Warriors of God (40 page)

The farce continued into 2001, when someone noticed that the two-inch-high map of Lebanon on the thousand-lira bill placed the Shebaa Farms inside Syria. The revelation sparked a scandal, with a writer, Naji Zeidan, filing a lawsuit against the currency designers. The thousand-lira bill was first issued in 1988 during the term of President Amine Gemayel, a onetime ally of Israel, which only deepened the conspiracy theories. Zeidan's lawyer said that his client claimed the thousand-lira bill was helping the Israelis “because they can say that all
Lebanese are walking around with maps that show the Shebaa Farms are not part of Lebanon.”

The Lebanese were not alone in tripping over their own feet in attempting to convince the UN that the Shebaa Farms rightfully belonged to Lebanon. The Syrians were also in a bind over the sovereignty of the mountainside. Damascus wanted the Shebaa Farms to serve as the new casus belli that would validate Hezbollah's keeping its weapons and continuing to attack Israeli troops after Israel had withdrawn from the rest of south Lebanon. But they could not bring themselves to state to the UN in clear and simple terms that the territory was Lebanese, not Syrian. Syria, even before the advent of the Baathist regime, had never really accepted the notion of Lebanese independence. Lebanon, the Syrians averred, was an aberration, ripped from the motherland at the behest of separatist Maronites and the indulgence of their French colonial patrons.

When the Shebaa Farms issue arose, Larsen traveled to Damascus and met with Bashar al-Assad and Farouq al-Sharaa to hear Syria's view on the sovereignty of the area. In his meeting with Sharaa, Larsen asked the foreign minister, “Is it [the Shebaa Farms] Lebanese or Syrian? I want a straight answer.”

“It's occupied Arab land,” Sharaa said.

“That's not my question. Is it Syrian or Lebanese occupied land?” Larsen asked again.

Sharaa looked hard at Larsen. “It's occupied Arab land,” he repeated.

“That was the best answer I got [from Damascus] at the time,” Larsen recalls.

Sharaa subsequently informed Kofi Annan by telephone that Damascus supported Lebanon's demands for the restoration of all its occupied land, including the Shebaa Farms. But it would take more than a vague assurance over the phone to persuade the UN of the validity of Lebanon's argument for the Farms.

On May 22, Kofi Annan released a report on the implementation of Resolution 425 in which he stated that Israel would be required to withdraw to a line “conforming to the internationally recognized boundaries of Lebanon.” But the Lebanese, unsurprisingly, lost the argument for the
Shebaa Farms, leaving its fate subject to future peace negotiations between Israel and Syria.

Meanwhile, in the south, the Israeli withdrawal had already begun. Trucks crossed the border bringing fresh supplies to Israeli outposts but returned to Israel filled with equipment. By mid-May, several Israeli outposts had been handed over to the SLA. Only some 120 Israeli soldiers were estimated still to be in Lebanon by May 19, half of them in frontline bases and the rest in positions on the border. The Israelis intended that by July 7, the stated deadline for the withdrawal, there would be only a skeleton crew of soldiers left in Lebanon manning positions all but stripped of equipment. The Lebanese would wake up one morning and discover that the last Israelis had slipped away overnight, and that would be that.

The Israeli preparations were evidently under way when I toured the zone's western sector with UN observers in mid-May. From the UN observation post on the border near Markaba village, we watched Israeli engineers reinforcing an outpost just inside Israel with bulldozed earth and concrete T-walls. The huge Israeli position on top of Sheikh Abbad Hill, recognizable by its distinctive twin radio masts, was being dismantled. The outpost straddled the border, and the Israelis were dragging equipment from the Lebanese half and rebuilding the position on the Israeli side of the line. Far below us in a deep wadi, Israeli soldiers milled around a self-propelled 155 mm cannon, one of five established as a temporary artillery post. Some of the soldiers sunbathed on armored personnel carriers, others lounged in the grass outside a row of canvas tents.

However, Hezbollah was not allowing the construction activity to proceed unhindered. As we drove along the border road close to the Israeli position on Sheikh Abbad Hill, a terse alert was broadcast over the UN radio: “Warning, warning, warning. Operational activity is taking place in Irishbatt.”

