Deadly
harvest:
The Lebanese
fields sown with cluster bombs
By Patrick
Cockburn
in Nabatiyeh
(September 18 2006)
[Lebanese
villagers must risk
death in fields 'flooded' with more than a million Israeli cluster
bombs - or
leave crops to rot
.]
The
war in Lebanon
has not ended. Every day, some of the million bomblets which were fired
by
Israeli artillery during the last three days of the conflict kill four
people
in southern Lebanon
and wound many more.
The
casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers
begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches
hide
bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon's
farmers are caught in a
deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which
they
depend to rot in the fields.
In
a coma in a hospital bed in Nabatiyeh lies Hussein Ali Ahmad, a
70-year-old man from the village
of Yohmor. He was
pruning
an orange tree outside his house last week when he dislodged a bomblet;
it
exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel into his brain, lungs and kidneys.
"I
know he can hear me because he squeezes my hand when I talk to him,"
said
his daughter, Suwad, as she sat beside her father's bed in the hospital.
At
least 83 people have been killed by cluster munitions since the
ceasefire, according to independent monitors.
Some
Israeli officers are protesting at the use of cluster bombs, each
containing 644 small but lethal bomblets, against civilian targets in Lebanon.
A
commander in the MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) unit told the
Israeli
daily Haaretz that the army had fired 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying
1.2
million bomblets over houses and fields. "In Lebanon,
we covered entire villages
with cluster bombs," he said. "What we did there was crazy and
monstrous." What makes the cluster bombs so dangerous is that 30 per
cent
of the bomblets do not detonate on impact. They can lie for years -
often
difficult to see because of their small size, on roofs, in gardens, in
trees,
beside roads or in rubbish - waiting to explode when disturbed.
In
Nabatiyeh, the modern 100-bed government hospital has received 19
victims of cluster bombs since the end of the war. As we arrived, a new
patient, Ahmad Sabah, a laboratory technician at the hospital, was
being rushed
into the emergency room. A burly man of 45, he was unconscious on a
stretcher.
Earlier in the morning, he had gone up to the flat roof of his house to
check
the water tank. While there, he must have touched a pile of logs he was
keeping
for winter fires. Unknown to him, a bomblet had fallen into the
woodpile a
month earlier. The logs shielded him from the full force of the blast,
but when
we saw him, doctors were still trying to find out the extent of his
injuries.
"For
us, the war is still going on, though there was a cease-fire
on 14 August," said Dr Hassan Wazni, the director of the hospital.
"If the cluster bombs had all exploded at the time they landed, it
would
not be so bad, but they are still killing and maiming people."
The
bomblets may be small, but they explode with devastating force. On
the morning of the ceasefire, Hadi Hatab, an 11-year old boy, was
brought dying
to the hospital. "He must have been holding the bomb close to him,"
Dr Wazni said. "It took off his hands and legs and the lower part of
his
body."
We
went to Yohmor to find where Hussein Ali Ahmad had received his
terrible wounds while pruning his orange tree. The village is at the
end of a
broken road, six miles south of Nabatiyeh, and is overlooked by the
ruins of Beaufort
Castle, a crusader
fortress on a ridge
above the deep valley along which the Litani river runs.
Israeli
bombs and shells have turned about a third of the houses in
Yohmor into concrete sandwiches, one floor falling on top of another
under the
impact of explosions. Some families camp in the ruins. Villagers said
that they
were most worried by the cluster bombs still infesting their gardens,
roofs and
fruit trees. In the village street, were the white vehicles of the
Manchester-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), whose teams are trying to
clear
the bomblets.
It
is not an easy job. Whenever members of one of the MAG teams finds
and removes a bomblet, they put a stick, painted red on top and then
yellow, in
the ground. There are so many of these sticks that it looks as if some
sinister
plant had taken root and is flourishing in the village.
"The
cluster bombs all landed in the last days of the war,"
said Nuhar Hejazi, a surprisingly cheerful 65-year-old woman. "There
were
35 on the roof of our house and 200 in our garden so we can't visit
our olive trees."
People in Yohmor depend on their olive trees and the harvest should
begin now
before the rains, but the trees are still full of bomblets. "My husband
and I make 20 cans of oil a year which we need to sell," Mrs Hejazi
says.
"Now we don't know what to do." The sheer number of the bomblets
makes it almost impossible to remove them all.
Frederic
Gras, a de-mining expert formerly in the French navy, who is
leading the MAG teams in Yohmor, says: "In the area north of the Litani
river, you have three or four people being killed every day by cluster
bombs.
The Israeli army knows that 30 per cent of them do not explode at the
time they
are fired so they become anti-personnel mines."
Why
did the Israeli army do it? The number of cluster bombs fired must
have been greater than 1.2 million because, in addition to those fired
in
rockets, many more were fired in 155mm artillery shells. One Israeli
gunner
said he had been told to "flood" the area at which they were firing
but was given no specific targets. M. Gras, who personally defuses 160
to 180
bomblets a day, says this is the first time he seen cluster bombs used
against
heavily populated villages.
An
editorial in Haaretz said that the mass use of this weapon by the
Israeli Defence Forces was a desperate last-minute attempt to stop
Hizbollah's
rocket fire into northern Israel.
Whatever the reason for the bombardment, the villagers in south Lebanon
will
suffer death and injury from cluster bombs as they pick their olives
and
oranges for years to come.