Yesterday, i had the privilge of visiting Naher Al Bared camp to attend the reception of 3 martyrs, part of the Al Radwan Operation. Entering the camp took some time as we had to pass many Lebanese army checkpoints back to back. I was surprised to find so many people have returned to the bombed out camp. The funeral saw thousands of palestinians gathering to give their goodbyes to the returning heros. The event was an occasion for me to take pictures of the camp, here they are:

“We will return…for our land”

Writings on the wall of the new UN school inside the camp with a bombed truck parked next to it.

“We will rebuild “The Bared” and come back to Palestine”

Changing Vectors………

Reconstruction 101

                  UN Housing Units

                                                            Trying to make a living

That’s the whole room

Pictures from the Funeral

Father of one of the returning Martyrs

Dalal Mughrabi was 19 years old in 1978, when she told he parents she was going to visit friends and left their Beirut apartment for the last time. Her parents, Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, didn’t know that their daughter, a young nurse with coltish looks and good grades, had a secret life. But three days later, they watched on television as an Israeli army officer — future Prime Minister Ehud Barak — shot bullets into Dalal’s already dead body as it lay on a road in Herzilyah, Isarel.

Today, almost every Palestinian knows who Dalal was: a commando commander, the first famous female fighter, an icon of the Palestinian resistance. On that fateful mission in 1978, she led 11 other militants by boat from south Lebanon into northern Israel where they captured a bus and tried to drive it to Tel Aviv and ram it into the Israeli parliament. Trapped by an Israeli army unit led by the young Barak, Dalal declared an independent Palestinian state and fought for some dozen hours before destroying the bus and many of those inside. Dalal’s attack killed some 70 Israelis.

Now, 30 years after her death, Dalal is coming back to Lebanon and hopefully back again to palestine where she will be given a proper berial.

Here’s an article written by Nizar Qabbani following the operation:

Twelve men lead by a woman called Dalal Mughrabi were able to establish Palestine. After the whole world denied their right in establishing their country, they rode a bus from Haifa to Tel Aviv and turned that bus into a temporary capital for the Republic of Palestine, they raised the white, green, red and black flag on the front of the bus. They roared, cried and danced the way student do on school trips.
And when the Zionist forces surrounded them and Helicopters chased them wanting to take it over by force, they blew it and blew themselves with it, and for the first time in the history of revolutions, a communal bus becomes an independent republic with full sovereignty, for 4 hours, exactly how long the Palestinian Republic remained.
The importance is that the republic was founded and its first president was named Dalal Mughrabi. Heroism has no sex. So let the Arab men understand that the glory of life and the glory of death are not reserved for them. And that a woman can love in a nobler way then they do and can have a more glorifying death then they do. And when Dalal Mughrabi decided to practice her real motherhood, she went to Palestine like Mariam Bin Oumran did and there on that good land that gave oath, olives and prophets, she laid her back on a Palm tree and Date fell on her so she ate, drank, slept and dreamt that the birds of Galileh landed on her while she was in Labor.
Even after 500 year, Palestinians will visit the tomb of their mother.
And even after a 1000 year, Arab children will read the following tale:
That on the 11th of march 1978, twelve men and one woman were able to establish the republic of Palestine inside a bus and that republic lasted for 4 hours, doesn’t matter how long it lasted what matters is that it was established.

Nizar Qabbani

Therese Slayman is a young Palestinian singer from Haifa. She’s an independent singer and has not yet been embraced by any mainstream media company. I found out about her after watching “Handala, the icon” a documentary that has her voice singing the following song in the background; I searched around the net and found 5 of her songs. Here’s the most famous song of hers called “law rahal”(If it leaves), here’s the translation of the lyrics

Law Ra7al (If It Leaves)

If my voice leaves yours will stay

My eye looks forward to tomorrow and hearth is with you

If the singer leaves, the songs will stay

Bringing together broken and aching hearths

(Repeats it 4 times)

Yesterday I took sat down alone, maybe for the first time in two months. A lot of things went through my head, things that I never considered before. I was puzzled by the things that changed for me during this period. This all started with tragic events that took place on the 10^th of May, the Halba Massacre. Since then lots has changed, now, I feel obligated to rethink every word I pronounce, to consider every phone call I make, and to plan and re-plan every trip I take. Not many things can compare to the horridness of having no security in your own house.

Sitting alone, I remembered something that totally slipped my mind this entire period; My Guitar Lessons. I had taken some guitar classes trying to put a guitar I bought 5 years ago into good use, but ever since the massacre and the events that followed I totally forgot about these classes. This awakening led me to a very distressing observation. During these two months, I had let go of my interest in Guitars and picked up a new dangerous hobby, Weapons.

