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Sami Hermez on the current crisis in Lebanon by José Antonio Gutiérrez
The following is an interview held with Sami Hermez on the 6th of June on
the current crisis in Lebanon, that started on the 20th of May with the
fighting between Fath al-Islam and the Lebanese Army. This has meant a
major crisis for the Palestinian refugees, thousands of them being further
displaced, many of them killed and wounded. ---- Sami is a Lebanese
anthropologist who has been active in providing support and relief to
Palestinian and Lebanese refugees. As well, he writes frequently to
Electronic Lebanon taking a brave political stance in defense of
Palestinians and against the US project for the region. .1. You have been
in the refugee camps in Lebanon... could you please tell us what is the
humanitarian situation of the refugees from Nahr-al-Bared?

The displaced refugees, if that term makes sense, are scattered across
several camps in the country, with most in the Baddawi camp in the North
as well as Chatilla and Burj el Barajneh in Beirut. This week has seen
also a wave of refugees coming from the Ein el-Hilweh camp in the South
where there has been low-level fighting for the last few days.

The Palestinian camps were in a bad condition to begin with. In Baddawi
camp, the population has doubled and water and electricity have become
scarce. In this situation with the increased density disease is likely to
spread. Already we have seen many cases of lice infections. The displaced
are in need of chronic disease medicines as often they leave their houses
without anything but the clothes on their back and without prescriptions.
Of course, they have no money and have lost their jobs, so effectively
they become totally dependent on humanitarian organizations to feed,
clothe and shelter them. In addition to this, we are now seeing another
crisis at work. The original inhabitants of the Baddawi camp are unable to
go to work for fear of being stopped and harassed at army checkpoints.
There have been a number of cases of Palestinians (one who is a friend of
mine) being arbitrarily stopped, arrested for a few hours or days, and in
some cases beaten, with one case of actual torture reported. These stories
have been spreading and scaring people so that they are not leaving the
camp as much.

The situation in the camps is controllable thus far but if the conflict
continues for long it will turn into a humanitarian disaster not to
mention the political disaster of these people feeling displaced for the
2nd, 3rd or 4rth time.

2. Being such a desperate situation, does these people have the hope of
going back home soon? What's the situation in Nahr-al-Bared right now?

They want to return as soon as possible but in most cases these people
will be returning to destroyed homes. The question will be whether or not
they will return anyway, like the people of the South last summer, and
whether they will camp outside their homes till they repair them. The
networks available to the Palestinian refugees are not as strong as those
of the people in the South, where people stayed in the homes of relatives
or in neighboring villages, so it will remain to be seen how this will
unfold. Because the camp is a contained and confined environment, unlike
the South, it will be difficult to find places to set up tents near the
destruction, or to find alternate places to live within the camp. Judging
from both TV images and what I saw with my own eyes, the damage is
pretty
extensive and it is likely that all parts of the camp have been affected.

As it stands, the prospects are bleak. Instead of these people going back
home we are already starting to hear gun fights break out in the Ein el
Hilweh camp in the South. So things seem like they are spreading and it is
anyone's guess when people will return. According to some displaced
people, they want to just storm the camp and return whether they can or
not. But this is more of an emotional reaction than anything they are
really planning.

The situation in Nahr el-Bared is disastrous at the moment. There are
between 5-11 thousand people still in the camp and at least 160 mentally
and physically handicapped people as well as many senior citizens. There
is only one doctor in the camp who is not even a surgeon; there are many
injured and sick who are not able to get out and the smell of the dead is
overpowering. People are managing to use electric generators to power
their homes thus far. On top of this, there is a media blackout so we are
unable to determine the number of dead civilians.

3. Certainly the military response of the Lebanese government seems to be
completely out of proportions. Why did you think this reaction was so?

I think there are many conspiracies being thrown around, none of them
confirmed till now, as to why things are happening the way they are. What
we do know is that the army responded to an attack, basically a massacre,
on its troops, where something like 17 reservist soldiers were killed. And
the army responded like a little kid lashing out with full force and not
knowing what is in front of him. It went after Fateh el-Islam almost
immediately and obviously with no plan as to an exit strategy or how they
could fight a militant group in a refugee camp setting. The army's
reaction is quite similar to the reaction of the US' war on Afghanistan
after September 11, except with even less preparation, and also similar to
Israel's attack on Lebanon in the summer where the response to the
capture
of two Israeli soldiers was met with a full scale war.

