The southern suburbs are utterly destroyed; comprehensively; devastatingly. A face-mask for half my visit given to me by a roving Hizbollah member didn’t protect me from the dust; my throat still hadn’t recovered days later. This is the environment where people are spending their time, searching through the rubble to recover any possessions possible or beginning to clear rubble, shielding themselves with facemasks, newspapers or sleeves or not at all.
There are so many images from the three hours I spent there: teddy-bears face down, one shoe half-buried, schoolbooks, videos all amongst the tables and computers and cookers and all buried in mounds and mountains of rubble. It was heartbreaking to see people’s destroyed lives on show, and that was even before the stories.
I saw a few people on a balcony that wasn't black, in a building that wasn't skew-wiff, and talked a little, and asked if they were still living there - "look round the back" was the answer - and the back was fully ripped off, like a back-to-front doll's house. A man said "take the photo the other way, my factory's behind you".I turn and see a huge pile of rubbish. 400 families depended on that factory which made clothes: “Look at those children’s clothes – they weren’t for Hizbollah” the owner said, and continued, “it doesn't really matter, what really matters is our victory". This was to be repeated many times, perhaps made easier to believe by Hizbollah’s commitment to reimbursing and rebuilding shattered lives.
Hizbollah’s PR operation in Beirut is sophisticated, especially when compared to the sledgehammer tactics of flags and demonstrations in Damascus. There are posters up all over the southern suburbs, but none refer to Hizbollah by name or symbol, except possibly for the oblique “the divine victory” at the foot of each. These are in both English and Arabic, and fascinatingly not one mentions Israel – it is all about America. “Made in the USA”; “Trademark: America”; “The New Middle Beast” – with graphic photos. This was echoed in conversations, where people mentioned American aggression, American atrocities: “this is what America did to us, but we achieved victory and that's what matters”. Israel presumably is seen as the tool being used to carry out America’s middle-eastern policy.
Hizbollah members themselves are friendly and helpful, explaining exactly why I couldn’t take photos of certain buildings (Hizbollah teams working in them to defuse unexploded cluster bombs), giving out newspapers and posters for free as well as facemasks, answering questions, cheerfully getting off a moped so I could take a photo of it (decorated with Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader).
Beyond the southern suburbs, Beirut was disturbingly empty - not surprising after so many Lebanese and expatriates have left, but sad nevertheless. True, many bars are opening up now, and it was great to see people dressed up and drinking in the cool urban places - but dislocating to think about the bomb damage a couple of kilometres away.
What is difficult to get across in any medium is the sheer force, rather than the scale, of such a bombardment. I wasn’t expecting to see craters metres deep with ten-storey apartment blocks reduced to rubble inside them – the effect of one “smart” bomb; nor concrete roofs on the floor at an angle above a mountain of rubble.
On the new road between Beirut and Damascus, one side of a major bridge has been blown onto the mountain below. There are cars blown off roads and bridges into the dirt and even planted into concrete; you have to hope that the people got out first but you know many didn't. A small bridge across a small river has been cynically destroyed (according to our taxi-driver) in a way that makes it too awkward to mend: “This is precision bombing”.
Picture via jeffm29 flickR page.
