http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/B2907905.html
Israeli Purge of Families Accelerates
Drives Out South Lebanese
By
Robert Fisk in Beirut
THE INDEPENDENT, 07/29/1999
You cannot call it "ethnic cleansing" -
not quite - but Israel's campaign of
family expulsions from its occupation
zone in southern Lebanon is now so
rapid that even human rights groups
cannot keep pace with it.
Last week, it was 35-year-old Wafa
Melhem and her baby daughter, Norma. In
January, 24 civilians living in the
mountain town of Chebaa were driven
from their homes by the Israelis.
Hundreds of people - including a baby a
few months old and a man of 99 - have
been thrown off their land in the past
10 years. No wonder yesterday's
excoriating Human Rights Watch report
on expulsions - released simultaneously
in Beirut and Jerusalem - was out of
date before it was published.
Wafa Melhem's husband had been one of
Israel's proxy "South Lebanon Army"
(SLA) militiamen, who had himself been
thrown out of his home five months ago;
like so many of the Israeli-paid,
Israeli-uniformed and Israeli-armed
militia, he was no longer trusted.
The people of Chebaa were dispossessed
- without trial or hearing - after the
murder of a local pro-Israeli militia
commander who was involved in tobacco
smuggling. Indeed, so many of the
expellees in the Human Rights Watch
report are related to defecting SLA men
- or to local civilians who refuse to
serve in Israel's cruel little militia
- that the document is as much an
account of the disintegration of the
SLA as it is of expulsion.
In one area of Lebanon alone - the
Arkoub in the southern Bekaa Valley -
250 residents are believed to have been
driven from their homes and forced
outside Israel's occupation zone in 12
years.
But according to Lebanese government
sources, the total figure could be well
over a thousand in a decade. In some
documented cases, homes were looted,
burned and dynamited Serb-style after
their occupants were dispossessed by
Israel's forces. Yesterday's report
includes pitiful evidence of elderly
couples ordered from their homes by
Israel's surrogates at five-minutes'
notice, and refused permission to take
away any of their belongings.
On 2 October 1998, for example, 80-year
old Mahmoud Ward and his 70-year old
wife, Zahr, were ordered from their
home in Hasbaya after their 37-year-old
Druze son, Raja - a high-ranking SLA
intelligence officer - turned himself
in to the Lebanese authorities.
A year earlier, a married couple and
their son and daughter were expelled
from the village of Markaba because
another son had deserted the SLA and
refused to return to the occupation
zone. A 64-year-old woman and her
57-year-old husband were deported from
Chebaa by Israel in 1998 after their
son - who lived outside the occupation
zone - joined Hizbollah. A woman whose
husband fled the village of Ramieh last
year when he was about to be
interrogated at an SLA intelligence
office was forced to stay in her home
for two years, ostracised by her
neighbours on SLA orders. Then she,
too, was driven out.
If the living are expelled, the dead
have been prevented from returning
home. When Israel visits "collective
punishments" on villages after
anti-Israeli attacks, SLA militiamen
have prevented the bodies of elderly
residents being brought back from
Beirut to their homes for burial. The
remains of 90-year-old Safiya Fouani
were turned back by SLA militiamen at
Beit Yahoun when her funeral cortege
tried to reach the village of Houla.
The human rights group points out that
the expulsions are against
international humanitarian law and
constitute clear breaches of the Geneva
Convention. The group says the new
Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak,
must end the dispossession of Lebanese
civilians at once.
