Letter from Lebanon

By Roger Assaf

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From top: Red Cross rescuers extract the body of a girl from the rubble of a destroyed house after Israeli air strikes on the southern Lebanese village of Qana 30 July 2006; a man screams for help as he carries the body of a dead girl after Israeli air strikes on Qana 2006 (photos:AFP); map; Qana 1996

Qana: past and present

Beirut, 30 July 2006

I could keep on saying that we are fine, how about you, but today... I am not fine.

I am by myself. Tomorrow morning (inch'allah) I have an appointment with my admirable fellow-members. Now I am alone with the images and the screams of the victims of the new carnage perpetrated by the Israeli army in the village of Qana, to the east of Tyre, controlled by UN forces and where a blessed wedding was celebrated by a certain Jesus some two thousand years ago, and where carnage was celebrated by the Israeli army on 16 April 1996.

This morning Qana has been once again the target of Tsahal's criminals: a three- storey building where some 50 civilians were asleep, most of them women and children, hosted a superb Israeli pilot with iron guts and glittering technology, a modern Hercules capable of sowing death with just one finger, able to lacerate the sky and reach a target with admirable precision -- supply trucks, a van overloaded with refugees, a telecommunication antenna, a moped.

This morning, at dawn, more than 50 bodies -- including until now 30 children -- carry the indelible signature of this bastard who would not even have the courage to identify himself.

Today an Israeli pilot feels good. I do not.

For those who don't know, between Marwahine (15 July) and Qana (30 July) many other massacres have been committed, in Srifa, Nmeyrieh... I cannot mention them all, nor speak of them with precision. Some day historians will be able to give an account of the number of dead and recount the massacres for which Tsahal should make amends. I think we will be horrified...

Bush announced in Washington, and Israel confirmed the delivery, of 1500 bombs, new "smart" bombs with unequalled power of destruction and precision. The delivery was made in order to make up for the Israeli army's impotence in reducing the Lebanese resistance and the humiliating blow it was subjected to with the defeat of its ground offensive in the region of Bint Jbeil. These 1500 bombs have already left the United States and some are already in Israel after a stop over in Scotland, where Mr Blair allowed the transport planes to refuel.

Does Mr Blair have the approval of his government?

Do British citizens accept that their country should serve as a platform for the "weapons of mass destruction" their own soldiers supposedly went looking for in Iraq?

Does the UN or the European states have a word to say in this matter?

Are people in Europe going to vote for this horror and allow the European Union to play the role of Washington's butler?

Is the world ready to shoulder the ecological and humanitarian consequences of this war?

I have just received some information about Bush's presents to his Israeli friends. The JDAM, or Joint Direct Attack Munition, is a bomb guided by GPS. Such bombs have been used by the American army in Afghanistan, during the war in Kosovo and in Iraq, mainly during the 1998 Desert Fox operation. They are Guided Bomb Units -- with depleted uranium -- directed by satellite, and can be piloted after being released at a high altitude. They don't explode on impact but can dive up to 30 metres underground. Such depth explosions wreak phenomenal destruction. Electro magnetism and radiation burn people, short circuit cities, destroy electronic nerve centers, suck up oxygen in subterranean and closed spaces.

We are urgently in need of an Emile Zola, Edmund Burke or Sean MacBride, not to protect us or save us from a tragedy that is becoming daily more inevitable but to accuse and to witness the criminality of Bush and his mob of arm dealers and oil billionaires; Tony Blair, a traitor to his country who has placed himself at the service of another country; the Israeli head of state; and others -- Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Germany and all of those who have encouraged the destruction of Lebanon in order to get rid of Hizbullah; the UN, France, Europe, and those Arabs who do not dare take a firm and honourable position as they make their political, diplomatic or mercantile calculations.

May the criminals be delivered to history's judgment, their accomplices to their people's vilification.

For us, people from everywhere, unarmed and powerless, may the time of which we are masters become a space without borders where the word, indestructible, resists the armies of the world, avoids their crimes and becomes a poem, a song, music, an image, tears and smiles, a memory of the dead and the threnody of destroyed cities and burnt lands, a tribute to the children who gave us their sap.

We shall be fine tomorrow. What about you?