From Syria With
Love: The Children of Ghabey
By: Joseph Hitti
President of New
England Americans for Lebanon (NEL)
Boston, Massachusetts. USA
April 10, 2005
Gone are the shabby checkpoints and the haggard Syrian soldiers manning them.
Gone are the green arches made from pine and palm trees downed to raise the
portraits of the Assad dynasty: from Hafez to Basel and Bashar. Gone are the
statues of the dictators erected “in your face” of the Lebanese people, for
nowhere at their checkpoints or the office buildings they confiscated or the
dungeons they ran did Syria's men – over thirty years in their host country –
have the decency to raise a Lebanese flag next to the Syrian flag. What more
did the Lebanese people need to understand that Syria was in Lebanon not to
liberate, protect or defend, but only to subdue, erase, and eliminate by
repression and oppression?
Gone are the drab green Soviet-vintage trucks. Gone are the civilian-dressed
Mukhabaraat men lounging at Beirut Airport and casually checking their
registers for the names of the “wanted” Lebanese who dared a homecoming. Gone
are the cars with shaded windows, the vulgar and sadistic killers, murderers,
kidnappers, hoodlums, vengeful men who hated Lebanon and its people to the
bone. Gone are all these men who were trucked in from remote desert villages of
the Syrian interior, after being brainwashed to hate Lebanon as a renegade and
decadent province that needed to be “re-educated” into the fold of true
Arabism. A strayed province of a once glorious Arab Syria that, truth be told,
never really existed except inside the megalomaniacal minds of the Baathist
criminals whose only source of pride in this world in which they utterly failed
is their delusional nostalgia for a antiquated fantasy. For the Syrian reality
remains a terribly miserable one, and the only escape from the Syrian Gulag is
to feed off the illusions of a past that has been mythified and exaggerated in
logarithmic proportion to the misery of 20th century Syria. They are all
finally going home, to that land beyond the green Lebanon mountain range and
the barren hills of the Anti-Lebanon range where the Syrian desert begins.
To those of my generation, however, the departure of the Syrian men from Lebanon
will never erase the pain, the fear and the hurt of three decades. From the
jewel of the Middle East, resplendent in the glimmer of its joie-de-vivre by
the Mediterranean, where East met West around every street corner and in the
myriad of cafes and restaurants, clubs and theaters, beaches and mountain
retreats, Lebanon was brought down like a calf to the slaughter by the Arabs –
every one of them, the Palestinians, the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, the Libyans
and the Egyptians, the Somalis and the Sudanese, and most of all the Syrians –
because it stood as a thorn in the side of the totalitarian drab of the Arab
World. Lebanon violated every taboo and every norm of that Arab World. It had
Christians, Druze, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Armenians, Shiites who intermarried
and lived as equals side by side next to Sunnis. Worse yet, it had Westerners
living with all those people – not in walled compounds – but anywhere they
wished. It had church bells that tolled next to the Muezzin at the mosque. It
had mini-skirts in the streets and bikinis on the beaches. It had Arak-drinking
Zajal poets dueling with words on television. It had a free press that poked
fun at kings and queens, presidents, sultans and Emirs alike, often with the
pens of the same Arab writers and intellectuals who had escaped from their home
countries to the refuge of Lebanon.
This was too much decadence and diversity to handle for the pan-Arab Baathist
nationalists who preferred homogenized compliant societies to diverse and
rebellious free people. Lebanon had too many colors. It had Arab, French,
American and Lebanese universities. It had a British High School, an American
International College, a secular Lyçée Français and a religious French Jesuit
school, and German, Italian and other schools, all coexisting next to a
plethora of Lebanese private religious and secular schools, as well as a
full-fledged Lebanese public school system. It had veiled women who watched
streakers cross Hamra Street in the early 1970s. It had a red light district
where wealthy Arabs – from the kingdoms and emirates of the Gulf – mingled with
equally drunken sailors from around the world to defuse their repressed
libidos. In the words of a young Kuwaiti student I met once at Brown
University, when Saddam occupied and was brutalizing Kuwait, as I tried to
compare his Kuwait under Saddam to my Lebanon under Hafez, “We went to Lebanon
to f--- your sisters and your mothers...You deserve to be occupied by Syria,
but we do not deserve to be occupied by Iraq”. Such was the gratitude of the
Arabs for a country that they claimed as one of them, often against its own
wishes, a country to which they escaped from the boredom and repression of
their own countries, and then only to turn around and spit at it in hatred.
And so, thirty years ago, as Lebanon was moving forward into the modern world by
keeping its doors open to the world, money, mercenaries, and weapons began
flowing in from Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab World. A rabid
Arab media turned against small Lebanon because it dared to say no to Arafat
and his PLO. Never mind that the Palestinians had been muzzled, massacred, and
locked up in their camps in every other Arab country, and all the Arab rulers
wanted was to contain the Palestinians inside Lebanon for fear of a revolution
at home. And never mind that the Palestinian Cause was merely a commodity in
the market of Arab principles for the dictators to maintain their grip on power
and their boots over their people.
