Landmines and prison breaks

Suited for cluster-bomb clearing in Tibnin, Lebanon

One of the most enjoyable things about being a reporter in Lebanon is the access it affords.

You want to speak to the Interior Minister? Sure, here’s his mobile and home phone number. You need a quote from the Head of the Internal Security Forces? Go ahead, he’ll call you after lunch and tell you, in perfect English, what it is you’re after.

Last week, I wanted to speak with UNIFIL troops in the south of the country, and file a dispatch from Tibnin on how the cluster-bomb clearing operation is going three years after the Summer War of 2006.

After a few phonecalls and correspondence with a charmingly eccentric Italian UN General, I was on the way to the south, a few kilometers from Israel, a state against which Lebanon is still officially at war.

Then the red tape catches up with you. You want to go south of Sidon in a professional capacity? Go ahead, but you need the Army’s permission and this takes 15 days. I know you want to go this week, but there is nothing I can do, there’s a procedure to follow, after all.

15 days turned rapidly into 2 as our terrier of a receptionist battered through this pointless beauracracy, yet I still found myself sitting in a stifling mobile in the LAF’s Sidon barracks. Calls in Arabic, made with not the slightest tinge of urgency. Paperwork. Sighs and queue-jumping. Eventually I get passed a hand-written slip, containing precisely three digits and a signature cast in childish scrawl. Next time, I will forge the pass myself.

Once in Tibnin, I get greeted by Lt Monnoyer and a half-hour health and safety blurb. We patrol an area of sparse shrubland, the earth parched from the baking sun which beats relentless down as the mine clearers get to work.

In the last 72 hours of the 2006 war, Israel dropped more than a million cluster bomb M42 submunitions, so that – according to many Lebanese – they could continue killing for the next 30 years. Hundreds have been killed or maimed by these de facto landmines (an estimated 40 percent of the bomblets didn’t explode upon contact with the ground).

I speak later with someone from Lebanon’s Mines Advisory Group. She tells me that the Israelis, knowing that a ceasefire was imminent, deliberately dropped weapons on Lebanon that were well past their use-by date.

We’ve found bomb casings with ‘use by 1978′ on them. They knew what they were doing.

The day I file my dispatch, there is news of two Syrian farmers who are obliterated the moment they step on a cluster bomb particle. These deaths will keep being reported, with a seemingly inescapable sense of ennui. This is a scandal. But people have grown used to this and the general malaise and lack of funding which now engulfs Lebanon’s landmine clearing operations.

Back in Beirut, I report on a prison break, involving a Fatah al-Islam inmate being held on terrorism charges. Want to speak to the head of the Army? Here’s his direct line.