Below is a message freelance journalist Jon Elmer sent out, reproduced here with his permission.
Hi folks, just wrapping up my work in Lebanon and getting a flight from Beirut to Amman soon. I will then go on to Palestine on Sunday. Hopefully it'll be Christmas in Gaza for me - the dream of every red-blooded Canadian, no?
Hezbollah is remarkably disciplined and extremely well organized and I was continually shocked by how well they went about their security. Sometimes it felt like they knew what I had for lunch before I ordered. For example, in the early days of my time here, in the southern suburb [read: massive slum, base of political operations for the group] of Beirut, Tarek and I were looking for the main office of the party which every single person in the slum knew. We'd ask people on the street for directions and they'd say "hmm, I don't know.." and we'd say thanks and walk on, only to have someone on a motorbike ride up and say "walk straight and someone will meet you" and sure enough three blocks later a man stepped out of the shadows in a busy street and said "go left, they'll meet you" and then he'd step back and this is how it went. This was not on deserted streets; it was packed, and people just went about their business paying almost no attention to the cracker in their midst, so confident of the apparatus. This is the same neighbourhood where foreign journalists and their CIA posers were kidnapped and held for years on end and often killed during the 1980s, so it was fascinating to see the developments of the organization. "Security is good, thanks to God and Hezbollah," is a refrain that fills my notebooks.
I arrived in Beirut on the first day of the massive and unprecedented demonstrations against the comprador government of Fuad Siniora, whose political programme reads rote from the Washington Consensus of globalization and whose military objectives match almost perfectly with Israel's. Yes, Condi loves him. During the war this summer, the Lebanese army didn't lift a rifle and there was one infamous story of them serving tea to Israeli forces in south Lebanon without firing a shot. There were signs at the demo that read "no more tea parties". [The government has paid a total of $0 in compensation since the war ended - Hezbollah, about $500 million.] To this end, when you see me ask me about my day with, or rather in, Lebanese intelligence; it is a paradigmatic tale.
The protests, surely led by Hezbollah but broadly based in participation, reached an unreal climax on 7 December 2006 when about two million people hit the streets on a Sunday afternoon, in a country of less than four million total - in other words, popular demonstrations that literally rival the electoral participation in Canada or the US. This is what one Reuters reporter said in print: "As a Reuters correspondent, I have covered countless demonstrations in numerous countries, from small-scale sit-ins to anti-globalisation riots, from rallies against war to union shutdowns. But Sunday's event was perhaps the most vibrant, colourful and animated mass mobilisation I have yet seen. Banging drums, whirling flags, chanting slogans, Hezbollah's army of supporters streamed into Beirut for hours on end, emptying villages and city slums recently devastated by Israeli jets in a 34-day war that targeted Shi'ite strongholds... Shi'ite girls wearing Iranian-style chadors, which hid all but their faces behind black cloth, pressed alongside made-up Christian teenagers, wearing skimpy t-shirts and jeans. Whatever their faith or faction, almost every protester clutched at least one red and white Lebanese flag, emblazoned with the national symbol of the green cedar tree -- never has the journalistic cliché of a forest of flags rung more true."
On another day, I watched Nasrallah speak with about 800,000 people and I have to say, it was one of the most powerful political moments [one hour and fifteen minutes] of my life. The man is a massive force, who is trusted and respected by even his most bitter rivals, including Israelis who overwhelmingly polled him more trustworthy than their leaders. His son was killed fighting Israel some years ago and he refused to treat the situation any differently than any other martyr - something that time and again people bring up. It is reflected in the chant "Abu Hadi" [father of Hadi], which is astonishing to hear a million people chant in unison.
I also spent a few weeks in the south, researching the devastation and reconstruction led by Hezbollah, as well as the UN mission clearing the more than one million cluster bombs that Israel fired in the last 48 hours of the war, after the ceasefire had been arranged. I saw the little bomblets - the size of a baseball or smaller in people's garages, gardens, front yards, olive groves, ditches.. and on and on. There have been at least 186 casualties since the war ended. The bomblets saturate the entire south. Israel won't give the maps or strike data, mostly because if they did, according to the UN, it would show that they fired them in the last two days and rained them down on schools and hospitals and villages. Cluster bombs are anti-tank weapons and it is uncontroversially a war crime to shower civilians with them. The bomblets have little white streamers on them, so it makes the crime so much richer that the bomblets are not only in people's kitchens and gardens, but also hanging at eye-level from their trees and bushes and olive groves. Do you remember why Israel waged this war? - apparently because two soldiers were taken prisoner along the border.
Hezbollah is a guerrilla army and political and social party, so there is no "sign" of them in the south, instead [virtually] everyone is Hezbollah - "even the rocks," said one cadre with a smile. The massacre of 30 people, mostly children, in Qana [which I visited and in which I spoke with family] was an attack on families whose fathers and brothers were on the frontlines. Olmert was asked in a Der Spiegel interview last week in Germany about the civilian toll, especially children and he replied simply "they were all Hezbollah." If you are sick, he is right.
Everyone tells stories of the Israeli tanks and armoured bulldozers that littered the south after they got smacked by Hezbollah, upside down, on their side, in pieces, being dragged back to Israel by three tanks with helicopter gunship support. Israelis talk about it too - they say there were more than 150 of them in such a state. Heads are rolling in Israel over what they clearly call a victory for Hezbollah. People here quote Israeli defence minister Amir Peretz saying that Israel can defeat any army in the world in conventional war, but Hezbollah is untouchable - and they often make the gesture of trying to pick up soup with their fingers. Anyway, such is the nature of popular movements. And it has been fascinating to see the military victory coupled with strictly nonviolent political movement as well as the enormous social apparatus of hospitals, welfare and reconstruction.
I could go on and on, but I will leave it here for now and hopefully my essays and photographs will give you the meat and bones underneath this skin of a description. They will follow soon. I am heading for Gaza to do a little bit of work about the "civil war", which is really a perfectly logical fight between a democratically elected government and a CIA-backed group of thugs trying to overthrow them, while the people almost literally starve to death and no one seems to give a $@!%. Or else they support it, like Canada - which I hear is having such a challenging time identifying genocide [what we did to the natives is not, but what Hamas does inside it's sealed ghettoed refugee camps with no weapons is].
By the way, look what Tarek and I constructed - jonelmer.ca. I will be putting a photoblog there in the next couple of days, so you can follow my efforts in Palestine through that. The site isn't going to be a "blog" as such, and it will be basically for you folks and to act as an online resume for my photography, which I really needed. In other words, it won't be widely distributed and I won't be opining on it about life day by day.
Love, Jon