With that, I went from attending Guitar lessons and practicing what I learned all day long to mastering the “art” of dismantling an assault rifle and trying to keep it clean and ready at all times.

This reality has forced me to rethink a lot of stuff, and I hope that things will change soon, for the better

This is the second part of an article regarding the Conflict in Darfur, of the series “Understanding Darfur”. It resume a collection of articles i wrote about this conflict.

Darfur (which means the land of the Fur, after the name of one of its largest ethnic groups) is located in the western and northwestern part of Sudan, mostly alongside its borders with Chad and the Central African Republic. Although roughly the size of France, it covers only one fifth of Sudan and a large part of its territory is desert or semi-desert. Above all, it is the poorest part of Sudan and lacks the most basic infrastructure, particularly roads and transport.

Due to its remote location and poverty, Darfur was largely unaffected by the civil war during most of its duration, if only because the fighting took place around the more prosperous parts of central and southern Sudan and around the areas designated as potential oil fields – and there is only one big oil concession in Darfur, located in its south.

Besides, due to its poverty and rural backwardness, the Sudanese regime was never too interested in Darfur. In the absence of any visible local opposition, the regime’s stranglehold over the province was less heavy-handed than in many other parts of the country. The vicious “Islamization” campaigns, for instance, were never seriously enforced. And although all Darfurians are traditionally Muslims, many of them carried on with their own traditional version of Islam, which included the use of locally-brewed beers as a food staple and a relative equality for women. In short, Darfur enjoyed, by and large, a relative autonomy from the vagaries of Khartoum’s politicians – at least until 2001 or so, when the regime began to tighten its grip against an increasingly vocal discontent.

The people originating from Darfur were not designated “Arabic” – meaning that they did not come from the immediate surroundings of the Nile river. Even though they were considered citizens according to the “sharia” (since they are Muslims), they were discriminated against, like all the other non-”Arabic” peoples in Sudan. People from Darfur, for example, hardly stood a chance of making a career in the top spheres of the state. In the army, for example, there were no senior officers originating from Darfur, even though around half of the ranks up through the non-commissioned officer level were from that province.

Given this discrimination, those members of the small Darfurian elite who went to Khartoum to make a career faced an uncomfortable alternative: either they joined the ruling fundamentalist NCP in order to benefit from its network of patronage (which many did) or else they joined the underground opposition in Sudan. Or – as was often the case – they went into exilein the hope that a regime change would offer them better opportunities. Discrimination maintained a smoldering discontent among the elites, which was bound to lead to the emergence of a Darfurian opposition.

This opposition emerged when Darfur found itself involved in two regional wars, which it would never have been sucked into had it not been for external factors.

One of these was the civil war in Chad, where various warlords were fighting for power. The warlord Idriss Deby, who is today Chad’s president and one of France’s closest allies in the region, happened to belong to an ethnic group which was split by the border between Chad and Darfur. As a result, Deby used Darfur as a rear base and a recruitment pool for his troops until, finally, he launched a successful offensive from Darfur which took him to power in 1990. Many Darfurians who had been involved in this military venture went over to Chad with Deby. But they eventually returned to Darfur with increased expectations and the conviction that what was needed to change things there was an armed rebellion.

The other war in which Darfur found itself involved, was of course, Khartoum’s war with the South. This was not because SPLA troops tried to establish themselves in Darfur – which they had no reason to do. Rather it was because throughout the 1990s the Khartoum regime decided to arm certain ethnic groups to use them as auxiliaries to help the army fight the SPLA outside Darfur. Since the regime wanted a low-cost auxiliary force, as a reward it sometimes offered these militiamen the land of a deceased farmer, regardless of the family’s rights on the land. In most cases, the militiamen were just left to use their weapons and get their payment from the population – something which they continued to do when they came back to Darfur.

Some commentators claim, as they have done many times in the past when dealing with African wars, that the conflict in Darfur is ethnic-based or that it is a conflict between “Arab” nomadic groups – who form the so-called “janjaweed” militias, responsible for a large number of the recent massacres – and “African” farmers. In fact, this is nonsense. First, because everyone in Darfur is of African origin, including those described as “ethnic Arabs.” All are part of a population, which, at times nomadic, may have wandered as far as Egypt a very long time ago. And second, because over the past century if not longer, the distinction between the various ethnic groups, on the one hand, and between nomads and farmers, on the other, has become increasingly blurred by intermarriage and economic interdependence. While the Sudanese army certainly tried to fuel ethnic resentment by targeting particular ethnic groups in their recruitment drives, they managed only to recruit the poorest among them, those who had neither family to look after, nor cattle, nor farm – in short, those who had nothing to lose and were desperate enough to see an automatic weapon and a license to kill as a legitimate means of survival.

