Nicholas Blanford covers the conflict in South Lebanon for The Daily Star. Nick is British by birth, and has been working as a journalist in Lebanon for five years. He has struggled with the problem of being a non-Arabic speaking scribe in a largely secretive and suspicious region of the world where strangers are not always welcome. But Nick shrugs the apprehensions away with the friendly wave of the hand and a smile. "The Hizbollah are not a problem," he explains, "In all my travelling and visits to their villages I have never been hassled by them. They are careful about their security and you should never try to photograph them without permission, but otherwise if you have a reputation for being fair and accurate they will welcome you."

The Hizbollah seem to have come around to accepting western interest and curiosity as a healthy part of living in a global community. They now realize they have more to gain from interaction with a world audience and are turning away from their isolationist policies of the early 1980s. The post-Khomeini era Hizbollah is one that has taken active part in local politics, contested and won significant representation in both local and national elections since 1992, and has built a reputation for itself as an honest political force with a strong background in social welfare work among the economically weaker sections of the majority Shia community in Lebanon.

The sizeable threat to Lebanese journalists comes from the armies that occupy Lebanon. In the South the Israelis are notorious for grabbing journalists and accusing them of being resistance workers, or sympathizers, and then throwing them in detention cells. Journalists have also been shot at and injured when trying to cover the hostile IDF actions in the South.  Mike and Zena are young Lebanese producers for Future TV, a Lebanese broadcasting company owned by former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The two journalists edit a daily news show in English for the Middle Eastern audience. They have been visiting the southern villages with their camera crews and have often come under fire from IDF and SLA positions. 

"I remember when we came down here to cover the Israeli seizure of Arnoun," recalls Zena , "They had put up a short fence up the road and when we approached it they fired tear gas shells at us and screamed at us through loudspeakers telling us to stop filming and leave. When we hesitated they opened fire on us with rubber bullets and one of the camera men got shot and had to be operated on."

The Lebanese news industry is dominated by motivated journalists, who are driven to expose themselves to danger in Lebanon by their fierce belief that they have a right to cover news in all parts of their country. However, they admit that there are some circumstances in which they have to curb their reportage. "We have to be careful while reporting on anything that has to do with Syrian affairs in Lebanon," explains one journalist, "They are very sensitive to the kind of news we put out about them."

Syrian soldiers form the major armed presence in Lebanon, and unlike the IDF they are here legally - as per the provisions of the 1990 Taif accord which broke up and settled the Lebanese civil war.  The accord was militarily enforced after the tacit approval of the United States in 1990, when then U.S. President George Bush sought an alliance with Syrian President Hafez Assad to counter the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in the region. As a trade off for Syrian support, the Syrian army was allowed to march into Beirut and crush the anti-Taif accord factions of the Lebanese army who had been running a parallel government in Lebanon. Since 1991 the Syrian hegemony in Lebanon has been almost complete. They dictate the terms for peace with Israel, they dictate seat sharing in national elections, they hand pick member of the Lebanese cabinet and, yes, they also censor news.

"All news regarding Syrian affairs has to be first approved by an authorized censor at the Ministry of Information," admits one journalist, "Usually it never gets that far, there is a great degree of self-censorship involved here."

That is a bitter pill most journalists are willing to swallow. Nevertheless, most of them stress that the major crises in Lebanon is not the Syrian army but the continued Israeli occupation and military strikes against Lebanon. Often, they argue, there are censors at work in the U.S. that conspire to hide the realities and the truth of the Israeli occupation.

"The country of terrorism which support Israel with weapons and financial support is America," reads aloud Reem Haddad  from a poster that hangs on the memorial for the victims of the 1996 shelling of the U.N. camp in Qana. The poster is crowded by a collage of black and white photographs of shrapnel riddled kids, and Fijian U.N. soldiers sifting through bodies torn apart and charred so badly that it is impossible to recognize them. "These people were killed by American weapons," notes Reem as she surveys the pictures of the Qana massacre.

Before 1996 Qana was popularly known as the village where Christ turned water into wine. During the 1996 Israeli ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’ a large number of civilians from the southern villages ran to the Fijian U.N. peacekeeping base at Qana and hid there to escape the shelling and bombing conducted by Israeli forces. What happened next is disputed  - the Lebanese villagers and U.N. peacekeepers claim the Israelis deliberately bombed the U.N. camp at Qana killing 107 people. Israeli officials, including then Foreign Minister Ehud Barak, have claimed it was a mistake. 

"When I got there the smell of burning flesh was overpowering and streams of blood flowed out of the camp gates," recalls veteran British correspondent Robert Fisk , "A U.N. peacekeeper later told me he had video taped an Israeli drone flying over the area a few minutes before the actual shelling took place." 
 
 

The remote controlled pilot-less drones are used by IDF to spot targets that are out of the line of sight of their artillery positions, thus this video would have pointed towards the fact that the Israelis deliberately sighted and bombed a U.N. compound. "I called my sources in the U.N. and they told me that U.S. officials had put pressure on then Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali," recalls Fisk, "The Americans had told Ghali that if the U.N. report on this incident was not squashed they would not support his bid for a second term of office. In response to this development the U.N. official in Lebanon then gave me a copy of his tape, which he had made before sending the original to U.N. headquarters."

