I have been asked by Fiona to write a blog. I am a bit surprised by this as this is meant to be her blog but she says she has not done anything very interesting in the last week or so. Well hopefully she will at some point write up yesterday's mountain expedition north of Beirut visiting obscure Roman temples and then the source of the river Adonis (as it was known once), with lots of weird villages full of hard-line Christians etc. And a very very big bag of onions! But I will leave that to her.
No she wants me to write about my trip down to the south last week with work - I went with my team, Paul from north Lebanon and Wissam whose father was once the mayor of Bint Jbail -- so she is Shia from the south. Elie the driver from the Bekaa Valley completed the diverse geographical mix, as well as me from south Devon! Purpose of the visit was to have a look at reconstruction effort and gauge what needs to be done, plus a few meetings with local businesspeople.
We set off from Beirut at 8 (but it was 8.20 by the time everyone got their act together..!) and headed south down the coastal highway. This takes you through the airport area then on to the motorway south. As you get to the turnings we used to take to the Chouf Mountains and Jezzine you realise that the turnings are not there any more as the bridges over the motorway have been destroyed and the rubble now cleared. Almost as if they were never there...weird. Then on to Jiyeh where the oil storage tanks were bombed - under repair now but the oil has destroyed delicate ecosystems and at least one nature reserve (Palm Islands off Tripoli), and every time the wind gets up more comes ashore. Obviously a Hizbullah target a government controlled heavy diesel storage facility - not much good for anything except running the power station...
Anyway you get to the entrance to Sidon and it is a spaghetti junction of destroyed flyovers so you have to go down to the old coast road - takes about 20 minutes longer. Then south of Sidon the road is destroyed at Zahrani and in a couple of other places so you just divert on and off as necessary. The good news is that most of the key bridges are already under repair by private individuals or companies (like the Hariri family or Byblos Bank) so they should be fixed within a few months. But if Hizbullah were ever driving rockets down this coastal road (which is Christian and Sunni generally so it is highly unlikely they would have been able to) they would have been inconvenienced but not delayed untowardly by the blowing up of the bridges.
From Tyre we turned south-east and you begin to see destroyed buildings - although strangely some villages are untouched then you come to one or two which are trashed, then finally you reach the town of Bint Jbail which has had thousands of houses destroyed and it reminded me of the final battle scene from Saving Private Ryan. There was even a bridge with blown up trucks on it which had not been cleared yet. But there was already rebuilding going on. The Qataris are sponsoring the rebuild and have cleared most of the rubble so there are wide empty spaces where there were buildings, and in some areas people are busy fixing holes and preparing to put up shelters. The schools have been the top priority (back to school tomorrow) and already they are largely fixed although there was one with no walls at one end and you could see the chairs and desks lined up. We dropped in on Head of the Municipality and the Bank Manager. Not often you meet a bank manager worried about bad debts as 14 of his debtors had been killed! And the main concern is depopulation - Bint Jbail used to have 60,000 citizens, then the first Israeli invasion in 1978 caused a mass immigration - 25,000 set up in Dearborne in Michigan! And it has just got worse. It was down to somewhere between 7 and 10,000 on the eve of war (and that includes people who return for the summer), but now there are only 3000 people there. The young people (like Wiss) are in Beirut or elsewhere and say there is nothing for them there. It would be a brave investor to set up a factory there but that is what it needs - real employment opportunities.
Wissam's house was fine once her dad fixed the shrapnel holes in the walls and mended the broken windows - you could see a crater 10 yards away where a smallish bomb had exploded - they were very lucky.
We went up to Maroun el Ras - which was more like Dresden in 1945 - completely wrecked and you could see Israeli paint marks on the wall in Hebrew warning about snipers etc. And from there you could overlook the 'promised land' - Israeli buses and cars driving around without a care in the world. Very strange indeed.
Anyway we then took the long and winding road to Naqqoura which is on the coast south of Tyre. Many destroyed houses and shops, but the thing I noticed most was the UNIFIL troops and Lebanese army - they really are there in force and looked organised and quite mean. We passed from the French sector to the Italian sector and Wiss began practising her Italian and managed to extract a Ciao from one Italian soldier - she got very excited at that! We stopped at a Lebanese army post which was right on the border - they had arrived 5 days before and were still building their barracks. The battalion commander was from Paul's town in the north and presented us with apples from Ehden and fruit juice. They did not look very ready to fight off an Israeli assault as they only have AK-47s but hopefully they won't need to - but they seemed determined to do a good job.
From Naqoura we went up the bumpiest road in Lebanon - luckily we had not had lunch yet - and then arrived at the Mine Clearance HQ of the UN in the city. Cental Tyre itself is not damaged as such, although one or two buildings have been destroyed and there is more widespread damage on the outskirts. The ruins are OK, although some Roman frescoes collapsed from a tomb - shaken off by the explosions - irreplaceable.
Met up with the British guy in charge of mine clearance. He is someone we have known for a while and was due to leave Lebanon in August for the sunny climes of Afghanistan. But he is now here for a bit longer. Both him and Dalia his Lebanese press person looked exhausted. But they have done fantastic work and all the roads are clear and now they are trying to do the main agricultural land (olives and tobacco are the main crops). They have cleared well over 30,000 cluster bombs (just 1 million to go!) - but lots of newly trained teams are now going into the field so it should speed up - the UAE are funding the whole operation until next June - so well done them. Give these mine clearance people MBEs and lots of other medals... We are going to try to get to Tyre for a few drinks in the next few weeks. Must admit the sea looked lovely - turquoise and clean and it was 26 degrees, so will bring my swimmers next time.
Back to Beirut by around 7 so quite a long day but very interesting and sobering. It is strange to be going out in Beirut where things seem largely normal, while only 40 miles south people are sitting in the ruins of their homes.
Back to work tomorrow - had a big lunch today at a mega-rich businessman's house, which was good - but it would be nice to keep Sundays and work separate in future! Weather turned cooler today and cloudy so that was a nice change and a harbinger of the rainy winter, so lets hope that the southern reconstruction gets going properly in the next few weeks. Bye for now