Having called upon these ad hoc militias in the 1990s in order to fight the SPLA outside Darfur, it was easy for Khartoum to call upon them once again when a new rebellion emerged, this time in Darfur itself. By bombing villages and using the janjaweed to terrorize the populations and force them to flee for their lives, the Sudanese regime hoped to deprive the rebellion of its base of support. In this case, however, the attempt did not work. The conflict went on and the SPLA started revenging every attack.

The crisis in Darfur dragged on for a long time. And yet, from a purely practical point of view, the most immediate needs of the local population could be met relatively easily. Hundreds of thousands of people are desperately hungry. The newly-born, the aged and the sick are dying at an alarming rate. Some reports give figures approaching 2000 deaths per day. Why is food not being provided? The argument was that “bad roads” and the actions of “armed bands” have supposedly prevented food and supplies from reaching the camps. The fact is that food, water, shelter and medical care could easily be brought into the camps by freight aircraft and helicopters. In 2003, in a matter of just a few weeks, the American and British governments transported over 250,000 military personnel, complete with tanks, vehicles, aircraft and an entire “military support industry” into position for the invasion of Iraq. Is it not possible to get a few thousand tons of supplies into Darfur? What the US administration did was that it moved quickly to brand the conflict with titles such as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” in order to use the plight of the Darfur tribes, as an argument for the blockading of the country.

Western governments have donated very little money, and even less has actually been used to relieve the victims of famine and violence in Darfur.

In fact, all this phoney “humanitarian” concern on the part of Western government(mainly US & UK)– who have never hesitated, as in Iraq, to inflict suffering and death when the interests of their “business communities” are at stake – is really about imperialist greed for profits and oil. American imperialism, in particular, is trying to use the plight of the Darfur peoples in order to obtain a trade embargo against Sudan, in order to cut off access to Sudanese oil fields to their main rivals in that industry and in that part of the world. The embargo threat is essentially directed against China, France, India and Malaya, all of which have oil interests in Sudan. At the same time, it is being used as a means of increasing pressure on the Sudanese government and strengthening the military and strategic position of the United States in that part of the world. To the northeast of Sudan lie the Red Sea and the strategically vital oil terminals on Saudi Arabia’s western coastline.

The intense pressure being applied for the imposition of an international embargo against Sudan is proof enough of the completely hypocritical character of the “humanitarian” propaganda of the American administration. The consequences of such an embargo would be to plunge the entire population of Sudan into a situation similar to that which exists in Darfur. Sudan is an extremely backward country. Even without the devastating consequences of an embargo, the vast majority of the people are desperately poor. An international embargo would mean nothing less than mass starvation.

For the meantime, the Darfur crisis will be kept on the boil, as a convenient excuse for sanctions against Sudan and for strengthening the presence of foreign troops in the Darfur region. The “scramble for Africa” by the great powers continues, and the people of Sudan and the rest of the continent are still paying the price, in terms of famine, sickness, and death.

This is the first part of an article regarding the Conflict in Darfur, of the series “Understanding Darfur”. It resume a collection of articles i wrote about this conflict.

Prior to being incorporated into Sudan, Darfur was an independent sultanate for several hundred years. Covering an area of approximately the size of Spain, the region is divided into three federal states: West Darfur, South Darfur, and North Darfur which are coordinated by a Transitional Darfur Regional Authority.

The war in Darfur did not come out of the blue, of course. Although a separate conflict, its roots are nevertheless to be found in the civil war between the northern and southern parts of the country.

Civil war broke out in 1955, just one year before Sudan’s formal independence and has continued ever since, although there was an 11-year interruption from 1972 to 1983. Just after the war resumed, in 1983, the National Islamic Front (the Sudanese offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which later became the National Congress Party – NCP) succeeded in getting the “sharia” law adopted, with the backing of the army. As a result, the civil war has taken the form of a confrontation between an Islamic north and secular forces regrouped in the SPLA (Sudanese People’s Liberation Army), which claims to represent the country’s southern population, which is mostly non-Muslim.

Although Khartoum’s “Islamization” campaign contributed to hardening the SPLA’s support in the South, this civil war was never primarily about that. Rather, it was about the determination of the southerners, who had been kept out of all official positions before independence by the British colonial administration, to secure their share of positions in the institutions of the state – something that the ruling north opposed stubbornly. But this war was not just about the perks connected with state power, it was also – and, in fact, became increasingly – about which of the Sudanese factions was going to get the expected income from the country’s natural resources, particularly the large untapped reserves of oil which had been discovered in various fields mostly located in central and southern Sudan.

