Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  To the south, on the road to Metullah and what was known for many years as the Israeli ‘Good Fence’ border crossing, you could just make out El Qlaiaa, another Christian town. The place became unsafe after Ahmed al-Hallaq, the SLA security chief, was abducted by some of his own men who had been got at by the Hizbollah command. They were paid good money to hand him over to the Party of God. In Israel such an act would be roughly analogous to Hamas partisans kidnapping the head of Shin Bet, torturing him and then putting him to death.

  That is what Hizbollah did, I was told often enough. They forced al-Hallaq to reveal the names of many of his agents, who were then rounded up or killed. He couldn’t resist their entreaties, they said afterwards, because they had their own ways of making him talk and the human body can only take so much …

  From the same roof you could also see some of the buildings on the outskirts of El Khiam, with its notorious prison that during the Israeli period of occupation drew a lot of attention, especially from human rights groups. There was plenty happening at Khiam when I was around – a bit like Guantanamo today – but it wasn’t the sort of place that visiting journalists made too much of.

  Both the Israelis and the SLA always maintained that the prison inmates were criminals who had committed what were euphemistically referred to as ‘military crimes’. There were no details given, even if you asked, except that if Khiam did not exist, ‘then the war would go badly for everyone’, an Israel colonel told me. Then Hizbollah might be within small-arms range of Israeli settlements, he warned. He was probably right because now that the IDF has finally pulled back, many Jewish settlements, moshavs and kibbutzims are being fired at from across the fence.

  What was disconcerting was when some people in a couple of villages adjacent to Khiam told me that they could sometimes hear prisoners screaming at night. Who knows what went on behind that structure’s 13-foot walls topped with razor wire?

  All this was happening in an area roughly 30 miles from east to west and about 8 miles deep and officially under UN control. Those Europeans operating in South Lebanon at the time knew very well about what was going on at El Khiam when the Israelis were still in South Lebanon, but they tended to look the other way whenever this reality faced them. In this peculiar never-never-land, most UN contingents pretended that the place simply didn’t exist.

  The man who created the SLA south of Beirut was an Israeli officer, Colonel Yoram Hamizrachi, who was originally a journalist, a very good one, we were told. For the purpose, he was given the rank of lieutenant colonel and told to get on with it. Initially the new unit was called the Christian forces, and only later the South Lebanese Army.

  Hamizrachi, whose idea it was in the first place, was an impressive fellow and I got to know him well over the years. After his tour of duty with the IDF, he stayed with me for a while in South Africa and then went on to live in Canada.

  Some journalists who arrived at Metullah – where Beata, his German-born wife, and he operated out of – suggested that Hamizrachi’s job with the SLA had all the makings of something quite glamorous and derring-do. It was anything but.

  The man was tall and, frankly, far too heavy for the popular notion of an Israeli Army officer. He usually wore a billowing kaftan at home, where he received most of his callers – Jewish or Arab – and that would sometimes give him an almost brooding, Buddha-like image. He was also impressively well-read and as fluent in Arabic as if he’d been born to the culture.

  A journalist and a lieutenant colonel in the IDF Reserve, barrel-chested Yoram Hamizrachi almost single-handedly created Sa’ad Haddad’s South Lebanese Army. Several times my wife and I visited him at his home in Metulla, Israel’s northernmost town. On one occasion, he took us across the border into South Lebanon. (Beata Hamizrachi)

  His mien was disarmingly frank, which would sometimes belie more immediate concerns. His house, he used to say, was on the very last spit of land that nudged Israel’s northernmost security fence. ‘The most northern house in the State of Israel’, he would joke and then offer us a drink.

  When Fatah and, later, Amal and the others began lob Katyushas across the fence, the Hamizrachi family would take shelter in one of the back rooms. The idea was to always have at least two walls between them and anything heading their way.

  ‘We don’t worry about it too much’, Beata would say. ‘They are not very accurate and we always have time to move when the first one whistles through.’

