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.