I think the army felt that it needed to show its strength, and when it saw
the Lebanese people united in support, I believe it took this as a
greenlight that public opinion was giving them to react in any way
possible to eliminate, what people here are calling, a phenomenon. Not to
go off on a tangent, but this word "Thahira" or phenomenon, is interesting
because it foretells the fact that it will be impossible to know the truth
about this group: who armed them, who financed them, how they arrived,
are
they really the guilty ones? Calling them a phenomenon allows us to just
blow them out of the sky and not bother with questions of accountability
and justice. They are a phenomenon, something from out of this world and
thus not worthy of our usual ways of dealing with people.

So with the people united behind the army, and with fresh fears from the
1970s when the army collapsed because it did not have political support or
know how to deal with the political crises of the time, the army is
seeing, this time, a chance to assert its strength. Everyone sees this
institution as the last resort for holding the country together, and if it
fails militias will come out to do the army's job for it. The militias
will be far more gruesome and devastating. So the army has the greenlight.
What no one realizes is that the army is not trained or equipped to fight
such a battle; the soldiers are falling like flies, and the fighting may
spread to other camps. If the fighting spreads the army will be stretched
thin. In the end, it may not be able to win a battle it got involved in,
proving the weakness of the army. A political solution will have to be
forced on the situation, which is something we could have started with and
spared the lives of both civilians and soldiers alike. A political
solution, of course, that would lead to the disarmament of this
"phenomenon."

4. Being such an obviously criminal and heavy-handed response, why has
the
international community, with all of the Lebanese political spectrum
(including the opposition), sided so monolithically behind Siniora?

People have not sided behind Siniora. The opposition is not siding with
him. Everyone is siding with the army (which is actually not seen as a pro
or anti-Siniora entity) because at a time like this the patriotism card
gets played against you if you take another position. All the news media
and groups like Hizballah, do not want to be accused of being
anti-nationalist at a time like this. Because the Lebanese army is weak,
and because of the memories of the civil war that saw the army collapse,
many Lebanese, the media included, do not want to be seen as outliers in
the nationalist chorus that is being sung in the country.

In a recent action we did protesting the army's behavior, the
indiscriminate killing of civilians, and the media censorship, we were
accused by the army of not being Lebanese and not being nationalist. The
army told us that anyone who protests against their army is basically an
enemy of the nation. So you see, the nationalist card is a very easy one
to play to silence dissent. But we will refuse to remain silent and watch
the Palestinians take the fall for the internal conflicts of the Lebanese.

So this is in terms of why the Lebanese political spectrum has come out in
support of the army. They cannot take what they fear is an
anti-nationalist position, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah spoke out in favor of
not destroying the camp and he was accused of siding with Fateh el-Islam,
and his comments were not nearly as strong as they should have been, so
even if politicians wanted to take a stand they are told they cannot. On
top of this, no one feels like they want to commit political suicide by
standing with the Palestinians. There is a racist attitude towards
Palestinians because they are poor refugees who are perceived as
outsiders. Also, the army was attacked and the army is weak, so the belief
is that it needs everyone's support and that it had no other option so
everyone must stand by it.

As for the international community, I am not surprised. As I wrote in a
previous article, Secretary Rice's position is very consistent. She is
standing with an army against a disenfranchised civilian population being
bombed, she did so in the summer against Lebanon. The international
community would like to see the Arabs do Israel's dirty work for Israel
and for them by taking care of the Palestinian refugee question. I think
they were hoping that this conflict would eliminate the camp and the
Palestinians would either become confined to fewer camps, be massacred
along with the camp infrastructure, or spread out among other Arab
countries. Another thought is that they were hoping this conflict would
lead to the disarming of the Palestinians in Lebanon and then towards
resolving their humanitarian situation by naturalizing them and forcing
them to give up their right of return to Palestine. So these are some
reasons for their support of the army's heavy-handed response. The short
answer is that it is a consistent one where the international community
stands with whichever state is fighting terrorist groups, regardless of
the methods the state uses and how many civilians it kills, starves or
displaces in the process.

