Serene Assir watches as thousands of forcibly expelled Lebanese return home and aid agencies are finally given clearance to work The morning of 14 August, watchful of whether the UN-set ceasefire deadline would hold, Lebanon got an early start. Naturally, the 970,000 who had been forcibly expelled from their homes under the weight of Israeli bombing were even more excited to see the sun rise. That was the morning many of them started to make their way home following a month-long rampage that killed more than 1,100 Lebanese, the overwhelming majority civilians and one-third children. By noon, the number of people in Sanayieh Park in Beirut, where hundreds of the displaced had sought refuge from the bombs under an open sky, had been halved. The next day, Sanayieh was empty, while the Batrakiye School was quiet as the last remaining families awaited transport to take them and the few belongings they had back home. By contrast, the Dahiye, or Beirut's southern suburb, now resembles the active, vibrant district it was just a month ago -- bombed and collapsed buildings notwithstanding. Just a week ago, it had been almost emptied of its residents, bar some peripheral areas where sleeping at night had become a virtual impossibility as apartment blocks invariably shook violently with the strength of nearby explosions. Even Haret Hreik, the neighbourhood that constituted Hizbullah's heartland in Beirut, quickly sprang back to life, residents revisiting their bombed homes in the hope of rescuing some of their possessions, or in order to start cleaning up. Other luckier residents found their buildings still standing, perhaps requiring minor repairs. Roads down to south and east Lebanon, where bombing was fiercest, were packed with traffic as people who had fled towards Beirut, the mountains and cities in the north of the country drove back to their home towns and villages from areas that had been spared the casual, hi-tech mass destruction Israel wrought for a month. Routes into Lebanon from Syria, where over 200,000 Lebanese had sought refuge, were equally packed, and humanitarian agencies rushed to provide returnees with basic commodities with which they could hope to restart their wrecked lives. Coupled with an intense longing to leave the temporary shelters they had found, displaced Lebanese now espoused a real sense of hope that they might just be able to rebuild from scratch. "Though I have at least found safety away from home through this terrible time, now I am so glad to be back," said Zakiya, a resident of Haret Hreik, who took shelter with her children in a Beirut school. Such was the enthusiasm in Haret Hreik, for instance, that shop owners were busy cleaning up the rubble and broken glass on the pavements beyond their shop fronts. Others, however, were not as lucky as they approached their buildings only to find them bombed out. Staring at a mountain of rubble he and his family once called home, Hassan covered his nose and mouth with his right hand to keep out the thick dust that had descended over Haret Hreik like a fog. "I wonder if I can find any of our things if I climb up there?" he asked. "Thank God my family is alright though, that is the most important thing for me." Still others were hit harder. "I don't know how long it will take for us to get home," said Hassan from Ayta As-Shaab, a village overlooking the Blue Line from a hill. Villages on the border are still deemed no-go areas, as Israel has warned that moving vehicles in areas south of the Litani River will still be targeted and also because of unexploded ordnance littering border areas. "Anyhow, even when it becomes a little safer, I know for certain that our village has been flattened. I also hear my father might have been martyred," Hassan said, holding back his tears. It remains to be seen when, if ever, Israel will let residents of these areas -- so often crudely described as a "buffer zone" for Israel -- live in peace. Throughout the month, the work of international aid and non- governmental agencies was physically obstructed by immense security risks in areas where help was most needed, while Israel openly forbade humanitarian aid convoys from entering the south without express permission. Minutes into the truce, however, the trucks started to rush in along the same roads those expelled from their land had taken weeks before, while UN mobile units were set up along major routes across the country. It appears tragic that it took as long as it did for humanitarian aid to reach the south in safety while the United States, Israel's partner in that very "special relationship", obstructed all political solutions to the crisis. Only when Israel's well-documented military losses became too large to sustain did a political route become viable. Only then did helping Lebanon's civilians become truly possible. One UN official, speaking on condition of anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the issue, told Al-Ahram Weekly : "In any humanitarian crisis, bar those borne of natural disasters, it is impossible to envisage a real humanitarian solution if a political one does not precede it." Echoing those words, Ibtisam said before departing from Beirut for her village in the south: "No one can really help us. However much aid is distributed, the fact remains that we are being attacked. Even now that there is a ceasefire -- and God only knows how long that will last -- there is no security for us in the south. We are and will always be targets, so long as Israel has designs on our land." Indeed, while a ceasefire is currently in place, there remains the very real problem of the ongoing military occupation of Lebanon, which prevents the normalisation of commercial activity and thus renders the country almost wholly reliant on international aid. "There continues to be a military occupation in Lebanon," said professor of international law Shafi Al-Masri. "The air and sea siege cannot be legitimised at all. This is another means of aggression and must end immediately." In a situation as cynical as that which has affected the whole of Lebanon through the entirety of this rampage, which by any standards of international human rights and humanitarian law constituted a series of grave breaches, it has proved hard to proffer real hope to civilians affected by seeing others die or be injured, or by losing their homes and their livelihoods. In a rush to save Lebanon from total disaster, highly capable local non- governmental organisations actively worked, and continue to do so, to help out as much as possible. Among them were agencies such as the Lebanese Red Cross and Samidoun, a non-political youth-run group that took charge of taking care of the displaced in Sanayieh. Also active have been political movements and parties, ranging from the Communist Party to Hizbullah, and the Future Movement to Amal. "In every conflict situation, you see party members participating in relief efforts," said the UN official. In Lebanon, the virtual division of towns and cities according to party, and more importantly sect, must be borne in mind. Many incidents of sectarian problems inside schools-cum- shelters were reported, including that of displaced people being threatened with expulsion if they did not show more respect to the party hosting them. While funding the humanitarian effort for the displaced came either from the state -- thus in principle was non-political -- or from beyond Lebanon's borders, as well as from individuals, there is little doubt that the war has only catalysed an existing process of political capitalisation on life. And what better result for Israel from the destruction than that, amid dark messages indirectly promoting sectarianism by calling repeatedly -- in leaflets, interventions into local television channels, and pre-recorded phone calls -- on the Lebanese to get rid of Hizbullah? Perhaps easier said than done, it is crucial that during this new social upheaval the Lebanese are careful not to fall into Israel's insidious trap of turning one against the other, but rather move forward together in the profound and well-earned enthusiasm they have espoused, though inevitably marred by loss and sadness.
