logo for the event, and a serial number stamped into it with gold foil.

They put me in a minibus and drove us through the layers of roadblocks and directly to the press stand. We passed guns and buns and an “ultra-realistic” paintball course and walked up into the crowd.

The square was packed. The press stand was in the middle, with half of the area already packed with screaming, adoring, chanting fans all posing for the cameras. The tall apartment blocks surrounding were filled with people hanging from their balconies, waving flags. There were many security personnel on every building’s roof... In front of us, the VIP section was set up and largely empty. The stage had an enormous cutout fist punching the air – a new symbol I had seen on a few billboards – and a band singing rousing party music. The scene was truly incredible. There were boom cameras swinging over the scene, broadcasting live on Al Manar. The two jumbotrons were showing the festivities as they unfolded at Beirut airport: the President, Prime Minister, Speaker of the Parliament all lined up, kissing the prisoners as they disembarked in Hezbollah uniforms. President Suleiman gave what, despite my lack of Arabic, was certainly a rousing speech.

The crowd behind me booed and cheered at all the right moments – whenever a member of the March 14th movement appeared on the screen, they all hissed and booed, and whenever anyone allied with Hezbollah came on, they went crazy. Like clockwork.

There were also hundreds upon hundreds of security guards, of different levels. There were some wearing suits and carefully shuffling along the press so we didn’t stray, and there were also crowd managers who wore yellow Hezbollah hats and sunglasses, and told the people to stop littering and things like that.

Three young girls wearing abayas were certainly spying on all the press on stage, covertly filming us as we took photos, typed up stories, and talked on our cell phones. I guess this is how Hezbollah builds its database.

There were a few speeches, and from the jumbotrons I could tell that things were getting closer. The motorcade was making its way from the airport to the square, and off to the side there appeared to be a commotion. Soon afterward, the prisoners themselves burst onto the stage, Samir Kuntar (the most notorious, and perhaps, most guilty) in the lead. They broke through the bars that were in the back of the stage, looking as if they had been practicing the stunt for some time, and not like they had just walked off of a helicopter fresh from thirty years in a foreign prison.

Eventually Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah came on stage, literally wearing his security guards, who were hugging his large frame - likely already clad in many layers of Kevlar. The leader looked triumphant, hugged Kuntar, and began to give a speech. The crowd behind the press stand was euphoric; everyone was standing on their folding chair, and some even fell backward near me in a domino scene, but quickly regained their spot and threw pebbles at the heads of journalists for us to sit down.

This was one of Nasrallah’s first public appearances in many months (I had heard two years, but I’m not sure), but he was gone quickly. Kuntar gave his speech, and by the time he was done, Nasrallah was back on the jumbotron, at his safehouse, giving the rest of his remarks. The whole thing was so incredibly carefully staged.

We left the stage soon after, still in shock at what we had seen, the sounds, the organization of the whole event. As we walked through the dark streets of Dahiyeh and tried to find a taxi, Nasrallah’s speech echoed from every home, store, and passing taxi. It was eerily similar to what being in a totalitarian state must be like when The Leader gives a speech. Everyone was listening.

My thoughts of the event will be posted soon. They are less organized, but that is a rundown of what happened.

2008-07-18T05:02:00.000-07:00

I just decided that it would be the correct thing to do to begin a public blog.

This is just a test post, I will post more, properly, later.

I'm currently in Beirut. A few days ago I went to the Hezbollah victory rally at which the five prisoners released by Israel were wheeled out to a euphoric crowd. Hassan Nasrallah, the party's Secretary General, also made an appearance. I have a lot of thoughts and things about it, but here is a picture for you to mull over while I write up my thoughts.