Remaining Bint Jbeil residents determined to stick around

Remaining Bint Jbeil residents determined to stick around
But Locals are bitter at a government that `ignored` them both during and after the war
Source: Daily Star, 16-1-2007
BINT JBEIL: Hind shanks of lamb hang in a butcher`s shop, a room just 3 meters high and 3 meters wide on the main street in Bint Jbeil which lost its facade during the summer 2006 war with "Israel". Dozens of such stalls curve a few hundred meters through the main street, but the shop adjacent to the butcher`s is no longer there. A bomb obliterated it - chunks of broken concrete and whatever the shopkeeper left behind now sit untouched in the lot next to the butcher`s shop.
Almost six months ago, Bint Jbeil witnessed some of the heaviest face-to-face combat in the war, and the spaces on the main street alternate between destruction and function - by every untouched structure destruction lurks, for every sign of construction and clean-up stands a broken and defeated edifice whose tenants are gone.
The Bint Jbeil branch of Bank Audi is open for business - an ATM awaits inside the bank`s glass doors and tellers welcome customers inside; however, the half-dozen floors above the bank still display their wounds from the war and remain empty.
But the recovery continues - a shoe store`s interior is unusable, so the vendors have laid out their wares on plastic crates in front of the store. Colonies of loaders and dump trucks operate around town; a small yellow loader maneuvers back and forth over a layer of war detritus in the center of town, picking up pieces and depositing them in a nearby dump truck.
Noticeably absent are military personnel - no United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers or Lebanese Army soldiers are on patrol. UNIFIL`s armored personnel carriers and tanks do roll through town, but there are no checkpoints.
Bint Jbeil flashed onto the world news stage when "Israel`s" occupation soldiers invaded it on the morning of July 25. Fierce fighting continued for four days and then again from August 6-14. CNN reported on July 31 that "heavy fighting reduced much of the area to rubble."
Dozens of multi-storey homes - not rubble - are scattered on the hills that fold out into countryside from Bint Jbeil, which the BBC dubbed the "Hizbullah heartland" and the "Israeli" Army labeled Hizbullah`s (so-called) "terror capital."
Oddly enough, the town, along with three other hard-hit areas in the South, was selected for reconstruction by the emir of Qatar.
Qatar has finished doling out compensation to about 4,000 families whose homes were damaged in the 34-day war, the first phase of its three-step plan. Phase two will attend to homes and public buildings which were completely destroyed and phase three consists of rebuilding local infrastructure.
So far, the reconstruction has allowed schools to function at 100 percent of their prewar capacity, although the region`s economy as a whole is limping along about 20 percent of its prewar level, according to Rachid Mackeh, South-branch manager of Geti Consulting, which is managing the reconstruction.
The Secondary Intermediate School of Bint Jbeil for Girls reopened October 16, although its student body now numbers about 160, down from the 200 students who attended the previous year, said school principal Fatima Anani Beydoun.
Red-coated schoolgirls, most wearing white headscarves, go through their full timetable of subjects, all taught in French. The school is using only one of its two buildings; a circular hole, about 5 meters in diameter, still gapes where a bomb went through the roof of the three-floor rear building, which has no back wall. Six bombs tore through the school on August 11, three days before the cease-fire.
Overlooking the school from across the street is a four-storey salmon-colored building, another war victim. A side wall has been blown out on the lower floors; a green-tiled kitchen has become a large balcony, but the building is unoccupied.
Bint Jbeil had about 25,000 residents before the war, but about 60 percent of the population has not returned, Mackeh said. Agriculture provided the primary source of income for most of the residents, with tobacco and olives the top crops, but now the fields are fouled by unexploded cluster bombs.
"They lost everything," Mackeh said. "There`s no work. People are not afraid of the future, but they are suffering in the present. They lost their means of subsistence."
Bint Jbeil resident Hassan Sood said he knows many who have left the town, whether to move in with relatives in Beirut or to emigrate from Lebanon. Bint Jbeil natives make up a sizeable portion of the Lebanese community in the cities of Dearborn and Detroit, Michigan - Sood estimated there were more Bint Jbeil natives in Michigan than in Bint Jbeil.
"Right now everything is not OK," he said. "Something like 70 percent is gone. Everybody in Bint Jbeil [has] got a lot of people in Michigan."
Bint Jbeil residents said the half-deserted appearance of Bint Jbeil saddened them. Nidal Bazzi teaches at a local elementary school, but he avoids going through the center of town on his way to the neighboring village where he is living with family. The only citizens who returned were those whose jobs were still here after the war, he said.
"I don`t like to see Bint Jbeil when it looks like this," he said. "It looks empty. I don`t like to see my country like this."
Elham Bazzi - the Bazzi family name is the most common in Bint Jbeil - avoids going into town with her four children because she does not want them to see how strongly the destruction affects her. Bazzi, however, is not considering leaving. She chose to return and is committed to staying and rebuilding.
