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Break the Silence: the Human Face of a Nation under Attack

Note.

This article was written on an individual basis by Miriam Azar, a half Lebanese half finish girl who is actually living in Geneva.

In her article, Miriam express the incomprehension of our nation with regard to the silence of the International community toward all crimes Israel is committing against Lebanese people. As Miriam said, I also think that it is huge time to smash down the wall of silence which is smashing the dream of All the Lebanese nation…

Also, I would like to thank Miriam for her valuable article, and look forward to hosting her in Lebanon…the Country that will shine for ever!

Break the Silence: the Human Face of a Nation under Attack

We must speak out: stop the killing; stop the carnage of civilians. The main victims are the vulnerable: children, women, elderly and the disabled. The excessive bombardment of innocent civilians in their homes, villages, towns and cities, and in their vehicles fleeing from the indiscriminate air strikes, must be stopped. There is no justification for destroying a nation, who never wanted, nor started this war. This is Lebanon: a country that has flourished and bled in turn; tragically used to fight proxy wars; a battleground for political games; a land whose geographical location has been both its blessing and its curse. Yet again, the nation is paying the price of being Lebanese, while the Government that was not aware of and did not adopt Hizbollah’s operation of kidnapping the two Israeli soldiers, pleas for a cease-fire and for humanitarian assistance to be allowed into the country. In the words of the Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, echoed by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Israel has “torn the country to shreds”. The attacks on civilians must be stopped immediately.

The heavy human toll of the crisis that started on the 12^th of July has affected both sides but has been ten times higher on the Lebanese side than on the Israeli. In Northern Israel, 37 Israelis have been killed and around 300 wounded; in Lebanon, there has been over 370 killed - of these 45% have been children and two-thirds women and children - thousands wounded; 700,000 are now internally displaced; another 150,000 Lebanese, 1,000 Palestinians, 20,000 Third Country Nationals have fled the country to neighboring Syria; and over 100,000 people from 20 different countries living in Lebanon have been affected. The UN has been warning of a looming humanitarian crisis and is seeking $150 million to assist 800,000 people over the next three months and to avert a humanitarian disaster. Access to vulnerable populations is a major concern. With the Israeli imposed air, maritime and land blockade on Lebanon as well as the widespread destruction of the country’s public infrastructure - including hospitals, schools, road networks, bridges, power stations, airports, main seaports, fuel storage tanks, factories, churches and mosques, communication networks and media stations - the country is being cut off from food and medicine, and the passage of ambulances to affected areas and people is being seriously curtailed. The Lebanese Social Affairs Minister Nayla Moawad, has underlined the disastrous situation of the shortage of water and food supplies. Humanitarian assistance has also been impeded by the targeting of convoys carrying badly needed supplies. The Lebanese Government has asked for a humanitarian corridor to be established and the UN has been negotiating with Israel for a safe passage to allow assistance for those in need. The total population stranded in the south with little or no access to the outside world is in the couple of hundred thousands. The universal principle of unhindered and unconditional humanitarian access must be respected and assistance allowed to be delivered to those in need – notably to the most affected area in the south of Lebanon.

The excessive bombardment of Lebanon is a violation of International Humanitarian Law, as stated by the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland during his visit to Beirut. It is a fundamental rule of IHL that parties to an armed conflict must at all times distinguish between civilians and combatants and between military objectives and civilian objects. Neither the civilian population as a whole, nor individual civilians may be the object of attack. Similarly, the bombardment of sites with alleged military significance, but resulting invariably in the killing of innocent civilians is unjustifiable. The duty to implement international humanitarian law lies first and foremost with states, which have a collective responsibility under Article 1 common to the Geneva Conventions to “respect and to ensure respect for” the Conventions “in all circumstances”. Despite the Israeli Government’s statements, this is NOT about “surgical strikes”: the scale of the attacks across the country is indisputably disproportionate in reaction to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and is a collective punishment of the whole population - parallel to Israel’s ongoing shelling of Gaza - violating the state’s sovereignty, International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law. As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has said, war crimes could have been committed in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza. International Law poses an obligation on all parties to respect the “principle of proportionality”. The British Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells in Lebanon highlighted that the aim to crush Hizbollah does not require going against the entire Lebanese nation.

A major concern is that children are bearing the brunt of this conflict in terms of deaths, physical injuries, and the psychological trauma of witnessing deaths and injuries of those around them and the destruction of homes and communities. The UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, has called for the protection of children in the Middle East crisis through a cessation of violence and an immediate opening of a humanitarian corridor for assistance to civilians in Lebanon. “Killing and maiming, the denial of humanitarian access for children as well as attacks on schools and hospitals are considered grave violations of children’s rights by the Security Council in its resolution 1612 (2005). Those crimes are also condemned by International Law including the Rome Statute, the Geneva Conventions as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child.” The violence must stop to avoid any further harm to children on both sides.

The ongoing bombardment of Lebanon has also inflicted damage on the country’s economy. According to the Finance Minister Jihad Azour, several billion dollars of damage has been done in just 10 days. This is at a time when the Lebanese economy was showing positive signs of flourishing notably in terms of attracting international investors, becoming a regional business centre, job creation for talented people, and increasing tourism. In the first half of the year, Lebanon attracted a sharp rise in capital inflows to about $5 billion; tourism has been one of the main sources of income accounting for 15% of the economy with a rise of 50% in tourism, and had been expected to raise $2.5bn over the course of the year. It has taken 15 years of rebuilding the country after its long and painful civil war, and now the people are witnessing these efforts and hopes being torn down in a matter of days. In the aftermath of this crisis, the direct economic costs in rebuilding the will be in the billions of dollars, while the indirect costs will be even higher with the lack of opportunities leading to a brain drainage and inefficiency. The damage has been done. Israel has taken away its neighboring country’s competitiveness in terms of tourism, banking and financing, for the next 15-20 years. The flattening of Lebanon’s infrastructure must be halted.

The disproportionate number of Lebanese casualties, the destruction of the entire country’s infrastructure, the destabilization of its Government and thus its nation, amount not only to a local disaster, but destabilizes the entire region, posing a risk for global security in the long-term. The bombardment will not increase Israel’s security, but only reinforce radicalization in the region, according to many analysts - including Rosemary Hollis, Director of the Middle East Department at Chatham House and Georges Asseily, Chairman of Centre for Lebanese Studies at St. Anthony‘s college. The longer the US gives the green light for Israeli attacks that are destroying Lebanon, the longer the international community does not call for an unconditional ceasefire, the longer the Arab states remain silent, the more the frustration, sadness and anger among the people in the region and the world will increase. For the sake of global security - and not least for the sake of innocent civilians dying – we, as individuals, cannot silently watch on. We have a moral obligation to speak out and assist a population under bombardment and isolation. We can do this through: creating awareness and highlighting the critical humanitarian situation in the region; by reaching out to the media through letters; by writing to our political representatives; by protesting in demonstrations against the strikes and against the abuse of International Humanitarian Law on both sides; by advocating for humanitarian access to the vulnerable; by donating to local, regional and international NGOs working in Lebanon (eg. Save the Children, Relief International, Response International), and to those humanitarian aid agencies (ICRC, UNICEF, UNHCR, WFP, WHO, UNFPA, UNRWA etc.) working on providing services notably in terms of water and sanitation, health, food and nutrition, shelter and site management, psychosocial care, protection of the vulnerable and landmine action, as well as education. In whichever way we chose to act, the bottom line is that we must speak out against the killing of innocent civilians on all sides.

Miriam AZAR

posted by La Folie Meurtrière @ 7/25/2006 03:30:00 PM