Reading through out the history of all the conflicts of the third world, one can come to the conclusion that all conflicts have Imperialist powers backing it. The Darfur conflict is no exception.

In the 1970s, a U.S. giant, Chevron, first discovered oil in Sudan. This turned the country into a potential asset closely watched by Washington. However, or because of this, U.S. leaders found nothing to object to when the religious parties’ influence on the regime began to increase, nor when they took over control in 1983 and imposed the “sharia.” After all, this made Sudan a bulwark against Soviet influence in the region, which was still significant in neighboring Ethiopia.

It took another decade before the U.S. leaders, who had by then embarked on their offensive to isolate Khomeini’s Iranian regime, decided to clamp down on Khartoum by adding Sudan to their list of “terrorist states” and banning American investment in the country. By that time, Chevron had discovered oil in a number of sites, but on too small a scale to justify maintaining their concession in a war zone so it sold its prospecting rights to other consortiums, Since the country’s political instability made the prospect of starting oil production in any significant quantities a distant one anyway.

By the time that the real scale of the oil reserves became apparent, the US oil companies were already on the outside. In 1997, economic sanctions imposed by the USA outlawed American investment in Sudan. Since then, Sudanese oil production has risen to 500,000 barrels per day, and is still on the rise. And with U.S. companies out of the way, the profits and oil resources went to another imperialist power, China.

The emergence of China as a major power on the world arena posed a direct threat to the interests of western imperialism in general and to American imperialism in particular. In 2003, Chinese imports of oil rose by a staggering 40% in relation to the previous year, with oil imports from Sudan accounting for 6% of total oil imports into China. This percentage is likely to grow very rapidly, given the massive investments made by China in the Sudanese oil industry since the 1990s. China’s state-owned oil company, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), owns a 40% share of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC), which controls two of the most important oil fields in the Western Upper Nile Province in Sudan. Starting in mid-2005, the CNPC will begin producing oil in the Melut Basin east of the Nile. Other Chinese companies are also involved in the construction of a 1400 kilometre pipeline running from the Melut Basin to Port Sudan, where China is also building an oil export terminal port. China has become Sudan’s most important trading partner. Significantly, the only oil leases in the Darfur region are held by the CNPC.

This is a general look at the circumstances that led to the conflict in Darfur. In the next article, i’ll discuss the conflict and try to sum up everything i read about it.

I was felt frustrated for not knowing much about Africa, that is why i took the decision to change that fact.

I started searching and reading more about the continent and decided to write a collective essay on each subject i encounter.

So expect articles about Darfur, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Rwanda……

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die -  Jean-Paul Sartre

I cant believe that one year his past already. Haytham Slayman was one of the two Red Cross medics who lost their lives in the Naher Al-Bared battle. He was a great teacher and a greater friend. No investigations into the real circumstances of his death were ever carried out, hope that some day we’ll know the truth

R.I.P.

Terrorismo

No lyrics because its a kind of a remix

A new Video has been showing frequently on the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation(LBC). The video clips plays into the superiority of the “Lebanese race” since not anybody have what it takes to Lebanese and only a few chosen ones to have that privilege. Well maybe I’m exaggerating a bit here, but honestly that’s the impression i get from this video. Check it out, and if you don’t understand Arabic, you can read the translation here

Here’s a translation of the clip i found here.

To Lebanese women and men.

Fate chose you, history challenges you, you sow but don’t reap, everyone is comfortable except you, you sacrifice you don’t find, you bleed but the blood doesnt dry, you die so that you can die again by the same concern,

this is the fate of a Lebanese and its not easy to be Lebanese

it needs an effort not only a human, it needs the capacity and strength not available in anyone else, it needs you to be really in your heart of hearts lebanese, it requires you to crash in a wall and many times in glass, it needs boldness and love of the nation and pride,

its not easy to be lebanese but lebanon is a nation like no other

you tell me you sacrificed years and are tired and what did you get. this is your country, this is ur fate because you are lebanese and its not easy to be Lebanese

maybe because its large and we are still small, maybe its small and those who are envious are many. Maybe because, simply, lebanon raised you and its not easy for one to be deservedly Lebanese

the hands that destroy are many and the Lebanese is the only who builds. Erecting buildings higher from his blood and flesh. With his will and determination, destruction is left ashamed

Not waiting for miracles nor good intentions, alone with your effort you melted the corners. We have representatives by name but you are the only one who questions and is responsible, they are the politics of abuse and impossible logic, (in the background politicians are heard saying you have no need to understand, we will understand for you)

because like your nation,you are alone, because you are lebanese, you have no one but your god, don’t rely on anyone else, be proud of your effort that is beyond human and remember always its not easy for someone to be Lebanese.