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LEBANON: Trials of Former Israeli Allies Divide the Lebanese
By Kim Ghattas
BEIRUT (IPS)- Mohammed Hmayyed's brother, a Hizbollah guerrilla, died while fighting against the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon.
He is regarded as a hero and a martyr. He succeeded in killing one Israeli soldier in an operation before loosing his own life.
Mohammed's cousin, Suheil Hmayyed, will soon stand trial in the military court in Beirut for being a member of Israel's proxy militia - the South Lebanon Army.
Their respective brothers, Hussein and Hatem, are sitting in Meis el Jebel in the former occupied zone, in Hussein's house, beneath a portrait of the Hizbollah martyr, discussing Suheil's trial.
This is one of many cases that shows the complexity of the situation that has developed in south Lebanon in the aftermath of the Israeli withdrawal on May 24.
The withdrawal brought to an end 22 years of occupation and unveiled a tightly knit, and almost inextricable, canvas of relationships between villagers under and around the occupied area.
During the occupation, around 850 square kilometres out of 10,452 of Lebanese territory were under Israeli control. The civil war was also ripping and dividing the rest of Lebanon. However the division with the south became more pronounced when the civil war ended in 1990 and the south remained under Israeli and SLA control.
"The withdrawal from south Lebanon marks the fall of the last civil war rampart," said Simon Karam, former Lebanon ambassador to the US and now head of a law firm.
Karam took in charge the defence of SLA members who surrendered last year June when the militia withdrew from one enclave.
And with that rampart fallen, the opportunity for nation-wide reconciliation has arisen. But the trials and the different reactions they trigger are still standing in the way.
Around 2.000 Lebanese turned themselves in following the Israeli withdrawal.
Trials are taking place three times a week, the accused are often tried in groups. Until now, 404 sentences have been issued, ranging between six months and five years, with most around one year.
"The hurried trials can in no way help national reconciliation" in Lebanon, said the human rights group, Amnesty International in a report.
The organisation said, "the accused have effectively just seven minutes to defend themselves and that time does not allow them to prove their innocence."
Patriarchs, priests and mainly Christian politicians have asked that the prisoners be treated leniently, hoping this will encourage 6,000 Lebanese who fled to Israel, most of them Christians, to come back to Lebanon.
In 1991, a general amnesty law was passed for all war crimes but the SLA cannot benefit from it since it continued carrying the arms after that date.
But for people like Sawsan Kteish, justice should be done. She was a prisoner of the infamous SLA controlled Khiam prison for four months until liberation came on May 23.
Like all prisoners, she went through a month of interrogation, during which one of the interrogators smashed her nose. She tells of hours of endless and daily questioning, humiliations and anguish.
"Every one of them should be judged according to what he did, some of them were forced into the SLA," she says.
Bilal Nabaa was held by the SLA for a year and a half after being caught passing information to the Lebanese Army. He visits Sawsan in her hospital room. With him in the room, Sawsan hardens her stance and says that all of the SLA should be
punished harshly.
"When we were in our cells, with the other girls, we used to dream about the day we would be able to take our revenge on them, do to them what they did to us," she says.
But here she seems unable to make the difference between those who were directly responsible for her imprisonment and the larger body of the SLA.
Most of the SLA members, who were high or mid way up in the chain of management, and are responsible for war crimes have fled to Israel. They have been scared away by Hizbollah's statements of merciless punishments, but are also aware that if they are spared by the guerrilla, they will be tried by the Lebanese judiciary.
Most of those who left for Israel had already been tried in absentia. Some of them have been sentenced to death.
Most of those who turned themselves in say they were forced into the SLA, like Hatem's brother, Suheil, who was taken out of school at the age of 15 and drafted into the militia, under threat that his family would be expelled from the area. Others are being tried for having entered the 'enemy territory', Israel.
In many cases, the court also banned the prisoners from returning to their villages for up to five years after they serve their prison term. This was seen as a step to avoid any reprisals from villagers who might want to vent personal anger.
For Hussein Hmayyed, the martyr's brother, the trials should be fair but he seems to doubt people's willingness to take justice in their own hands if they are not satisfied with the sentences.
"In the end everybody wants peace, we want quiet, we want our children to live in better conditions than we did," he said.
Hizbollah had initially warned that if the sentences were not harsh enough, no one could guarantee that villagers would not try to take revenge on the people they deem responsible for their hardships under the occupation.
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