5. And what has been the response of the Palestinian authorities?

The Palestinian authorities are fragmented in their response. They have
all come out against Fateh el-Islam but do not have one unified position
on how they would solve the situation. Nor were they given enough time to
try and solve the situation peacefully. The army should have put heavy
pressure on the Palestinian authorities to hand over Fateh-el-Islam before
attacking the group on the first day. The Palestinian Fateh wanted to go
into the camp and help the army, but Hamas was against this because they
fear a Palestinian-Palestinian battle in the camps. The Palestinian
leadership does not reflect the opinions of people on the ground, with the
leader of Fateh being himself a criminal charged on several counts.

6. Do you think there's any clear link between the offensive of the
Israeli State against Gaza and the offensive against Nahr-al-Bared?
Somehow they seem to have been perfectly coordinated...

On one hand the two are connected, but I do not think it is at the level
of the Lebanese coordinating anything with Israel directly but more at the
level of an American-Israeli agenda for the Palestinians in the region.
There are many conspiracies out there, one is that they want to clear the
Nahr el-Bared camp to make room for a NATO or US base, another is that
they would get the camps to flare up and this would give political and
military will to rid the camps of weapons instead of taking the diplomatic
route to do so. Another idea is that this fighting will lead to some sort
of settlement of the Palestinians in Lebanon and giving them full
naturalization for letting go of their right to return. The connection is
that there is a policy to defeat the Palestinian people and any hope they
have for resisting their unjust situation. In this sense, the
American-Israeli agenda is to put full force and pressure to break the
spirit of these people.

I think the Gaza offensive has been going on for sometime, since last
summer, so I wouldn't see them as perfectly coordinated. I see all this in
a larger picture of how the US and Israel want to reshape the demographics
of the Palestinians in the region and how they want to break the spirit of
any resistance. So this is not only a connection with Gaza but also a
connection with last summer's war and the heavy aid and sponsorship by
the
US government of the Lebanese government in the last 6 months. The US
and
Israel are trying to find different ways to weaken Hizballah. They hoped
to get it embroiled in a civil war in January, but that did not work. Now
they are hoping it will get involved in a fight with Fateh-el-Islam. The
US is also trying to shift focus away from Iraq and prove that the Middle
East needs its presence to maintain security.

7. What do you think has been the role of the US government in this
conflict? Certainly from a while, they have been arming the government
-actually, since January, when the protests of the opposition have been
threatening Siniora's government...

The US government is pushing its policy in Lebanon. It is standing 100%
behind the current government despite the fact that it is not behaving
democratically. The Internal Security Forces is largely seen as a tool of
the US and this is actually why there is a lot of support for the army
from the opposition. The army is seen as being more neutral, perhaps
leaning towards the opposition more. As I said above, the US government
has been trying to push its agenda both politically and economically. It
sees an ally in the current Lebanese government and is trying to make
Lebanon a more solid partner in the war on terror, hoping this will be a
way to defeat Hizballah. Of course, it is trying to force its way in
against the will of the majority of the people.

The battles we are fighting against each other are battles we are fighting
on behalf of the US government. So I think it would make more sense to
ask
what the role of the Lebanese government is in this conflict, because in
all honesty, the perception is that the US government is the puppet
master. We must be very clear: it is a US government agenda that is being
pushed with the collaboration of the Lebanese government and not a
Lebanese agenda with the help of the US.

As for US weapons, people are afraid that these weapons will not find
their way to the army but into the hands of different militias. Just as
aid never reached the displaced but instead, through middlemen, made it
into the market where groups, like the one I worked with, purchased it in
bulk, so it is possible that the US arms follow this same channel; not
unlikely if the US is intent on lighting up the Lebanese stage.

8. Some people say that Fatah al-Islam has been armed and encouraged
by
the Hariri's as a way to counter-balance Hizbullah. Is there any substance
to such claims?

There is some substance to this claim in the sense that some of its
members were released two years ago during elections to vote for Hariri.
Unfortunately, most of the other information is still at the level of
conspiracy because there is no investigation, no accountability, and no
transparency within government. If Hariri was involved then the
government
has a strong incentive not to get this out because his party largely
controls the government. The opposition has not pushed this claim into the
public's eye enough, probably fearing that it would result in internal
fighting. Many people here are starting to believe this claim but there
has still been no proof despite people from Fateh el-Islam being arrested.