Several mortar rounds exploded against the Sheikh Abbad outpost, sending plumes of dust and smoke into the sky. We pulled over in a nearby village to sit out the attack. Moments later came the thunderclap of outgoing Israeli artillery fire from a position a few hundred yards away on the other side of the border. “This is typical of what's going on here,” said Major Brendan O'Shea, the Irish operations officer for the UN observers. “They [Hezbollah] are keeping up the pressure.”

Indeed, Hezbollah was determined that Israel would leave under fire. In late April, Hezbollah fighters mounted an audacious operation against the SLA outpost on the edge of Aramta village in the mountainous northern tip of the occupation zone. Shortly after dawn, a Hezbollah man, accompanied by several comrades riding trail bikes, drove a car packed with explosives down the road from Jezzine to Aramta. As the group approached the village, the trail bikers hung back and the car continued up to the outpost. Simultaneously, Hezbollah mortar teams began shelling the outpost and SLA compounds on surrounding mountaintops. With shells exploding nearby, the Hezbollah man, pretending to be a civilian, asked the SLA if he could enter the compound with his car to escape the barrage. The militiamen agreed, and he drove his vehicle in through the front gate. Parking the vehicle, he slipped out the gate, seconds before the car bomb blew up. The huge blast killed three militiamen, wounded another four, and almost completely destroyed the outpost. The SLA abandoned the position and withdrew two miles farther south to Rihan.

Hezbollah stepped up its psychological warfare campaign against the SLA, exploiting their insecurities with bloodcurdling threats. Nasrallah said no mercy should be shown the SLA, who must either “leave with the Jews, turn themselves in, or be killed.”

On May 18, I headed back into the occupation zone for what, as it turned out, would be my last trip there. I was driven to Jezzine, just north of the zone, by Abed Taqqoush, a jovial Beiruti who was one of a breed of taxi drivers who made a living chauffeuring foreign journalists around Lebanon during the civil war years. He was the favorite driver of visiting BBC correspondents, having worked for the British broadcaster for twenty-five years, and had ferried one of my colleagues from
The
Times
of London around Lebanon a few months earlier. He scarcely stopped chatting all the way from Beirut to Jezzine. He was looking forward to the Israelis' leaving, as that meant the BBC and other foreign television crews would be arriving in Lebanon to cover the big story. For Abed, the love of the story was even greater than the promise of lucrative work. Abed dropped me off in Jezzine, where I was to catch a ride with a taxi driver from Marjayoun. Our trip was delayed an hour or so, as Hezbollah had spent the night battering Israeli and SLA positions in Rihan, the frontline village ten miles to the south.

The shelling sputtered out midmorning, and we took advantage of the lull to head south toward Rihan along the same winding road down which Johnny, the SLA militiaman, and his two comrades, Nimr and the terrified Manny, had ridden the last armored personnel carrier from Jezzine almost a year earlier. One of my three fellow passengers in the cab had brought a small round drum with him. He tapped out a rhythm and sang to calm our nerves; Hezbollah's shelling could have resumed at any moment. On the northern edge of Rihan, we lined up to hand our papers to a plainclothes SLA officer who checked off our names in a ledger. As I waited, a militiaman staggered toward me. He looked shell-shocked. His bloodshot eyes bulged from their sockets as he pawed at my shirt and gabbled in broken English, stumbling over the unfamiliar words. His faded olive-green Israeli army uniform fit him like a second skin. He had scribbled a cross in blue ballpoint on his snug but tatty flak jacket, God's protection augmenting man-made Kevlar. Short and squat with an unkempt beard, tangled curly hair, and grimy creases around his eyes, he looked like a militiaman of many years' standing.

But he had had enough. He had spent the night in his outpost in Rihan sheltering while Hezbollah had pounded his compound and the neighboring Israeli position, dropping mortar shells with merciless accuracy onto the reinforced concrete roofs of the bunkers. The stocky militiaman babbled incessantly. He held my arm and tugged it for emphasis,
imploring me to do something to help him. I was British, yes? Couldn't I ask the British embassy to get him a passport? Was there much work in London? His plainclothes colleague writing our names in the ledger smirked but said nothing. My fellow passengers from the taxi looked embarrassed and turned away.

Gradually his tone changed, his desperation turning into a jumbled stream of bitterness and despair. Why wouldn't the Lebanese government grant amnesty to the SLA? All they were doing was protecting themselves, their families and homes. The SLA were patriots, so why were they being treated like traitors? At last he fell silent and let go of my arm. With his AK-47 rifle dangling loosely from his hand, the broken militiaman wandered away up the road.

