As Lebanon prepares to celebrate the second anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal, Aouthern villages damaged by the Israeli Army and its proxy militia have slowly returned to life.
But residents in Hanine, a village only 6 kilometers from the border with Israel, are still struggling to overcome a deep-seated mistrust of their neighbors, whose role in their displacement remains a sore spot.
“We want the government to sponsor a reconciliation process between the people of Hanine and those of Dibil, Ain Ibl and Rmaish,” Hassan Ali Qashaqish, Hanine’s mukhtar, told The Daily Star.
He was referring to the three neighboring Christian villages whose residents flocked to the former Israeli-backed Free Lebanon Army commanded by Major Saad Haddad. The FLA is believed responsible for the demolition of Hanine, the death of 12 residents and the expulsion of the rest 24 years ago. The FLA was later transformed into the South Lebanon Army.
The militia committed horrific crimes in the village and an unknown number of bodies have still not been retrieved from a well due to the lack of proper equipment.
Five months after the liberation of the village, Hanine resident Ali Soufan decided to venture into the well, recovering six unidentifiable bodies. One was recognized as a female because of her long hair. “I cannot do this again. It was a horrible experience,” Soufan told The Daily Star in an earlier interview.
“Just like what is happening in Mount Lebanon, we want to go through a similar process here,” Qashaqish said, referring to government-sponsored efforts to reconcile the Christian and Druze communities. While he said he communicated well with the mayor and mukhtar of the three villages, he acknowledged that there is no relationship between the people of Hanine and those of the other villages.
Although Hanine residents during interviews showed leniency toward the people of Ain Ibl, they expressed rage toward those of Dibil, who used a village mosque as a barn.
“They (Dibil residents) were involved the most in the destruction of the village,” said Umm Anis Abbas, an old woman who fled the village with all the other families in 1976.
But the mayor of Dibil, Ibrahim Beshara, denied that the people of his village were involved in the razing of the village.
“Those insisting that we were engaged in the demolishing of the village say that out of their political backgrounds,” he said.
Like many others who returned to the village in May 2000, Umm Anis found her trees cut down and her lands planted by others. One plot was planted with tobacco by people from Dibil and another with wheat by a family in the Shiite village of Aita Shaab.
“I don’t like the people of both villages,” the red-cheeked woman giggled. However, she expressed her anger at Dibil residents, who she said destroyed more than 100 of her olive trees. “They took the olives and used the wood to make coal,” she said, adding: “They thought we’d never come back.”
Despite everything, she said she was friendly with those people whom she said had nothing to do with what happened: “Not everybody took advantage of our expulsion.”
She said she visited a woman in Rmaish directly after the liberation of the South. “I cannot forget her because she sent her son to alert me about the dangerous situation back in 1976,” Umm Anis recalled.
Similar individual initiatives have occurred, but their incidence has been limited as attempts to improve relations between the people of the four villages as a whole have stalled over bitter memories.
Two weeks following the Israeli withdrawal, a delegation from Ain Ibl came to Hanine, hoping to reconcile with its people. But the returnees were not responsive.
“People were at the height of their anger,” the mukhtar of Hanine explained. “Our homes were still destroyed and we were not ready to just forget what happened,” he said.
Several days later, a meeting sponsored by a man widely respected by the people of Hanine, Mtanious Khreish, gathered a committee from Dibil and another one from Hanine in a bid to improve their relations. “There was a great disparity between both sides,” Khreish, who is from Ain Ibl, recalled. He blamed the Dibil committee for trying to justify the events that led to Hanine’s destruction. “Is it possible that you wipe a village out and then make excuses for that?”
He also urged greater compassion for Hanine residents, saying: “You have to put yourself in their place before judging the way they feel. How would you feel when you come to see your homes destroyed?”
Upon their return, Hanine families set up tents over the rubble of their former homes. A year later, on the first anniversary of liberation, only the foundations of the houses were completed. Today at least 280 houses have been erected.
“Were it not for Kuwait, we wouldn’t have been able to rebuild our homes,” said Abdullah Atrash. The Kuwaiti government has granted each family LL30 million to reconstruct its home. But as the reconstruction boom wanes, residents are fearful about their future livelihoods in the  village.
Atrash had set up a hut in Hanine to sell groceries. While the hut is now a store, sales have dropped dramatically in the last two months as reconstruction nears completion. He used to sell 50 to 60 kilos of bread a day, but now moves only 10.
“Our customers were the construction workers who (numbered) over 1,000. But they have finished their work and left,” he said.
Similarly, Mohammed Qashaqish opened a bakery nine months ago and used to take around LL200,000 a day, but he is now lucky to garner daily sales of LL8,000.
As most of the some 40 permanent returnees are old, they have failed to spur an economic recovery for local merchants. Families with children are waiting for the completion of the village school by the Council of the South.
But the school is not the only incentive for people to return. People interviewed called on the government to grant them licenses to sell tobacco for the Tobacco and Tambac Regie. “What can people do for a living here other than raise tobacco?” asked resident Mohammed Abed Abbas.
According to Khreish, who is also the head of the regie in the Bint Jbeil area, the regie announced in 1996 it was accepting applications for licenses to grow tobacco. But when the Finance Ministry limited the area of land to be planted to 50,000 dunums (5,000 hectares), the displaced residents of Hanine did not apply, apparently unaware of the consequences.
“For the sake of justice, Hanine should be considered an exceptional case and its people should be granted the licenses,” Khreish said.

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