"You have the places that you had your childhood and now, it`s nothing," she said. "I lost everything, even the memories, even the childhood. Now I go down and it`s a strange place for me. I walk, but I don`t like to look [anywhere] but at the ground. It takes me at least one hour to settle down.
"I feel depressed. Everybody has the same feeling. My past is gone and my future is unknown. This town needs at least 10 years to stand up."
But Bazzi is already making plans to put the town back on its feet. She and some other residents have proposals to reconstruct parts of Bint Jbeil as they existed decades ago. Bazzi loves Bint Jbeil, and if she left it would feel as though she were surrendering it to "Israel", she said.
"The more you feel that others want to take your roots, the more you stick to it," she said. "We could have lived in Beirut, but ... we want to [raise] our family in this town. We`re here because we want to be here. We like this town - it`s perfect.
"It`s no problem - five, six, 10 years [to rebuild]. If you love it, you do it.
"We won`t leave. If I left with my four kids, they might not come back. They might like it there," she said.
Bazzi has made the decision before to return to Bint Jbeil. She studied in Montreal at Concordia University, where she received a master`s degree in information systems. Her husband earned a doctorate there.
She left again during the war, fleeing to Beirut with 11 children in tow - hers and those of two of her brothers. While she waited out the war, she was told in error that her home had been destroyed. But three days after the cease-fire, she was back. She still remembers the stench throughout the city, a noxious mix of rotten food and corpses. Her family relied on a generator during the three months they spent without electricity.
Regardless of the millions of dollars that Qatar has poured into the South, Bazzi said she cannot forgive the Lebanese government for ignoring Bint Jbeil during and after the war.
"This town deserves to be rebuilt, not ignored by the government," she said. "People are dying from minor, minor heart problems. We don`t have a decent hospital.
"My friends were killed; a nice man that I know was under the rubble. I have the right to bury my friend decently and I couldn`t. They deal with my friends` blood very cruelly.
"When I was weak, they didn`t even think about me. How would you expect me to trust these people in peace?"
To rebuild Bint Jbeil, Bazzi is putting education first. She sends her eldest son, 14, to the village of Tibreen so he can study in the area`s best English-language school. She wants to teach her children to think for themselves, and they will be free to decide on their own beliefs once they reach adulthood, she said.
The outside world, Bazzi said, has an image of Bint Jbeil as a hotbed of extremism populated by unthinking, fanatical followers of Hizbullah.
But in reality those who stayed in Bint Jbeil, although almost all Shiites, still include some who collaborated with "Israel" during its 22-year occupation of the South, she said.
A variety of political opinions coexist in Bint Jbeil - one of those employed by Qatar worked in a black t-shirt emblazoned with the words "Those who rock live longer."
"Everybody thinks that we`re some group of ignorant people - it`s not right," Bazzi said. "We are not terrorists. Religion always means that you should be an extremist?
"I am a Muslim [and] I am a Shiite-Muslim, but I teach my children how to have a free mind, how to argue, how to enjoy life," she explained. "I put on my hijab but I`m open-minded.
"Why [does] everybody now feel these people were blinded? It`s like somebody brainwashed [us] and we follow like slaves. We`re not putting our children to be slaves. I want to build a generation that feels love inside. From death, I`m raising a child that can smile, have a future.
"We respect each other, we share mentalities. Everybody should respect the other, with his religion, with his culture. It`s how we should live. We`re not brainwashed," she said.
The remaining residents of Bint Jbeil also know the summer war might not be their last encounter with "Israel". Bazzi said she is ready to defend Bint Jbeil and she completely supports Hizbullah`s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
"We should prepare ourselves that maybe round two is coming," she said. "Now, every night I plan I will send my children away but I will stay. I`m sure I will stay here, even if there`s a next time.
"It`s like we build, and they destroy. They have the mentality that they can`t live if we`re alive. They have the weapons, they have everything, [but] we have the faith. We will always win. If they come again, we will win. We have more faith than any other people that we will survive.
"We believe in Sayyed Hassan," she told The Daily Star. We`re with Sayyed Hassan to the death. I`m ready to offer my child. Sayyed Hassan was right - in every step he was right. When you have a leader that you trust his judgment, I have to follow him since I believe in his good judgment. If [the "Israelis"] want to let me live as a servant, then I prefer to get killed and show my children how to defend their rights."
Bazzi has already rebuilt her home, a two-floor flat with a spiral staircase leading to the upper floor. Paintings in gold frames adorn the walls, and she pops in "Barney" videos to placate her 19-month-old son, Mohammad. Bazzi is not going anywhere.
Those around her are less certain. Her distant relative, the teacher Nidal Bazzi, came back to Bint Jbeil after the war and took money from Qatar to rebuild his home, and he said he would rebuild it, but in the same breath he mentioned he has a brother in Austria and has had enough of war.
"Now I`m trying to leave my country," he said. "I have to leave to the outside."