15 years after war, children’s fates uncertain
BEIRUT — On this morning, as on every morning since Oct. 17, 1985,
Audette Salem cleaned the rooms of her son and daughter. She left his
razor, toothbrush, and comb as they were on the day her children were
abducted from the streets of Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war.
She fiddled with her daughter’s makeup and straightened her bed. She
dusted the three guitars, the papers still on their desks, and the pack
that holds a 20-year-old cigarette, the artifacts of two lives
interrupted.
”Everything is there as they left it,” she said. ”I haven’t changed a
thing, nothing at all. It’s all still there.”
At 70, Salem is quiet but determined, clinging to memories in a country
that prefers to forget.
In the heart of downtown Beirut, ravaged by a brutal 15-year civil war,
then rebuilt into a graceful, if somewhat soulless, urban hub, Salem joins
other women every day in a protest demanding to know the fate of their
children. Many believe they languish in jails in neighboring Syria. Others
are not sure. Behind them, their children’s faces stare from pictures
tacked to billboards, blank faces with generation-old haircuts, the dates
of their disappearances reading like a war memorial yet to be built.
The protest by Salem and dozens of other mothers serves as a stark
reminder, organizers say, that Lebanese society has yet to confront, much
less resolve: the legacy of the most cataclysmic event in its modern
history — the 1975-90 civil war. Fifteen years later, that conflict is
still shrouded in silence. Under a 1991 amnesty law, all but a handful of
killings were placed beyond prosecution. History textbooks address nothing
more recent than 1975. And many factional warlords serve in government,
their portraits staring down on streets they once wrecked.
”When you discuss the truth and you know the truth — who was
responsible, who prolonged the war — then you can have true
reconciliation. The door to bring in a new generation is to find out what
happened in Lebanon,” said Ghazi Aad, who heads Support of Lebanese in
Detention and Exile, the group that has led the protest since April 11 in
downtown Beirut. ”Without that, you’re just sweeping the dust under the
rug. You cannot reconcile when you don’t know what happened.”
The protest’s longevity reflects the changes unleashed by the departure
of Syrian troops last spring after a 29-year presence. It is a sign of new
transparency in public discourse as Lebanon — still deeply fractured
along the lines of its Christian and Muslim sects — struggles to craft an
alternative to the old Syrian order. Under the former system, Syria
exercised the last word on virtually everything in the country, and its
security services, along with their Lebanese allies, enforced compliance
through arrests, intimidation, and patronage. But now, long-discouraged
subjects — including the perhaps more than 600 Lebanese taken to Syrian
jails — are now being aired as calls for accountability have mounted.
At the protest in Jibran Khalil Jibran Park, staffed 24 hours a day,
women wear name tags with their relatives’ pictures next to the words
”How long?” In a tent where the women sleep, a poster reads, ”She’s
waited for him for 20 years.” Next to the green canvas tent are the
relatives’ pictures, some so faded by time as to be barely
recognizable.
”It’s in us to hope,” Salem said, sitting on a plastic chair next to
the tent, sipping bitter coffee. ”That is what a mother does.”
Her children, Richard and Christine, were abducted on a road in West
Beirut, probably at a checkpoint, as they drove home in an orange
Their mother had prepared a dish of rice and a stew of peas, carrots, and
potatoes. She waited, then contacted friends, who visited hospitals,
restaurants, political parties, and others with connections. Then she kept
waiting.
Twenty years later, last spring, a former Iraqi intelligence officer
released from a Syrian prison visited the Beirut protest. He gazed at the
pictures, Salem said, then stopped at a photo of Richard. He had seen him
in 1992 in Tadmur, one of Syria’s worst jails.
”Hope is durable,” Aad said. ”It’s so durable because they don’t have
an answer.”
At the start of the protest, Aad had the names of 280 people who had
disappeared and were perhaps in Syrian jails. Since then, more families
have come forward, bringing the number to 643. Hundreds of other cases
remain unresolved by families who believe their relatives were detained by
Israeli or allied forces in southern Lebanon during its occupation, which
ended in 2000. (Only one Lebanese detainee officially remains in an
Israeli prison.) Both numbers pale before the 17,000 still unaccounted for
from the civil war itself. But for Aad and others, the detainees in Syria,
mostly unacknowledged by its government, remain the most pressing.
”There are people who are still alive in Syria,” he said. ”It’s a
matter of the living.”
Some of the answers may rest beneath the deep brown soil of Majdal
Anjar, where Syria once maintained a de facto headquarters for its
presence in eastern Lebanon. There, last month, a shallow grave was
unearthed on a hill overlooking the Bekaa Valley, uncovering as many as 30
corpses. Some of the bodies were exhumed from two sites near a yellow
swing set, green slide, and abandoned mosque, still had traces of clothing
and military uniforms.
The town’s mayor, Shaaban Ajami, said he had known about the grave
since 1999, ”but they told me, ‘Don’t say a word.’ “
”There are still more bodies,” Ajami said, nodding his head.
Amnesty International criticized the exhumation as unprofessional. On a
visit after the search was finished, a reporter for the Daily Star, an
English-language newspaper in Lebanon, found bones strewn across the
hilltop. Some activists suspect the government is wary of making too large
an issue of it — willing to unearth the grave to perhaps put more
pressure on Syria, but not to risk furthering demands by victims’ families
to unearth civil war-era mass graves that still litter the country.
”You can’t just open this mass grave and say that’s it,” said Habib
Nassar, a human rights lawyer in Beirut. ”Are you ready to open all the
mass graves? You can’t make a distinction between the Syrians and all the
other factions involved in the war.”
”I think now they’ll even forget Anjar,” he added. ”They’re afraid
they’ll open a Pandora’s box.”
For a country of 3.8 million, Lebanon’s civil war exacted a
breathtaking toll. Official figures put the dead at more than 144,000 and
the wounded at more than 184,000. Nearly 13,000 were abducted, and more
than 17,000 remain missing. The task of addressing the war’s legacy has
fallen to a handful of intellectuals. A conference, ”Memory for the
Future,” was organized in 2001. But its proposals — a war memorial, for
instance — are overshadowed by what some activists call officially
sanctioned amnesia.
The amnesty law meant that none of the warlords were prosecuted, save
Samir Geagea, a Christian leader opposed to Syria at a time when it
controlled the country’s politics. (He was released in July after 11 years
in prison.) Government efforts have been directed more at closing cases by
declaring the missing dead than in determining their whereabouts. One
committee formed in 2001 to look into the missing never released a report;
its chairman said he was pressured by pro-Syrian officials. A
Syrian-Lebanese committee was formed last year, charged with resolving the
fate of the missing in each country’s jails, but it has yet to issue any
findings.
”The reason why the problem was never solved was precisely because the
perpetrators have been in power since the war and Syria was in control of
the country. It was not in their interest to find a solution,” Nassar
said.
”All the factions, without exception, committed atrocities,” he
added.
”They are united in their atrocities.”
