To Anwar Yassin, Rabih and al-Hariri: We didn’t see time go by

‘Notice that all of this bravery was in a past that has become far from us’

BEIRUT - Fidaa Itani

March/April 2004

Don’t search in your memories about me Anwar; we don’t know each other, we never met and we will never meet. Even if we had met, we are now in two different worlds. You are now living happily the moments of your freedom. You came back after serving around half of your sentence, following your capture with your gear on you. Today, things changed.

You weren’t probably here when Russian astronauts landed on Earth after leaving it as Soviets. They came back as Russians. Regimes changed and life changed. Things here are quite similar: regimes changed, life changed and evolution that is not necessarily for the better has taken place. So don’t be as those astronauts.

Thank God, you are back, but don’t be bewildered by things. Definitely, some euphoria will take you over, but your eyes won’t see things the way we see them. Being surrounded with all the welcoming manifestations will definitely ease things up. Describing you and other freed detainees as heroes would help, but life remains harder to adapt to by using a few words such as hero, brave or other titles you really deserve.

Anwar, we sometimes have to burry our dead, we have to throw their bodies in graves and cover them with earth then rest and keep good memories about them. Life goes on strongly; this is why we have to burry our dead. We can’t remain attached to bodies rotting every day and whose smell wipe out their past and the good memories we have about them.

Before you were taken, most of the South was liberated, Beirut was liberated, the shoreline between Beirut and Sidon fell; we then took over Sidon itself and reached its eastern outskirts in direct confrontation with the collaborators. The siege of al-Iqlim was ended, the Mountain was liberated and fully re-conquered and the Agreement of May 17 fell.

You and I know who did it all, who took arms, who fought these battles, which force was the spearhead in all the breakthroughs. You and I know to whom the hotel of Souq al-Gharb fell before US Marines had to use helicopters to land troops on the hotel’s rooftop to hand it over to those who were later defeated.

You and I know that the operation of Wadi al-Zeina can be thought in the best military academies, that PLO operations in Beirut against the Israelis were a model of urban guerilla warfare and that due to the Aley operation, the Israelis had to change all their occupation tactics in Lebanon at the time.

You and I know that Hadi, God bless his soul, taught you and others the techniques of thinking and action that other forces wanted to acquire, that Maher used to operate on the ground as if he moved in his house, and that together they planned remarkable operations most of which were successful. What’s also remarkable is that the two were always in the front lines of the operations and that they forbid elitist forces of the Israeli Golani paratrooper battalion from the soil of Jabal al-Sheikh.

You, I and others knew that your operation was supposed to shoot down a helicopter, but the helicopter didn’t fall, for some reason it didn’t. Maher fell if I am not mistaken during the same period. Few years before you were captured, much of the South had been liberated and become a restricted area forbidden to you and other resistance fighters. Even Hezbollah, which came from a religious background, was for some time forbidden from operating freely in the South.

But notice here that all of this was in the past, a past that in a nick of time became far form us. The future is something else. Maybe with your determination you would still be attached to specific ideas, but let us not unbury dead bodies. Let us rather recall good memories about the work we did for the sake of human beings, the same human beings who are suffering today and who suffered yesterday.

Some of the liberated thought they could play leadership roles; a childish idea: no leadership roles are possible without avant-garde political agendas, and no serious agendas exist in this state of divorce between you and the people. You are in a state of isolation and marginalization, a state not allowing even the most beautiful of freed detainees to play a leadership role, not even on the screens of satellite television channels.

No political idea can foster if you are frustrated at those who succeeded in their competition against you, those who filled the gap you left willingly, giving excuses such as ‘‘the Syrian siege of the resistance’’ (which you don’t dare to announce) or ‘‘the lack of funds.’’ But for sure, there was a political bankruptcy that left dozens of detainees and bodies in the hands of the enemy for more than a decade.

Those who were superior to you throughout the years acquired a credibility you didn’t build during your golden age. Metaphorically speaking to you Anwar, the son of the supreme leader of Hezbollah died with a rifle in his hand while the children of your leaders had been studying in the West since our civil war.

Details are not important, but they show meanings people understand before you and I do. Hezbollah would not leave the grounds for your leadership to stand before it and before the president of the republic to greet you. Anyway, we don’t know what this leadership is leading nowadays or where it is leading it. We didn’t hear the voice of this leadership when VAT was imposed – yes during your absence we had VAT imposed – or upon the crisis of the Lebanese University or upon all the crises that the people faced. We only heard about this leadership during a period of internal elections whose results we didn’t care to know.

Anwar, you are greater than the floor of some party’s offices. Maybe it is time to remember that we liberated half of the country, and that we are one of the main reasons for the breakout of the war and for its end. We offered many of our youths as martyrs. On the personal level, we were pure and we used to be violent in order for all the people to live better. But the people are not in a better state today, our project failed and we were defeated.

Today there is a new reality to understand and to try to change. We must use a different discourse in which any attempt to discredit Hezbollah or to recall the past would be a cheap attempt to justify the failure and to fulfill a consciousness now missing the purity it once had.

Anwar, get married, have children and raise them as you were raised or better, dream and hug your mother who waited for you with great willpower. A piece of advice: let your mother draw the path of your future and forget the wrongdoings of our dead parties, which lost their entire raison d’être. Let us look towards a better future, towards our old dream that is renewing.

Anwar, do me a favor, if you meet any of Hezbollah’s men, thank them for liberating the bodies of our martyrs.

Live happily ever after.

From www.street67.net