No more miracles in Qana...

Qana, where Christ’s first miracle took place;

Qana, where the lateste glorious action by the israely army took place on the 18th of april 1996: the killing of 100 civilians, mainly olders, women and children, who found shelter in a site of the UNIFIL (UN Interim Forces In Lebanon).

Qana, a symbol of the sufferings of the Lebanese, of the tragedies of Middle-East: 50 years of slaughters, destructions, sorrow and pain.

Till when ?

The story of a unforgettable visit, by Lucie Heymann.

No more miracles in Qana...

Almost 2000 years have past since the last miracle of Jesus in the small village of Qana. Nowadays, this latter is far from reminding one of Veronese’s painting. It is dwelled in a miserable area of southern Lebanon, in the middle of dry grounds which nevertheless remain the heart of the israeli greed. The name will catch your ear, the village won’t catch your eye...

On each side of the road houses in concrete seem to wait for last walls which will never come. No paint: in Qana everybody’s prepared to flee.

The only recent building is a small graveyard, behind the main and only square of the settlement. The graves are all alike, made of dark marble. They have stone frames standing everywhere to hand you portraits. The pictures are dyed by the sun and will remind you of any of your old photo albums. Qana is a name which had been linked to faith for hundred of years...until this day of April 1996, when a bombing over the village killed 107 people and wounded hundreds. They were all civilians, slaughtered by israeli rockets.

Here are the victims, close to the site of their martyrdom which has been turned into a shrine. You have to come closer to the central tombstone to have a look at the different items laid there. Contemplate the false cedar tree and its branch holding small corpses roll into shrouds. Touch the flower vase, made of an empty rocket. Hold pieces of melted metal. Behind you, more colourless pictures: they show you the tragical reality of the event. Blue helmets holding tiny bodies covered with blood, boneless cadavers, heap of skin and flesh. You get out of the place with a strange feeling of incredulity, and yet uneasy after such a display of death.

The area is under UN control and the village of Qana itself hosts a UNIFIL camp managed by blue helmets from the Fidji Islands. The little camp is in the vicinity of the graveyard and you’ll have no problem to get inside it to have a little tour. May be the same libanese will guide you there and will tell you as he introduces himself: "I’m a survivor of the slaughter".

You will then wander between the barracks, on the edge of the tranchees and everywhere you’ll go you’ll bump into ambulances since the camp is also used as a dispensary for the inhabitants of the region. You’ll be surprised by the size of the dwelling, so small, and think this is really not what you expected of a camp for refugees: well, don’t blame only your occidental mind because actually this camp is NOT a shelter for refugees and has never been planned to be one. It HAD to welcome the 800 refugees of April 1996 who were fleeing the israeli bombings. It HAD to erect new buildings in a hurry in order to house everyone. It HAD to become a shelter for hundreds of scared people, mainly women and children, and it did, in spite of the overcrowded atmosphere which resulted from this unexpected population.

"They say there was only one massacre in Qana and this is wrong." That’s what our guide said to us, stopping in front of a deep tranchee. "There were two of them and one happened right here. 55 people were killed. The building was demolished because it was in the middle of the camp and even after a few days, the smell was still unbearable. Another building was reached by the bombings. It was standing close to where the cemetery is today. This one remained untouched but we rebuilt the camp walls so that it would be outside, so that the people would be able to go there in remembrance.

He took us there, behind the new walls, and we saw the remains of the building. He sighed: "on April the 12th, bombings became more frequent and people from Qana and form three other villages began to arrive at our settlement. Those civilians were mainly women and children. Even though quite numerous, they began to live a normal life here. Women would cook and kids would play football. It was pretty difficult to handle such a huge amount of people, yet spirits were high. Moreover, all the rockets fell outside without damaging anything in the camp. We were confident, remembering that the camp had already been an efficient shelter when similar israeli attacks occured in 1993."

"They had been here for 7 days when the bombing started on the camp itself. Everybody thought the rockets were launched from helicopters, but in fact they were coming from the ground and of the most horrible kind: they were fragmentation artillery shells and reached the 2 buildings. One or two may have reached them by mistake, but no less than 35 ones fell on one of the houses in a 20 minutes period !". He kept quiet for awhile and raised his index in the air to catch our ear. You may also hear the hoarse sound of shelling and see as we did the weary smile on the man’s face: "Here they start again!".

"I was wounded myself" he will add, touching the scar through his shirt with his thumb. "People who survived that can’t live as before. Some are not even able to eat meat anymore... I’ve been working with the UN for 16 years, and this is the most horrible thing I’ve seen. I’m writing a book right now about it, I think it could help me to get over it."

We made our way to the conserved building. Not far from it you’ll see a house spared by the bombs. The other house had a roof, walls, windows of which almost nothing is left. You can imagine the number of rockets and the precision needed to perform such a destruction. The ground is black, covered by ashes, but if you take a better look you’ll see shapes appear. Here are tin cans, personal belongings. Here is a woman shoe with its heel sticked to the floor. Things which has not been turned into ashes have literally melted and become part of the house itself. You’ll think as I did to the last words of our guide. You’ll be able to start to apprehend what happened and how it happened. You’ll see death more vivitantly and stories will come back in your mind. 22 members of a same family stucked there and of whom only 3 escaped alive. Refugees under blankets, protected by the bodies of the others. Numbers, body counts, dead children not even 9 years of age, dead babies beheaded after 14 days on earth. On the tombs in the little graveyard of Qana, the dyed portraits will watch you before you leave, and as I did you’ll promise to remember. How could you not anyway ?

Qana is a symbol for rememberance. What happened there, only a couple of years ago, without any reaction from the so-called developed countries, is a true exemple of what is worse in our society: indifference and oblivion. And yet many questions come into mind comparing our international implication to the use of it. Our involvment in the United Nations is illusary, and Qana paid the price for that hypocrisy. The bombing of Qana is a volontary slaughter of civilians who had saught protection in a camp of the force of interposition. The slaughter was aimed at women and children, and was intending to be as lethal and mutilating as possible. Those weapons are forbidden by most of the western countries and the israeli authorities themselves admit that the operation was planned and executed in accordance of the guide line of the "Grapes of Wrath" agression against Lebanon. No regrets were shown and a UN inquiry proved the guilt of Tsahal... and still nothing could move the international community into a severe condemn of Israel.

The government of this latter claim everywhere that terrorism must stop...but what about its state-terrorism against women and children ? Is it a better terrorism than that of a fanatic group ? We are shocked by the behaviour of the Algerian government, and is it not because we believe that complicity in murder IS murder? The involvment of a so-called democratic state in murder is even worse than murder since it shows the corruption of the leading forces of the country, lead by the will of the militarian and not by the people anymore.

This is what we can learn from Qana. The disaster of the process of peace in the region, which is the result of the "no-compromise" position of the israeli government, demonstrates the trivial power of the United Nations. Two years ago, children died in the arms of those whom WE, citizens of the world represented by the United Nations, had appointed to protect them. Never was the UN protection such "wishful thinking" as today and never had oblivion been the mean we choose to forget our powerless politics.

Lucie Heymann Lebanon

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ckastoun/qana.htm#RecitLucie