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| A Bad Season for Elections and Hashish |
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| Al-Hayat |
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| Translated by: Article summarized by D. R. for Hayya Bina |
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28/4/09 |
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Journalist Hazem al-Amin interviews a member of the Jaafar clan who spoke to Al-Hayyat on the condition that he be referred to only as M. Jaafar.
M. Jaafar lives in Sharawne, a neighborhood next to Baalbeck. The neighborhood was besieged recently by the Lebanese Armed Forces during a search operation aimed at arresting various members of the Jaafar clan accused of killing four army soldiers on April 13. According to M. Jaafar, the situation in the neighborhood changed dramatically following the LAF raids. He said, Things will not be the same as before. Everyone is against us. It all started with the adoption of U.N. resolution 1701. Instead of preventing the flow of weapons to Hezbollah, the resolution was used to crack down on our drug trafficking channels across the sea. M. Jaafar accuses the army of disproportionately targeting his clan in their new war on drugs, bringing a lot of negative media attention with it.
M. Jaafar said that around 37,000 people in the Bekaa have outstanding warrants against them, a number that has grown by 200 following the LAFs latest campaign. Many of those who are wanted had only a gram or two of cocaine when they were arrested. Almost none of them were dealers, and there are hundreds of cases like this, he said.
My relatives [in the Jaafar clan] only killed the four soldiers because [around a week before], the LAF killed [a member of our clan] and another man in an ambush that could have been avoided, he said. And a month before that, the same LAF soldiers that killed my relative carried out a similar ambush.
The members of our clan were going to boycott the parliamentary elections to protest Amal and Hezbollahs reluctance to protect the two men assassinated by the army. However, after the shooting of the four soldiers, Hezbollah mediated between the Jaafar clan and the army to calm the situation. In exchange, the Jaafar clan agreed not to boycott the elections, M. Jaafar said.
Hezbollah acts as an alternative institution to the state in the Baalbeck-Hermel district, also known as the eastern Bekaa, although the area still lacks many important services. The eastern Bekaa, where the party has a strong presence is not, however, an area where Hezbollah can secure its success. The Bekaa remains a region where maintaining law and order requires continuous effort. It is home to tribes that behave as a unified political and social entity; they are independent from the party, and Hezbollah has to work constantly to gain their support. The Bekaa also faces another difficulty: the ongoing disagreements between Amal and Hezbollah. It should be noted that these parties agreed to strengthen the Shiite leadership living in the South, and this decision severely frustrated the Shiites in the Bekaa.
Indeed the Baalbeck-Hermel candidate list for the June 7 parliamentary elections that Hezbollah announced does not include members of any tribes, and this causes the most outrage among many people in the East Bekaa. A group of tribal figures in the eastern Bekaa met with Hezbollah, said Yasin Jaafar, the son of one of the leaders of the al-Jaafar clan. Hezbollah told us not to protest the lack of tribal representation on the electoral list. Nevertheless, the security incidents we are seeing these days in the eastern Bekaa is a result of Hezbollahs inability to exercise full authority in the region. The Lebanese state and its security apparatus are weak and competing with a force that does not allow them to intervene. Perhaps the recent killing of four Lebanese soldiers offers a good example of how critical the situation in the Bekaa has become.
Meanwhile, the most prominent leaders from the Bekaa tribes are left to deal with the global recession, high levels of poverty and unemployment that plague the region and a lack of development projects over nearly two decades, at a time when the cultivation of hashish has been largely abandoned.
The Bekaa region was one of the most secure and wealthy, M. Jaafar recalled. Whoever says that we are trying to steal cars should remember that we were the ones who made the Lebanese economy flourish through agriculture, which should prove to them the importance of our region, he added sadly. |
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