Persona non grata

60 
Persona Non Grata: Expulsions of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon 
 
 
 
Khadija was released after two months and twenty-two days, Ismail told 
Human Rights Watch. She returned to Markaba, but said that she was separated 
from her expelled husband because she was not allowed to leave the village: “I 
wanted a permit to go out because I no longer had a house. I had nowhere to go, 
but Abu al-Rida [the head of security for Markaba] would not give me a permit to 
go to Beirut.”    Finally — Khadija could not remember the exact date — she said 
that she was given a white piece of paper that allowed her to leave Markaba but 
never return. She stated that the paper was taken from her at the crossing point on 
the day that she left. When her husband died in May 1994, the family was not 
permitted to bury his body in the village.
81
 
 
                                                 
          81         
Human Rights Watch interviews, Beirut, Lebanon, April 1999 and May 1999. 
The prohibition of the burial of some elderly residents in their home villages in the 
occupied zone has continued. Agence France-Presse reported that on May 2, 1999, the 
burial of ninety-year-old Safiya Fouani was not permitted in Houla, and that SLA 
militiamen turned away her funeral cortege at the Beit Yahoun crossing. According to 
AFP: “The Israeli army has been imposing `collective punishment’ measures against 
the village of Houla...since a deadly anti-Israeli guerrilla attack there in March.   
Houla residents have been prevented from entering or leaving the occupied border 
strip since then.” The same day, AFP added, militiamen at the crossing “allowed two 
other funeral processions to enter the border zone towards the village of Mais Al Jabal 
and the town of Bint Jbeil.” See “SLA forcibly prevents funeral in south Lebanon 
village,” Jordan Times (Amman), May 3, 1999.       
 

---

 
 
 
61 
 
V.   PUNISHING FLIGHT FROM THE MILITIA 
 
“They came to us in the afternoon and said 
that we had to leave in the morning.” 
 
—Former resident of the occupied zone 
describing how she, her husband, and two 
children were expelled from the  village of 
Markaba after her son deserted the SLA in 
1997.    
 
The SLA practice of forced conscription of teenaged boys has been a 
long-standing nightmare for families that are opposed to the occupation and 
despise the SLA. According to Lebanese defense lawyers,  since 1985 “about 
12,000 people have joined the SLA freely or forcibly.
82
  Based on the testimony of 
former residents of the occupied zone, there appears to be no standard procedure 
for recruitment of militia members and no minimum age requirement for those 
who have been pressed into service. A woman from Markaba, whose son was 
forced to join the SLA at sixteen years old (see below), told Human Rights Watch 
that forced conscription of children by the SLA was not unusual: “They take them 
at fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years old. They took my neighbor’s son at 
fourteen,” she said. Present at her interview with Human    Rights Watch was one 
of her  nephews, who said that he had been forced into SLA service in 1998, 
when he was seventeen years old. He remained in the militia for four months and 
then was released for medical reasons. He fled the village and is afraid to return.   
                                                 
          82         
    Agence France-Presse, "Former Israeli-allied militiamen `treated correctly’ 
— lawyers,” June 11, 1999. 
 

---

62 
Persona Non Grata: Expulsions of Civilians from Israeli-Occupied Lebanon 
 
 
 
A former resident who deserted the SLA in 1995 told Human Rights 
Watch: “They take them even at twelve years old if they are tall and strong. It 
depends on the village.  If you collaborate with them, they don’t take you. The 
young men who are left in the villages are either collaborators or militia.”  He 
said that militiamen have visited villages with lists of names, looking for intended 
conscripts at their homes.
83
 By the accounts of other residents, sometimes the 
SLA security chief in a village personally instructed fathers that their sons should 
“volunteer.” If families were not responsive, the sons were forcibly conscripted.   
A former resident of Sheba, expelled in December 1998, said that teenagers 
between the ages of fifteen and seventeen were targeted for conscription: “They 
had to join the SLA voluntarily or by force. Those who did not had to leave.”    As 
noted earlier, the exercise of this option of flight from the occupied zone has 
contributed to the depopulation of local villages. 
A twenty-one-year-old from a small village in the eastern sector of the 
occupied zone described how he was forcibly pressed into the SLA in 1995, when 
he was seventeen years old.
84
  During the two years before he was seized, he 
would hide when militiamen came to the village looking for new conscripts. In 
1995, when he was in his last year of technical school studying to be an 
electrician, ten militiamen in uniform arrived in a truck and a jeep and surrounded 
the family’s home, their guns drawn. “They stormed the house and took me,” he 
said. “They told me that I had a problem and was wanted.”       
He said that his parents and his school principal unsuccessfully pleaded 
with local SLA security authorities to let him finish school. He was taken first to 
the security office in the village, where he was beaten and tortured because he had 
eluded military service for several years. Then he was moved  to the SLA’s 
Megidiyya military training camp for twenty days, where he was placed under 
constant surveillance. After training, he served for two months in Beit Yahoun 
and Brachit until he managed to escape and flee the zone. As a precaution, the 
family arranged the departure of his fifteen-year-old brother from the village 
before he fled.
85
 
Some families moved out of the zone voluntarily to ensure that their sons 
would not be forced into SLA service; others stayed in their villages but sent their 
sons out when they reached fourteen or fifteen years old. “I left thirteen years ago 
                                                 
          83
     Name, and name of village, withheld on request.  
          84         
Name and village name withheld on request. Human Rights Watch interview,   
Beirut, Lebanon, April 1999. 
          85         
Human Rights Watch interview, Beirut, Lebanon, April 1999.   

---