The Fear of It All
The viper's nest has been breached. Accordingly, out come the vipers. Deadly serpents. Best to leave distance. Caused by a search in a Palestinian refugee camp for suspected bank robbers? A somewhat incautious move, and a surprising one, given the tacit agreement that Lebanon will not 'interfere' with matters in the refugee camps.Mightn't it have been better, far better, for the refugees, wherever they fled to, to have been absorbed, rather than left festering? Mightn't they then have found new homes for themselves, got on with their lives, become citizens of the countries they fled to, contributed to the economic future of the countries and themselves as well? Not, into the future, metamorphize as a truly destabilizing influence on the country's future?
Instead, they were left, deliberately, to fester, to sit broodingly on their memories, to soil any opportunities for leading normal lives with normal expectations of advancement in their economic and social condition. A conspiracy to have frustrated and aggrieved people stew in their misery. For the larger purpose of engaging their anger, their hatred, aiming it toward the interloper state that the assembled armies of the neighbouring countries were incapable of dislodging. They would become a deadly missile in their search to avenge their tribal honour, assuaging their enmity against Israel by the assault of the righteously murderous.
Times change, and those very neighbours who once sought to expunge Israel are now prepared to accommodate its presence - with reservations. But the deadly anger, the determined resistance to the 'occupiers' remains, more steadfast, more incorrigible, more death-determined than ever. Forced by determinate circumstance to live in squalor, scorned by their host country, they represent an ongoing livid reminder of a people engineered by their neighbours to remain a canker in the region. One that threatens their hosts' stability as much as it does that of the original target.
Now it is the Lebanese troops bombarding the al-Qaeda-linked Palestinian Islamist militias which have taken root in the Palestinian refugee camps. The death toll rises gradually but steadily, and there are many civilian casualties since of its very nature a terror group, a guerrilla army, fights among civilians for cover. It stalks the streets and neighbourhoods of the city called a refugee camp, establishing its headquarters in comfortable and costly high-rise apartments, a law unto themselves, feared by Palestinian civilians and Lebanese law-makers alike.
The breakdown of the day's deaths is revealing: 30 Lebanese soldiers, 17 Islamist fighters, 10 Palestinian civilians and one Lebanese civilian. Thirty soldiers as opposed to seventeen terrorists. The regular army doesn't acquit itself very persuasively as a fighting unit against the death-defying but martyrdom-loving Islamists, does it? As for the civilians; they have an unfortunate tendency to get in the way of the important business of warfare, from time to time.
And just to show the government of Lebanon and its timorous armed forces who they're really up against, threats to take the conflict a little closer to 'home', around the port city of Tripoli, make a convincing argument for a truce, if not a permanent stand-off. And there's the additional confusion, in Beirut itself with bombs going off alternately in a Muslim, then a Christian neighbourhood. A promising conflagration, an all-encompassing possibility of extended reach.
Fatah al-Islam stares down the Lebanese army. Why not, when Hezbollah has proven itself successful in doing the very same thing. Will Fatah al-Islam and Hezbollah come to loggerheads, and eventually war on one another, much like Fatah and Hamas? The Sunni against the Shia, as the secular faction detests and wars with the Sunni Islamists. It is too much to hope.
On another day 27 soldiers and 17 gunmen are killed in this conflict taking place in Nahr al-Bared, home to about thirty thousand of Lebanon's estimated four hundred thousand Palestinian refugees. These are not neighbours to be proud of. These are the neighbours from hell. Well, ignore peoples' plight for long enough, confer unter-mensch status on them for a sufficient period of time, and people take umbrage, don't they? They become what you make of them.
Take heart, however; Prime Minister Fouad Siniora insists his government is determined to enforce law and order. And good luck.
Labels: Middle East, Political Realities
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, May 22, 2007
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