His despair was emblematic of the disintegration of morale and manpower afflicting the SLA. Hezbollah's threats, the Lebanese government's refusal to offer amnesty, and Israel's silence on its plans to protect the SLA had further aggravated the already deep-rooted paranoia that existed within the militia.

By early 2000, Shia militiamen were deserting their positions, slipping out of the zone to hand themselves over to the Lebanese army. Hezbollah had begun snatching militiamen from inside the zone, echoing the tactic of a year earlier in the weeks before the SLA withdrawal from Jezzine. Some Christian villagers had already left south Lebanon, and many others were making plans to flee. The exodus of nervous residents had sparked a lucrative spin-off business in some Christian villages. Elias, a resident of Qlaya who had left the SLA a few months earlier, said he had paid $2,000 for a fake Lebanese passport. His service in the SLA prevented him from obtaining a genuine passport. Another $1,000 secured his airfare from Israel to Canada. If the forged travel documents were discovered on arrival in Canada, he would plead political asylum.

Elias articulated a widely held belief in the zone: that Hezbollah men would steal into their homes at night and slaughter them in their beds after the Israelis had gone. His wife muttered darkly that she had heard many of the SLA men who surrendered the previous year during the
pullout from Jezzine had been secretly executed in prison. “But they have hushed it up,” she whispered.

While some militiamen were packing their bags and making plans to be well away by the time Israel withdrew, others struck a tone of defiance, proclaiming their determination to continue defending their villages and homes against the “outsiders” of Hezbollah.

A month earlier, Antoine Lahd, the SLA commander who spent much of his time in Paris, vowed to continue fighting Hezbollah after the Israelis had gone. “We will prefer to commit suicide as in Masada, rather than become refugees,” he said, referring to the Jewish Zealots defending the Masada fortress in
A.D.
70 who chose to die by their own hand rather than surrender to the Roman legions.

Such bravado was echoed by several SLA intelligence officers sipping tiny cups of Turkish coffee in a café in Qlaya. “We will fight until the end,” said one, to mutters of approval from his comrades. “If Hezbollah attacks civilians, we will shoot all over the south. They fire one rocket at civilians and we will fire twenty rockets at them.”

These men were among the originals, former Lebanese soldiers who returned to their homes in Qlaya in 1975 when the army split apart, and formed the nucleus of Saad Haddad's Army of Free Lebanon (later the SLA). Now gray-haired and paunchy, they were contemplating a return to the past, reviving the old Haddad enclave of the late 1970s and resurrecting the village militias in Christian- and Druze-populated areas of the border district. Already new SLA checkpoints were sprouting up on the edges of Christian villages. Civilians were buying up weapons including rifles, heavy machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades and were being taught how to fire them at the SLA's training camp in Majidiyah at the foot of the Shebaa Farms and in woods near the Druze town of Hasbaya.

“We have relied on our brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins in the SLA to defend us, but now the time has come where we have to defend ourselves,” said Bassam, a civilian from Qlaya in his midthirties. Displaying his recent purchases on the floor of his small home, Bassam said that he had spent $430 on an M-16 fitted with an M-203 grenade
launcher and another $220 on ammunition for the rifle, flares, a helmet, and a backpack with magazine pouches. “I asked myself, should I spend the money on toys for my children, food for my family, or to buy guns?” he said. “I decided to buy guns so that I can defend my family.”

The contradictory fear and defiance of the militiamen underlined the stark fact that as this vicious little war finally drew to a close, the real losers were the SLA. True, the Israelis would suffer a certain amount of humiliation at being chased out of Lebanon by the Shia warriors of Hezbollah; but the prospects facing the SLA were bleak. They could escape Lebanon for an uncertain future of exile in Israel or elsewhere, banished from their homeland possibly forever; die fighting Hezbollah in a futile and bloody last gesture of defiance; or surrender themselves to the authorities in Beirut and pray for leniency.

Through necessity rather than design, they had entered an uneasy alliance with Israel a quarter century earlier to confront the menace of the Palestinian militants then threatening their villages. But as the years passed, they had found themselves sucked ever deeper into a vortex of collaboration, their fate becoming shackled to Israel's fortunes in Lebanon. They were the unwitting victims of tragic circumstance, but now they were about to pay the inevitable price.