Fear haunts Israel's Lebanese militiamen

By Joseph Logan

MARJAYOUN, Lebanon (Reuters): Only children returning from school and old men stroll the streets of Marjayoun these days, but the veterans of Israel's vanquished Lebanese proxy army here fear the neighbors they don't see.

As hundreds of members of the defunct South Lebanon Army (SLA) return to their villages after serving jail terms for collaborating with Israel's 22-year occupation of south Lebanon, they know well that all is not forgiven.

In Marjayoun -- once the center of the Christian-led force that crumbled before Israel's withdrawal last May -- and nearby towns, many have been greeted with bombs in their cars and anonymous leaflets warning of revenge.

A fire that ripped through the house of one SLA member the night before he was to return from a prison near Beirut last month tells them all they need to know, they say.

"I am ruined," says one SLA man who returned to Marjayoun a few weeks ago after finishing his sentence.

Speaking in a sitting room in his home adorned with portraits of Christ and statues of saints, he refuses to give his name or discuss his role in the SLA in any detail.

But he says the charge of collaboration and the stigma it bears are insults that inevitably fall to the rank and file on the wrong side of a victor's peace.

"This is a huge word, 'traitor'," he says, smoking and trembling slightly. "You spend your days bringing coffee to some bastard, as a slave basically, and then your life is over."

Lebanon has detained about 3,000 SLA members and people accused of collaborating with Israel during the occupation. Most of them and SLA members who heeded a call by the Islamic guerrilla group Hizbollah to turn themselves in have been given light sentences by a military court.

Lebanese and foreign observers predicted a bloody wave of retribution against Christian and Shi'ite SLA members in the pullout, but instead saw Hizbollah dispatch sheikhs to liberated towns, welcoming them back to Lebanese sovereignty.

The group's head, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, points to the move as proof that revenge was never a consideration.

"If we had wanted to, we could easily have exploited the chaos of the withdrawal for those ends," he said in an interview with the Al-Jazeera satellite television channel in May.

But he said lingering hostility to the SLA -- which ran a prison in the occupation zone whose former inmates recount a range of torture -- is fanned by the seeming leniency of the sentences handed out by Lebanon's judiciary.

More than 6,000 SLA men and family members fled to Israel during the pullout. Several thousand remain, but it is estimated that about 1,600 have returned to Lebanon. Former SLA head Antoine Lahd stays on, living in a Tel Aviv hotel.

Other former SLA members and their families say they knew they would never have that option, and chose instead to take their chances with the Lebanese authorities.

"How many top-ranking officers were there, 20, 50? They're gone, almost all of them. They fled: the Israelis had no intention of leaving them here," says one former militiaman.

Their families argue that the charge of collaboration with an occupier rings hollow; that the power vacuum Lebanon's civil war generated in the south forced them into the arms of the SLA through conscription or out of economic necessity.

"It happened. There's a foreign army here and you have to deal with them to live and get by," explains the wife of one SLA man sentenced to a seven-year term after he crossed the border.

The families of those who fled resent Israel for abandoning them, but save their true rancor for the Lebanese state that all but vanished during the war and now makes itself known in the south by meting out justice.

"No country in the world ever did this, abandon an entire region for 30 years, then come back and try people," says one woman whose husband fled for Israel, and whose son is returning after a jail term for collaboration.

She notes bitterly that most Lebanese are now re-acquainting themselves with the south after decades, while her husband and son remained through the war and the casualties Hizbollah and various militias inflicted on Israeli troops and the SLA.

"Suppose I abandoned my children, then dropped in to chat 30 years later. Are they going to love me?"

The trials have been seen in some quarters as a tentative step by Lebanon's central government to assert itself, a sign of a Lebanese state that covers and reflects all of the country's religious groups rather than being split up among them.

The woman dismisses the judicial process as a farce that shows the Lebanese haven't come to terms with what they did to each other during the war and the period of occupation that extended beyond it.

"If we've done something wrong then let God punish us. But the whole cost of this war is coming down on our heads. Let everyone pay it."