FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
CHAMA – The patrols of young people to prevent the Hezbollah guerrillas from shooting against Israel: this is how we save ourselves from bombings and war. The turning point for the Maronite Christians of small town of Rmaich it occurred two days after the attack launched by Hamas against Israeli settlements around Gaza. «It was the evening of October 9th. We knew that the situation would quickly worsen throughout the Southern Lebanon, already our Christian co-religionists were fleeing north, while hundreds of Syrian Sunni refugees sought refuge under our bell towers in the hope that they would act as a shield against Israeli bombs. That’s when we set up patrols to control access to Rmaich”, says 41-year-old Toni Elias, deputy parish priest of this which is one of the three Maronite villages close to the “blue line”, as they call the border line drawn on the ceasefire line which since 1948 has separated southern Lebanon from the northern Galilee defended by barbed wire, minefields and military posts.
We meet him in the area of Chamawhich hosts the headquarters of the Italian contingent of Unifil, the mission of United Nations which has been monitoring this extremely tense and sensitive stage of the Arab-Israeli conflict with different formats since 1978. At the moment there are around 1,100 Alpine troops from the Taurinense brigade on duty: they arrived in February and will remain until August. «In truth, Rmaich is today the only urban settlement among the 107 villages along the Blue Line, almost all Shiite, which has managed to preserve its houses intact and where the inhabitants have remained, despite almost seven months of bombing and daily fighting between Hezbollah and Israeli troops”, continues the priest. The data are reassuring: since last October 8, when Hezbollah opened fire with rockets and anti-tank projectiles in solidarity with Hamas and Israel immediately responded with cannon fire and targeted drone attacks, almost 100 thousand Lebanese civilians have been displaced towards the centers of gathered in Tyre, in the Beqaa valley or welcomed by friends and relatives in the northernmost urban areas between Sidon and Beirut. Of the little more than 10 thousand inhabitants of Rmaich, more than half joined the escape. «The specter of the war of the summer of 2006 dominated, when Israeli cannon fire and tanks had cut off the communication routes to the north. We didn’t want to be trapped.” remember.
That’s when the reaction happened. The citizens who remained in the village reunited and made contact with the Lebanese army, which in turn spoke with Hezbollah to impose a sort of free zone. In truth, very limited, the neighboring Shiite villages of Ayta el Chaeb, Ramyeh, Marwahine to the north and Yaroun to the east are semi-destroyed, with over 50 percent of the homes affected. In Rmaich, however, only one house was partially damaged. «The Israelis saw that no shots were coming from us and stopped shooting at us. So, already in November our people began to return to their homes, today we estimate there are almost 7,000 people”, he says. It hasn’t always gone smoothly, though. Twice Hezbollah approached to take advantage of the relative calm of the village and shoot. And the supervisory committees reacted promptly to drive out the guerrillas. But if the urban area is intact, the cultivated fields and fruit trees remain unreachable. «Israeli phosphorus bombs make the land uncultivable, burn tobacco plantations, olive groves and vegetable gardens. Our economy is on its knees, we estimate that this year we will save less than 30 percent of the harvest”, say the farmers.
The poorly concealed hostility towards Hezbollah also shines through among the families of displaced Muslims hosted by the Lebanese civil protection in schools in Tyre. Everyone is happy to harshly criticize Israeli raids, but if we ask what they think of Hezbollah, the answer is always the same: “We don’t know, we are simple farmers, we don’t talk about politics.” Immediately after the devastation caused by the 2006 war, not only Christians and Sunnis, but also many Shiites loudly called for the disarmament of Hezbollah. And this explains why the head of the armed movement, financed and inspired by Iran, Hassan Nasrallah, has so far preferred to avoid open conflict with Israel: the popularity of his party would remain severely prejudiced. Among the blankets and dishes piled up in one of the classrooms of the local technical institute, 35-year-old Fatima Issa talks about the 35 chickens killed by the bombs with the horse and the 10 sheep: «We lost everything and we don’t know when we will be able to return to our home, which in any case is half burnt.”
