Well, no, not really. In the past couple of weeks we’ve seen reports about an explosion at a Hezbollah arms factory, a military build-up across the border in Israel, an al Qaeda video claiming responsibility for rocket attacks in the south, and 10 people arrested for plotting to attack UN peacekeepers. Oh, and fighter jets have been in the skies over Beirut.
The tension began two weeks ago when a series of blasts in the southern town of Khirbet Silim triggered a slew of conflicting explanations from Hezbollah, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Israelis. Despite being Hezbollah-controlled territory, a friend of mine was told by the group’s spokesperson that he hadn’t heard about the blast – six hours after it had occurred.
Eventually it transpired that the building had been a Hezbollah arms depot, which the UN quickly highlighted as a violation of Resolution 1701, and when UNIFIL sent a team of investigators to the site they were pelted with stones and forced to retreat with several peacekeepers injured.
Israel said the explosion was a clear sign that Hezbollah was actively rearming and initially responded by massing troops along the border before reportedly moving tanks into the area yesterday. And if that wasn’t worrying enough, there were also claims that a gun-battle between Israel and the LAF had been narrowly avoided last week when Lebanese authorities claimed an IDF watchtower was illegally positioned. For once, it seems the Blue Helmets managed to step in and calm the mood.
And then, out of nowhere, came a video thought to feature the voice of Osama bin Laden claiming responsibility for rockets launched from southern Lebanon into Israel in January. Whether al Qaeda had anything to do with it or not (I’ll save that for another post), it’s never a good thing to hear bin Laden talking about your country. Especially just after 10 suspected terrorists, thought to be members of the al Qaeda-aligned Fatah al Islam group, were arrested.
So there you have it: two weeks in the NYT’s top tourist destination for 2009. And although many Lebanese are adamant peace will hold, when the country’s fighter jets took to the skies above Beirut this week, after last being deployed over 30 years ago, it was hardly surprising that the city’s visitors from the Gulf were scrambling to evacuate.
If the tourism ministry wants to hit its target of 2 million tourists this year, they’d better warn everyone next time the vintage Hawker Hunters are taken for a spin.
]]>Anderson, who was kidnapped in 1985 and held for six years and nine months, spoke eloquently for over an hour about his kidnapping, the dangers of reporting and the issue of journalists' impartiality during wars.
While discussing the coverage of Israel's operations in Gaza in January, Anderson remembered a conversation he had had with an IDF officer in southern Lebanon in the 1980s. Asked why he had written bad things about the Israelis, Anderson replied: 'Sir, if you stop doing bad things, I'll stop writing them', adding, 'When the truth is one sided, so is the story.'
Anderson, who spent six years in the US Marines before becoming a journalist, said even his neutrality was tested when the Americans landed in Beirut in 1982.
"When the Marines came to Lebanon I knew some of them, I had fought in Vietnam with them. I was there when the barracks were destroyed and 240 Americans died. Did I have sympathy with them? Yes. Once a Marine, always a Marine. Did I feel bad for the commander? Yes. But did I ask him what he had done wrong that had allowed those Marines to be murdered? Yes. That’s my job."
Anderson also spoke of the difficulty journalists face in telling fact from fiction: “The idea is to be fair, to tell the truth as best you can find it. But that’s a very difficult job, particularly in war. Everybody lies. I’ve been lied to by American Marines. I’ve certainly been lied to by Israeli generals. I’ve been lied to by Lebanese. Everybody lies during war time.
After being released in 1991, Anderson began working for the Committee to Protect Journalists and he says it's this work that kept his faith in journalism alive. "It’s great to work with these people. These are people who go to work every day all over the world, not knowing if they’re going to be coming home that night, if they’re going to be alive, if they’re going to be in jail, if they’re going to be beaten, if they’re going to be kidnapped. And they do it anyway. It’s very inspiring."
"Why do they do it? They do it because they know how important it is. And the people that do that to them, that beat them and put them in jail, they’re not doing it for fun. They’re doing it because they know that it’s important too.”
When asked about the growing influence of social media on traditional media, Anderson, who currently teaches journalism at the University of Kentucky in the US, said that he didn't think citizen journalists or social networking sites would ever kill off 'serious journalism'.
"The tools you use have nothing to do with whether you are a journalist or not. They are simply tools. I don’t think blogs, Twitter or Facebook is going to replace journalism. Journalism can only be done by professionally trained, dedicated, ideologically committed people. I love the web, don’t get me wrong. It’s a wonderful intervention.But I don’t Twitter. Or tweet, or whatever."
And on how traditional media will continue to operate financially, he added, optimistically: "If my belief that serious journalism is vital to our society is right, then we’ll find a way to pay for it." As simple as that.
Back in Paddington, meanwhile, John the chef will be happy to hear that on his last visit to London, Anderson said he ate 'morning, noon and night' at the club. High praise indeed.
The Issam Fares Centre for Lebanon will soon be publishing the full audio of the Anderson's talk. As soon as it's online I'll link to it from here, so keep checking back. Many thanks to Patrick Galey for providing a rough audio recording of the event.
