Volume 31, Number 13 · August 16, 1984
A Dangerous Occupation
By Scott MacLeod
The killings in June in Borg Rahal and Bidias, southern Lebanese villages of scarcely two thousand people each, testify to the continuing troubles of the Israeli military occupation of southern Lebanon that began two summers ago. With Israel distracted by its foundering economy and Lebanon by the continuing fighting and negotiations in Beirut, southern Lebanon seemed to have faded from attention when I visited the region recently. The news from Borg Rahal reached me on the second day, in the seaport of Tyre, only twelve miles from the Israeli border. When my driver maneuvered our beat-up Toyota seven miles past coastal orange groves and up a one-lane country road into the dry hills east of the Mediterranean, several dozen men were filing out of the village mosque. I was immediately spotted as a foreigner among the conservative Shi'ite Moslems, whose women were wearing traditional chadors. We were in the Shi'ite heartland of southern Lebanon. A few of the men, recognizing me as a reporter because I carried a spiral notebook and a Nikon camera, led me inside the mosque for an inspection of 'evidence.' On the marble manbar, or pulpit, there was an axe, a crowbar, a beige-colored tear-gas cannister with Hebrew lettering on the side, and six spent bullet casings which clinked together in my hand when I picked them up.
Feature, 5080 words
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