Lebanese ex-prisoners face up to freedom

By Nayla Razzouk

BEIRUT (AFP): The first morning after Israel released him from 13 years in prison Lebanese Abbas Srour woke up at dawn, prayed and started mechanically to pace his small room.

Only half an hour later did it occur to him that he could actually open the door and walk out as he pleased.

"For years, I was used to life as a hostage. I had to ask permission to go to the bathroom. I still can't believe I am a free man," said Srour, 37, with a sad smile under his thick beard.

"Years of detention since the age of 24 and being subjected to all kinds of inhuman physical and psychological torture do that to a person," he said, as a circle of well-wishers at his Beirut home nodded in silence.

Srour, his younger brother Abdel Hassan, and 11 other Lebanese were freed last week and returned home after Israel's supreme court ruled their detention illegal.

All were being held as bargaining chips to pressurize the Hezbollah guerrilla group to provide information about Israeli servicemen missing in action in Lebanon, including air force navigator Ron Arad.

"Arad's mother keeps the world's attention focused on his fate. But what about my old and sick mother? Six of her sons were jailed unjustly by Israel, including my 22-year-old brother Khalil who remains in Khiam," said Srour.

Hassan Hijazi was only 16 in 1986 when Israeli officers and their allied South Lebanon Army (SLA) militiamen came to seize him from his family home in Mays al-Jabal in the Israeli-occupied border zone in southern Lebanon.

When they could not find him, they took two of his brothers instead until he surrendered himself a few days later.

He was tried by an Israeli military court which sentenced him to three years in jail, after which he remained in administrative detention for 10 years during which he was transferred to 10 different prisons in Israel.

His crime? The teenager said he had written anti-Israeli graffiti on a wall in his tiny village.

Hijazi, the Srour brothers and the others, all tell the same tales.

Most of them were first detained at the notorious Khiam prison, in the border zone, run by the Israeli-allied South Lebanon Army (SLA) militia under Israeli supervision.

Conditions at the jail have been frequently condemned by human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who point to the torture and ill treatment of Lebanese arbitrarily detained there.

"For five months, I was subjected to interrogations during which I was severely beaten, I was whipped and tortured with electricity," said Hijazi.

The freed detainees said they were then transferred to a military jail called Sarafand in an unknown location in northern Israel where they were placed in tiny solitary cells painted either red or black.

"They prevented us from sleeping with a blinding spotlight and by forcing us to jump up, wear a hood and put our hands over our heads every time they entered our cells," said Abdel Hassan Srour.

"They sometimes used to do that 10 times in one night and if we were not ready, they beat us," said Srour, who was a Hezbollah guerrilla.

Then they were tried by military courts, but remained in detention as "bargaining chips" long after their sentences expired -- in some cases for an extra 10 years. Four of them were never put on trial at all.

That was what happened to Hussein Ahmad Ramiti and Hussein Bahij Ahmad.

In 1987, the two Shiite Muslim men were driving up the Monte Verde mountain road, a region controlled by Christian militias during the 1975-1990 civil war, when they were kidnapped by the now-disbanded Lebanese Forces.

"I was systematically beaten and tortured for a month and a half. Then, in 1990, I was taken by sea to Israel where I was held for 10 years without trial," said Ramiti.

If the detainees are proud to have received a hero's welcome in Lebanon and feel somehow vindicated by the planned Israeli pullout from southern Lebanon by July 7, they remain uncertain and disorientated about their future.

"I was taken at 16. I was a child and there is little I can do now. My life is completely shattered," said a frail bespectacled Hijazi.

"I don't even know how to talk to my children, especially my 13-year-old son Ragheb whom I have only just met because he was born 16 days after my detention," said Abbas Srour.