]]>It's possible, though, that undecided Christian voters made their minds up when Hezbollah's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, gave a speech on the one-year anniversary of his forces storming Beirut. In a televised appearance, Nasrallah said that events in March 2008 had been 'a glorious day for the Resistance in Lebanon'. Glorious? Despite Hezbollah vowing never to turn their arms on their own people, these battles across Beirut left 100 dead. As Qifa Nabki suggested at the time, the Hezbollah leader looked to have overstepped the mark with his victorious tone.
But it's hard to believe that someone as calculated as Nasrallah could make such a pivotal error in the run up to elections, so it's tempting to side with the conspiracy theorists: perhaps the comments were designed to push undecided Christians towards M14. After all, if elected, a government formed by the Hezbollah-led coalition would surely have faced boycotts from the international community and calls for the Shi'ite group to lay down its arm and back the Lebanese Armed Forces. As it stands, the current status quo allows Hezbollah to keep hold of its weapons, despite outside pressure, and keep its strength at the bargaining table.
And the speech given by Nasrallah on Monday, following the release of official results confirming a M14 victory, supports this theory. After declaring that group's arms were not up for discussion, the remainder of his speech could almost have been written by the same person who penned Obama's lines for Cairo. Take this line, for instance:
“Let us build the republic based on truth, clarity and transparency, and not on fears, threats and lies. Let us defend, build and develop our country together."
Yesterday, a spokesman for the Shi'ite party continued with the same reconciliatory rhetoric and told Reuters that the opposition will 'behave in a highly positive manner and cooperate with the other side'. Whether Hezbollah mean this or not, it certainly puts M14 in a tough position when it comes to forming a government.
Sharek961, a website based on the open-source software developed by Ushahidi, launched this week and will face a busy weekend as it tries to collate first-hand information sent in from voters heading to the polling stations. As the site points out, foreign observers cannot be everywhere at every moment and so it's crucial ordinary citizens pitch in to encourage free and fair elections.
Lebanese voters will be able to text, tweet, email or submit online any election-related incidents, from "political rallies and polling queues to voteâ€buying and violence." Sharek961 - roughly translated as 'participate' plus Lebanon international phone code - will then collect these submissions and publish them in a Google Maps mash-up alongside blog posts, news reports, pictures and videos in an interactive presentation.
The project follows in the footsteps of other crowdsourcing experiments that Ushahidi has pioneered, most prominently during the conflict in Gaza in January when it collaborated with Al Jazeera to map the escalation of hostilities.
As the Economist points out, the technology behind the advances in mapping data is far-reaching, but one of the reasons Sharek961 is such a unique endeavour in Lebanon is its neutrality. In a country where every political player seems to have their own news organisation, it’s refreshing to see a platform emerge that enables the public to be heard.
And it's good to see that the site is determined to expand the mission of transparency and accountability in Lebanon when all of this weekend's commotion comes to an end.
I'll be heading over to the Sharek961 offices this weekend to lend a hand with their election coverage so tune into @mikewhills for more information on the project and the elections in general.
]]>It takes a very unusual national outlook to celebrate a war that was far from victorious, but that’s exactly what the Tishreen (October) War Panorama museum does. The impressively intimidating building, which resembles a medieval citadel and was constructed with the help of some Commie buddies from North Korea, opened its doors on October 9, 1999 – exactly 26 years after Israel began pushing Syrian troops back over the pre-war border after initial advances made in a surprise attack.
With the Golan Heights still partly occupied by Israel, and a buffer zone controlled by the UN Disengagement and Observer Force, the memorial ignores the many negatives and concentrates instead on the ‘heroic’ storming of the town of Quneitra by President Hafez Assad’s troops – even though the town was eventually retaken by the Israelis.
After the security had questioned myself and my two American friends about our occupations – I’m a student, honest – we were assigned a pleasant enough Syrian tour guide and shown into the main museum building. After seeing a few paintings depicting various monumental moments in the country’s history we were whisked into a small cinema packed full with schoolchildren. Having just taken our front-row seats we were ushered to stand once again as the children bellowed out the national anthem as the ‘documentary’ began rolling.
The film was a collection of original black and white footage showing Syria’s ‘brave warriors’ launching a counter-attack on a ‘Zionist’ watchtower overlooking Quneitra. Other than a short burst of subtitles explaining who the goodies and baddies were, it was essentially 10-minutes of hardcore war porn and the schoolchildren cheered in all the right places.
To avoid the inevitable post-film scrum, our guide pulled us out just as the credits began to roll and led us to the museum’s main attraction – a 360° panoramic oil painting of Quneitra. We sat on the rotating seats and our guide pointed out the destruction wreaked by Israeli bombardments, including the obligatory burning schools and hospitals. To be fair, those North Korean artists are clearly very talented and the painting is a pretty impressive feat.
After a quick look at photographs of Assad Snr with various world leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Omar Bashir and, of course, Kim Il Sung, we were taken outside to what many consider the real reason to visit the memorial – a collection of Syrian and Israeli military hardware from the war. On the Syrian side there are various Russian-made tanks and armoured vehicles, rockets and a plane and on the Israeli side there are a couple of tanks, a truck and two piles of remains from what were apparently warplanes.
While we wandered over to the Israeli ‘booty’ I explained to the tour guide that I was British, not American, thinking he might reveal some anti-US feelings. Instead he pointed over to one of the Israeli tanks and said: “That’s English-made. Do you feel proud?” Doh.
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