There are also reports, coming from one of today's local Arabic papers,
that Jund el Sham, which has been clashing with the army in the South in
the Ein el-Hilweh camp, has been funded by Lebanese politicians to
counter
Hizballah and other groups. So this idea of Sunni fanatic militant groups
being funded by Lebanese politicians, especially Hariri, is not limited to
the North or Fateh el-Islam.

9. What repercussions do you think the actions in Nahr-al-Bared will have
on the rest of Lebanon? Do you think there's any chance of the conflict
spreading to other refugee camps? Do you think the government,
encouraged
by the way they are getting away with this, can clamp down on the
opposition?

The conflict has already spread to the Ein el Hilweh camp in the South.
The fighting there is still largely under control but I see it easily
exploding. Fateh el-Islam has threatened that it is not limited to Nahr
el-Bared and if things continue Lebanon will see the true meaning of who
this group is. I doubt this is just threats judging from the fact that
there is already a Jund el-Sham in Ein el-Hilweh holding a similar
philosophy. I see the army as being caught up in some conspiracy of trying
to stretch it thin so it is not able to control the internal
Lebanese-Lebanese situation. What will happen is that the internal
security forces will take control and as I said earlier, they are loyal to
one party (Hariri and the US).

All this may not "clamp down" on the opposition, but it might either put
pressure on it or force it to retaliate, something the government tried to
do in January but failed. Hizballah has spoken up in the last two weeks
but it has largely remained silent and allowed the army to do its work as
it sees fit. It will remain to be seen how Hizballah handles the next
weeks to come to really get a true sense of where the country is going.

Today, there were several Israeli airforce incursions over Lebanese land.
So with all this one has to consider Israeli's next move and how it will
capitalize on the weaknesses in the country and gaps left open. It is not
far removed that Israel would seize this opportunity to attack Hizballah
when it is busy trying to manage the internal situation.

10. In what way do you think the events in Lebanon reflect growing
internal tensions or the regional scenario?

Lebanon is too small with no resources and no industry to demand this
much
attention from the international community or the regional powers. This
makes it clear that the struggles here reflect larger tensions. If the US
can neutralize Lebanon and make it a friendly ally then it would have
effectively surrounded Syria. It will also have substituted Syrian
influence in the country for American influence and from here can work on
securing Israel's borders. The current situation is an attempt to
neutralize one of the strongest and longest lasting resistance movements
against Israel in the Middle East. The Lebanese are fed up of fighting
this battle alone and the US is trying to capitalize on these feelings.
What the Lebanese must understand is that their struggle is a just one and
that it remains for other Arab countries to learn from the persistence of
the Lebanese and Palestinians in Lebanon rather than following the
Jordanian or Egyptian model of becoming a Zionist Arab state in order to
receive conditional loans and economic benefits.

On top of this, if the US can gain a strong foothold in Lebanon then it
can control Hizballah and therefore put further pressure on Iran on the
nuclear question and its collaboration in Iraq. Lebanon is not the goal,
it is just the tool to exert pressure on Iran and other Arab countries. It
is the goal of Israel and the US to silence all forms of resistance, and
this is what they are doing to the Hamas government through their
offensive in Gaza; in Lebanon, their strategy, after the failure this
summer, is to turn the Lebanese against each other.

11. Thanks very much for your time... do you have a last thing to say? How
can people get involved and support the Palestinian refugees?

If people would like to get involved they can visit the following website:
www.nahrelbaredcampaign.org where they can get news and donate
money to
the relief effort in the country. I would urge people when speaking to
connect the issues between Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon so that we may
see
this conflict in the greater picture. There is an effort to turn Lebanese
society into a military state, which is increasingly succeeding. As many
have learned in America, all you need to do is create a threat and that
makes it easier to sacrifice freedom for security. People need to realize
that what is happening in Lebanon with the militarization is similar to
what is happening in the US and what is already complete in Israel. This
is not the way to build a healthy democratic society capable of resisting
Israel's unjust apartheid policies and occupation.