The videotape, that proved Israeli premeditation in shelling civilians, is one of many atrocities that Robert Fisk has uncovered over the last 25 years he has spent in Lebanon. His previous exposes include reporting on the bloody Syrian massacre of tens of thousands in the crack down on the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Hama in 1982. He also discovered the IDF backed Phalange militia massacre of Palestinian and Shia refugees at the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut that same year. His subsequent stories have regularly won him awards and accolades in Britain but have largely gone unnoticed by the mainstream U.S. press which, Fisk asserts, suffers from a "journalistic cowardice" when it comes to reporting on stories from the Middle East.

Among these stories is the tale of one U.S. Hellfire missile, fired deliberately from an IDF helicopter on an ambulance carrying two men, four women and eight children out of a Lebanese village in 1996. The missile killed two of the women and four of the children. The Israelis claimed that the Ambulance belonged to the Hizbollah and was carrying a wounded Hizbollah guerrilla - investigation by journalists present in the area proved this to be a lie. All the occupants of the ambulance were civilians, and it was not owned by the Hizbollah.

Fisk traveled to the United States hoping to ask the manufacturers of the Hellfire why they sold missiles to countries that used them against civilians. The manufacturers, not knowing the reason for Fisk’s curiosity in the missile, boasted that their missile was "probably the most precise anti-armor weapon in the world… you can fire it through a basketball hoop at five miles and it would do it every time." According to Fisk they got angry when he produced photographs of what their missile had done in Lebanon. Photographs of the two dead women and four dead children. "This is so far off base it is ridiculous, said one of the ex-Colonels," recalls Fisk, "And one of the executives asked me: Are you on some kind of a crusade?" 

Later, Fisk discovered that the missile had never been sold to Israel, but given away as part of a packaged ordnance gift by U.S. Marines to the IDF, when the Marines left the region after the Gulf War. Fisk claims that the story of the Hellfire missile didn’t appear in the mainstream U.S. press, and that even the actual incident of the blowing up of an ambulance by the Israelis using an American made Apache helicopter was misreported by the New York Times.

"The New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, Serge Schmemann, wrote a story describing the advances of ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’ that evening (April 13th, 1996)," recalls Fisk, "The first five paragraphs quoted Israeli press releases and statements by Israeli officers without question. The shooting of the ambulance got one mention in the sixth paragraph  - the sixth paragraph! And this was followed by a two paragraph statement by an Israeli official who claimed that the ‘other individuals’ in the vehicle hit during the attack had been used by Hizbollah as a cover for Hizbollah activities. And that was it. Serge Schmemann took twice as long to give Israel’s justification of this terrible attack as he did describing the victims. The dead were libeled."

Fisk argues that this kind of reporting on the Middle East is a double standard practiced frequently by some American journalists. "If a Syrian helicopter had attacked an Israeli ambulance and killed four Israeli children and two Israeli women, and pray God such an incident never, ever happens, would Serge have relegated the attack to his sixth paragraph?" asks Fisk, "Would he have given two paragraphs over to a Syrian explanation that the ambulance was carrying a military man, even if it wasn’t? I don’t believe it. If it had been an Israeli ambulance Serge would have put the attack in his first paragraph. That’s where the story should be. That’s what Americans are taught in journalism schools."

Lebanese journalists too are frustrated by the lukewarm response the stories they cover get in the mainstream American press. The most recent incident that proves their point - the Israeli air raids on civil infrastructure in Beirut after Benjamin Netanyahu’s defeat in the June 1999 elections.

"I arrived at the power plant an hour after the Israeli jets had bombed it," recalls Reem Haddad , "I walked around the outside first, there were people running out of their houses, crying. There was glass everywhere. I went into a house and found four children hiding in a closet, crying. We wanted to go into the plant but were prevented by the local security as the plant was on fire. Inside, there were rescue crews trying to find survivors, and fire fighters trying to put out the fires. Then we heard the sound of airplanes and a huge explosion and lights everywhere. The Israeli jets came back, they actually turned around and came back to bomb us a second time. They knew we would be there, journalists and firemen. They came back to attack us and kill people deliberately. "

The second wave of Israeli bombing killed nearly all the Lebanese fire fighters that were around the building. While the U.S. press covered the incident, it concentrated mostly on the Israeli version of the events. "Newspapers in America carry stories about Lebanon but these stories are written for them in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Washington D.C.," asserts Reem.

Journalists in Lebanon go out of their way to help foreign visitors and especially ‘para-correspondents’ who parachute into the region once in a while to represent global news giants. The Lebanese scribes spend long hours explaining the history of the Lebanese conflict and often travel with visiting journalists to remote and dangerous areas. Their sole aim is to provide the world with an insight into the region that is lost in the news bureaus of big cities, chopped up at the desk of skeptical editors, and muted by the propaganda machines of powerful states. Sometimes, they admit, it gets hard to keep going. "I feel very frustrated because the world does not realize this is happening," says Reem, "They think it is poor Israel living among horrible Arabs, but it is Israel that is terrorizing us. It is here, we see it, and the world does not listen to us." 

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From a personal interview with members of staff, Future TV, Beirut, July 1999. 

From a personal interview with Reem Haddad, Qana, South Lebanon, July 1999.

From a personal interview with Robert Fisk, Beirut, July 1999.

From a personal interview with Reem Haddad, Beirut, July 1999.