Maggie Abou-Jaoudeh's death in the Spring of 1976 epitomizes what the Arabs
did to Lebanon. I personally witnessed this one of many untold atrocities
during the so-called “civil” war between the Syro-Palestinians and the Lebanese
people, when the war moved from the streets of Beirut along the fortified PLO
camps to the Mountain. Maggie was a 5-year old with curly blond hair who
was killed by a single shell fired by the Syrian paramilitary Al-Saika
organization from the other side of the mountain facing Broumana on a glorious
Spring day of 1976. A single shell. Not a volley. Not a battle. Not an
artillery exchange. Just one mortar shell. There had been no clashes for weeks,
and Spring on the hills was erasing the memory of the misery of that cold
winter we spent in Ghabey near Broumana as refugees from Beirut. It was not hot
enough yet for the cycads to begin their daytime rap on the trunks of the pine
trees, but the air was light and sweet. The war had followed us from Beirut,
and the Battle of the Mountain was underway. But we were enjoying a lull in the
fighting. The children of Ghabey, a small village down the road from Broumana
going south towards Salima and Qornayel, were playing in the village square up
the hill from our house, and I could hear them from my room as I lay on my bed
reading. My mother was having coffee with Sayydeh, Maggie's mother, in the
living room. The voices of the children filled the village.
Then, there was a thud. One mortar thud in the distance. The echo quickly
reverberated across the valley beneath the Knaisseh peak and I knew the mortar
was launched from the other side, as we had grown accustomed to instinctively
listen and gauge the origin and direction of shells. It took several seconds
for the shell to fly overhead, with the nervous roar of its tail vrrrooming
over the house. And it took us a split second to realize that the shell was
going to strike near us. And then the blast. Fifty yards from the house, up the
hill in the middle of the village square where the children were playing. The
children's voices went silent, like a school of sparrows on a tree when their
singing frenzy is disturbed. From the living room, Sayydeh's scream rose in a
fast crescendo, the primal scream of a mother's heart who knew her child had
been harmed...MAAAAGGGIIIEE.... and my hair stood on my neck before I could
jump out of the bed. We all ran up the hill. Everyone was converging on the
square. Maggie's sisters were there. I was one of the first people on the
scene...The crater, and the little grey bodies melded with the blackened rubble
and pavement...the colors of their clothes muted...mixed into the monotone
shade of burned explosives and ravaged asphalt...motionless...just lying
there...I don't recall seeing the faces...just these still little bodies...like
Guernica's children, about whom the song says, “and God filled their bullet
holes with candy”... A single shell fired by the heroes of the Arab Cause on
the children of Ghabey on a Spring afternoon...for no other reason but to kill
the children...for no other reason but to inflict deep pain...For the road to
Palestine and the Golan and all the lost Arab causes, as Syria still wants the
world to believe even today, had to go through every Lebanese village, all the
way from Beit Mellat in the north, through Damour and on to the Shebaa Farms in
the south, and over the dead bodies of Lebanon's children. The death of Maggie
and the children of Ghabey sums up the agony of Lebanon at the hands of the
Arabs. Wanton and barbaric, driven by hatred, jealousy and the frustration at
Arab impotence. And so they chose Lebanon as the substitute enemy because on
the scale of their racist view of the world, Lebanon ranks pretty high in the
degree of its “otherness”. Lebanon was the proxy “Crusader”, the isolationist,
the Arab who does not want to be an Arab, the renegade, the whore who went
astray.
What purpose, I ask today, as we near the thirtieth anniversary of the start of
the Lebanese War in April 13, 1975, has the Lebanese War served the
Arabs and the Palestinian Cause? How can anyone find a shred of credibility in
Hezbollah's claims to resistance and liberation when that organization's
objective has been, and still is, to fight a war that the majority of the
Palestinians themselves abandoned more than 13 years ago in Oslo and
Madrid? I say to Hezbollah, Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, and the
Lebanese should no longer die for Palestine. Like Jordan, the Lebanese people
have chosen a “Lebanon first” policy. The Lebanese of the South have been led
like sheep to the slaughter, first by the PLO between 1970 and 1982 and,
after the PLO was evicted from Lebanon in 1982, by Hezbollah which was
created, armed and financed by Syria and Iran specifically to replace the PLO
as the instrument of destabilization in the hands of the Assad regime.
Hezbollah has never served Lebanon. It has served Iran and Syria, and like these
two countries, Hezbollah has spilled Lebanese blood for the sake of other
causes except the cause of Lebanon. And to disguise its objectives, Hezbollah
has assumed the cloak of a social welfare organization after hijacking those
functions from the Lebanese State to whom it continues to deny access to the
land of the Lebanese south. The Lebanese people have to wake up to the truth
and understand the Big Lie and the sham liberation ideology of Hezbollah that
has been shoved down their throats for close to two decades. Why, I ask
Hezbollah, isn't there a Syrian Hezbollah fighting the Israeli occupation –
worse, the annexation – of the Syrian Golan Heights?
And now, as another April 13, 2005 comes to remind us of when, thirty
years ago, that “Civil War” between the Lebanese and the Palestinians broke
out, now that Lebanon is ending that era of its history, I will never forget
Maggie and the children of Ghabey, and will remind myself that their death, in
its inhumanity, was also the death of my country. If Lebanon is becoming alive
again, it is because all the children of Lebanon who were made to die for many
years, like Maggie and the children of Ghabey, have finally decided to come out
and play on all the village squares of Lebanon, including that big square in
downtown Beirut. They no longer fear that their voices will ever again be
silenced by the shells of hatred or the drab totalitarian regimes of the Arab
World.