  Hamizrachi could also be unconventional, especially in his handling of ‘predators’, as he liked to refer to members of the Fourth Estate. In the late 1970s, no serving Israeli officer would take a journalist (certainly none with foreign passports) across the border into Lebanon. We were considered to be imperfect correspondents by the authorities in the Middle East and were treated accordingly. Yet he led me across the border on my second morning in Metullah.

  ‘I want you to meet somebody’, he said in his booming baritone that always set the scene, if not for a confrontation, then for something about to happen. I was to meet the leader of the SLA, he told me. So it was that I was, for the first time, ushered into the presence of Major Sa’ad Haddad, a self-effacing Lebanese regular officer who had given up a promising career in the army to throw in his lot with the Israelis.

  This Arab officer was the antithesis of Hamizrachi and a very different kind of individual. He spoke imperfect English and almost needed to be nursed through an interview, suggesting little and volunteering almost nothing except platitudes. He’d use phrases like ‘my boys are brave’ and ‘the cause is just’. His Israeli ‘controller’ meanwhile, trod his own narrow path in Arabic when dealing with the man.

  Haddad must have been good at what he did, for the SLA – which initially emerged as an ineffectual mob of ill-assorted strays with guns – was ultimately to become a reasonably efficient counter-insurgency unit. The force would go on to develop a measure of clout that could match anything the Palestinians or Amal threw at them, if only because the SLA operated in the backyard of many of the men in its ranks. Most had grown up in South Lebanon.

  In the early days, after the SLA had been constituted as a fully fledged fighting force by the IDF and given much Soviet hardware captured from the Egyptians and Syrians, serious difficulties emerged, some of them bad enough for Jerusalem to consider abandoning the project.

  There was initially little order or discipline among the first recruits mustered at Marj’Ayoun. Factional differences gave rise to friction: one group supporting the Ketaib, powerful Christian Phalangists who dominated the Lebanese Force Command, while another Christian grouping fancied those who not only opposed them, but also supported the dissident Franjieh hierarchy of the north. This group was later exposed to Syrian infiltration.

  In those days both groups were generally regarded as thugs. Ruffians I’d heard them called, who would murder for a nickel. I found them pretty good fighters the first time I went out on ops with one of their patrols.

  Taken into the hills flanking the old Crusader castle Fort Beaufort, the patrol became disconcerting when the soldiers started taunting Palestinian units on the ridges above. It was a bold but asinine show of strength. What worried me was that that all we had between us and ‘them’ was a thin-skinned M113 APC which trundled along lines that were hardly demarcated. The APC would certainly have been no match for any of the 23mm heavy guns that Fatah was able to deploy.

  Although the Palestinians shot at us from time to time, there was never any kind of concerted attack. Both sides knew that the Israeli Air Force needed little provocation to respond. Nights were different and were when most Hizbollah, Palestinian Fatah or Amal elements would emerge.

  Over the years many questions were asked about why the SLA was actually created in the first place. It seemed a paradox: Jews employing Arabs to protect their northern flank. ‘Simple’, said Hamizrachi after I’d returned to the Israeli side of the fence. ‘It’s there to protect the southern Lebanese from Beirut and the north. Since
there are thousands of people dying each month, it makes good sense to recruit these people.’

  As Hamizrachi explained, the SLA was conceived to prevent hostile penetration of Israel from Lebanon. At that time, in the late 1970s, Israeli farms and settlements came under frequent attack from across the border. Moreover, the frontier was porous; Fatah could sometimes ambush vehicles on Israeli roads. When they did, casualties could be serious and often were. A Fatah guerrilla group once attacked a bus full of Israeli children and took hostages. Many young innocents died that day.

  Some UN countries were willing to stand up to Hizbollah militants and casualties mounted steadily. The Fijians, in particular lost quite a few lives because they stood fast in the face of Arab intimidation; here a Fijian soldier is airlifted out of the operational area. (Author’s collection)

  ‘We could put an end to all that schlimazel by creating a secure border zone’, were his words. ‘And what better way to do that than by using the people living on the other side?’

