A year on, Hizbullah continues to meet needs of victims of conflict

WOW! We need a "terrorist" group like Hizbullah in New Orleans to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina!

The Daily Star - July 13, 2007

HARET HREIK: Whether it is mothers who lost their sons in combat or other Shiites whose homes were destroyed in Israel's blitz of Beirut a year ago, Hizbullah is still riding high on its home turf. Two sisters, Loyal and Iman Shahrur, aged 20 and 21, are keen to stress it was Hizbullah - both in battle and on the social services front - that helped find them work and a new home.

Thousands of apartments, like their former home in the Haret Hreik district of the Shiite group's stronghold in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital, were razed to the ground in the 34-day Israel-Hizbullah conflict which erupted on July 12, 2006.

The young women moved into a ground-floor apartment in September, with a year's rent of $4,000 paid by Hizbullah.

Iman was out of work for three months, surviving on a subsidy from the resistance group, which also covered a younger brother's school fees.

Loyal, dressed in a black abbaya robe with white embroidery, glances at a giant portrait of Hizbullah's charismatic chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah with tears in her eyes.

"Nasrallah, I would give my blood for you," she pledges.

Across the road, in a third-floor apartment, a group of former cocoa traders who have returned from the Ivory Coast show off a large metal triangle which remains from a missile fired by Israeli warplanes.

Their old apartment was flattened, as was the former Hizbullah nervecenter next door where men in black civvies

and kitted with walkie-talkies still keep tabs on passers-by around a giant crater left behind by the planes.

Half-a-million people live in and around Haret Hreik, where about 4,000 homes were destroyed in a square-kilometer zone and many thousands more damaged during the war sparked by Hizbullah's capture of two Israeli soldiers.

The Quleit family of merchants has savings, but that did not stop Hizbullah from handing them $12,000 for a year's rent and to buy new furniture. "As for the government, nobody here has received a cent," charges their angry mother.

A government source insists that 4,000 cheques have been paid out, despite long delays due to land registry problems in zones of wildfire development over the decades without any official papers.

The government and its security forces steer clear of the Shiite suburbs, with Hizbullah filling the void.

In the Chiyah area of the suburbs, Fatima, who would only give one name, swears that the death in combat of her son Ahmad, 29, as a shahid (martyr) on the last day of the war, which ended with a UN-brokered cease-fire on August 14, was definitely "worth it." Surrounded by four portraits of her son, in glossy print courtesy of Hizbullah, younger brother, Hassan, 21, is proud that Ahmad helped man batteries that rained rockets on the northern Israeli port city of Haifa.

Amid the sea of posters of fallen Hizbullah fighters plastered across the southern suburbs, Ahmad's picture figures prominently on a wall facing the apartment of his widow.

Hizbullah has a master plan for the suburbs baptized "Waad" (the promise), costing $100 million, officially launched at the end of May. But reconstruction at bombed-out sites has yet to kick off, despite the buzz of repairs which started way back in August.

Teams of architects have drawn up plans for the entire former war zone, to be divided into 30 sectors.

According to Hizbullah's Web site, three quarters of the suburb' residents have agreed to hand any government compensation they receive over to the group to allow for reconstruction to be carried out on a far more organized basis, with town planning.

While competing with the "Solidere" post-Civil War reconstruction in Downtown Beirut that was devised by then-Premier Rafik Hariri, Hizbullah has in the past also turned down an "Elissar" project for the suburbs proposed on behalf of the government by the slain former premier. - AFP