  It was decided by Jerusalem that since the area round the Litani River, the largest water course in Southern Lebanon (though barely a trickle in summer), was inhabited mostly by Christians, they could be mustered, also for their own protection. They would be brought together as a group, trained and armed and used to deal with the kind of terror then creeping south. In fact, it made good sense. As Hamizrachi said: ‘Lebanon was on the rubbish tip of history, anyway.’

  So it was that the Christians in the south began looking after their own interests and, indirectly, those of Israel. Since the Muslims living in the region were aghast at what was happening elsewhere in the country, they did not oppose this new development. In fact, so many of them supported it in the early stages that the SLA opened its ranks to members of the local Shi’ite community. Hindsight demonstrated afterwards that this was a bad mistake.

  Part of the problem inherited by Hamizrachi was that despite the fighting, many Lebanese government institutions were still in place, if only nominally. There was still a Lebanese Army as well as a police force, although by now, both had been marginalized by civil insurrection. For many, to join the newly established SLA would have meant abandoning their careers. Some long-serving officers were worried about what association with the SLA might do to their prospects of promotion, never mind their pensions. Crumbling security and the collapse of the Lebanese economy finally decided it for them.

  Slowly the SLA matured, but it was a demanding process. For a while American, German and French mercenaries were allowed to join (conditions were hard and the pay derisory; about $100 a month with no perks), but few stayed long. One was Dave McGrady, an American who had fought in Rhodesia and with whom I went on a bounty hunt in Ian Smith’s rebel territory (as described in Chapter 19). He came to hate Lebanon.

  Some of these ‘volunteers’ were infiltrated into the SLA by radical groups then active in Europe and the Middle East. Those whose cover was blown were quickly liquidated. Others just disappeared.

  Many South Lebanese Army strongpoints were fortified by the Israelis, who passed on captured Soviet armour, taken from the Egyptians or the Syrians, to help fortify these positions. (Author’s collection)

  On a broader canvas, there is little doubt that the Muslim people of southern Lebanon have always been an entity unto themselves. Proud of their southern origins, they can almost be compared to southern Italians who regard their northern cousins with disdain.

  Though Shi’ite, these people are known as Metawillah and have been referred to as dissenting followers of Islam. Past travellers have noted their toughness and treachery, due to the number of times their culture has been uprooted by invading armies, from the early Egyptians on. In the few dealings I had with these people, I found them forthright. If not overly friendly they were always correct in their dealings. By contrast, there was no curbing the vicious hostility projected my way by their children, particularly after Israeli artillery had been active and casualties resulted.

  Colin Thubron deals with the region and its inhabitants in sumptuous detail in his book The Hills of Adonis. Though published almost half a century ago, it was clear even then that turmoil was imminent.

  Yet, as the SLA gathered strength, still more Shi’ites were recruited. Like Christians serving in the SLA, they were allowed to send their families across the Good Fence into Israel to work. Initially, as I was to see, things worked well. Because of the war there were times when their wage packets provided the only economic support.

  By the mid 1980s the SLA had evolved into a cocky and well-knit little army. By now the IDF had strengthened its defences by providing its surrogates with captured Russian tanks, scores of American M113s and a variety of tracked and half-tracked vehicles. Many SLA officers were sent to Israeli military training depots. It was not long before SLA cadres were almost indistinguishable from the Jews, except for language. Their uniforms and small arms were the same and to cap it, every IDF soldier working with the SLA was fluent in Arabic, since most of these troops were of Sephardic origin.

  Meanwhile, the Israelis had built a string of secure fortifications that stretched from the mountains along the Syrian border to the coast north of Naqoura. In UN jargon, these were the installations that were referred to as PVs: ‘Permanent Violations’.

  Most lay on high ground and dominated a likely infiltration route. In keeping with Israeli strategy, all approaches were mined. The same was true of IDF strongpoints on the Golan, one or two of which were able to hold out until relieved during the Yom Kippur War, even when completely surrounded by the Syrian Army.

  Though the Israelis are now back in Israel, the minefields they left behind still present problems and will continue to do so for a while, especially as not all are mapped.

  At one stage an international mine-clearing group headed by Lionel Dyck, a former Rhodesian Army officer, was contracted to deal with some of them. His brief included some Hizbollah-controlled areas in the Beka’a Valley. By all accounts, it will still take many years to finish the job properly.

  Meanwhile, the casualties still occasionally roll in, the majority of them civilians.

  The 1990s initiated a different set of problems that also obfuscated the intentions of those with fingers in the proverbial South Lebanese pie. Yoram Hamizrachi was long gone and while the SLA continued to remain a factor for a while, it was less so than before. Again its future was scrutinized, and for several reasons.

  ‘It’s essentially a problem of security’, said Joseph P., regarding me carefully with his single eye: he’d lost the other in a firefight with a bunch of Palestinians who’d ambushed his patrol. He was an old friend from the period when Samir Geagea had been head of the Lebanese Forces, now also dissolved, and had been a key man in his hierarchy. He’d actually been my contact when I first entered Lebanon during the civil war period. Because he was from the Christian south and still had many members of his family there, this former demolitions expert took a great interest in that region. At the same time he didn’t want to be named, which was absurd since everybody knew who he was and the role that he played in this internecine conflict. Still, he was deadly serious when he turned towards me shortly after we first met and warned: ‘You identify me in print and I’ll have your balls, even if I have to send someone to cut them out!’

  Lebanon was still at war when we met in Baabda, a suburb of Beirut, in a little coffee shop. I’d called Rocky, the officer in charge when Christian was killed. He had told me where to find Joseph P.

  ‘The problem is that the SLA is no longer secure. Before it was a Christian force; about 90 per cent. Now it’s mostly Shi’ite. Some members have been subverted.’ He looked surreptitiously about him as he spoke, a characteristic trait, always suspicious, always checking. By his own admission, it had probably kept him alive over the years.

  ‘Some Christian villages have even tried to reach an accommodation with Hizbollah’s Nasrallah. It’s all a question of survival… staying on top.’ It was the customary conspir
atorial touch, typical of Joseph P.

  ‘If the Israelis pull out, then what? There will be a massacre… a serious killing. Thousands! All the old scores will be settled.’ The scar high on his left cheek where he had been hit by shrapnel stood out in sharp profile as he spoke. Then he added: ‘Discipline has become slack. It’s not like the old days when we were doing a competent job’.

  Joseph P. defined the scope of the Israelis in South Lebanon. Because the SLA was no longer working properly, increasing numbers of security roles fell within the ambit of the IDF. That meant more patrols, more searches for mines and more booby traps. The result, he declared, was still more tension and an increasing number of Israeli casualties.

  ‘My friend’, he added, ‘it is no longer a secret that more SLA and Israelis are being killed there than Hizbollah. You can read it for yourself in the Jerusalem Post’.

  Joseph P. was correct. Simply speaking, the Jewish State was losing too many of its young soldiers in what was clearly an army of occupation in South Lebanon. Though the IDF was on the ground in hostile territory, its presence under almost constant fire was achieving very little. Not long afterwards it didn’t surprise us that the Israeli Army pulled back and security in the entire South Lebanon region fell under the control of Hizbollah. Because cross-border hostilities then began to escalate markedly, the IDF launched its disastrous invasion in the summer of 2006.

  Israeli patrols throughout South Lebanon were constant until roadside bombs – or in more modern parlance IEDs – started taking lives. The IEDs currently being used against Coalition Forces in Afghanistan were originally blooded by Hizbollah in this area adjacent to the Israeli frontier. (Author’s collection)