Government-Less

Tomorrow will be the first day that we are without a government. It’s not the first time; we’ve done without a government before, and we did quite well, I might add. People seem to be quite apprehensive about it. But even with a government, we did not accomplish much, so I dare say it can’t get any worse without one.

It hit the news around 4 P.M. local time, which surprised me quite a bit, as I had read it already this morning in the Dutch newspapers (some 9 hours earlier). Now how come the Dutch papers know this well before the Lebanese do?

This reminded me of a similar situation, some 14 years ago, early April of 1996. My newspaper calls me up on a Monday morning with the request; ‘Go look around in the south, the Israelis are planning something.’

And so I call around. I call my sources in Beirut. 'No, nothing’s moving. Why?' they ask. Well, my paper in Holland says something’s going on. Then I call my sources in the south. Same story. 'No, no movement on the border, everything is quiet. Why?' they ask as well. Well, my paper in Holland says something’s going on. Everyone assures me, all is quiet.

But hey, it’s a Monday, I’m in the mood for a road trip, so hubbie and I take the car, and go for a ride down south. We decide the drive along the border of the security zone which was then still in place. That’s as close as we can get to the Israelis. But between Jarjoueh and Arab Salim, hubbie needs to go to the bathroom. We stop the car near some trees, and he disappears into the bushes. He hasn’t had the time to unbutton his pants when out of the trees, two guys in army fatigue jump, right in front of my car. What are we doing there? Uhhh, well, uhhh, we’re just looking around, seeing if the Israelis are up to something, we say.

Back into the tree they climb, crank up an old black field phone, and call someone in headquarters. Two suspicious, foreign looking characters are snooping around the neighborhood, they report. And so we are ‘escorted’ to the local bigwig in the village, a certain Abu Hussein. He receives us, very cordially. We are served cups of sweet tea and glasses of juice with a napkin folded around them. And he asks what it is we are doing here. It’s not really a conversation, more of an interrogation, but hey, he’s polite, it’s his territory, and there really isn’t much we can do. And so I repeat the same story; my Dutch news paper wants to know what the Israelis are up to, there’s movement on the border. He asks around, makes some phone calls, but he assures us, again, no, nothing is going on, all is quiet.

And so we go home that Monday, April 8, 1996, empty-handed. “Nothing going on in the south,” I fax my paper (in those days we still worked with fax machines). Three days later, the Israelis launch their Grapes of Wrath operation .

I tell you, I didn’t show my face in that village for the next ten years. As a foreigner, you’re deemed a spy anyway, as far as the Hezbollah is concerned. And if you’re roaming around the border, hanging around in the bushes and have a flimsy story that ‘I’m writing a story for my paper about the situation in the south’, well, that just doesn’t come out quite right. Especially not when the Israelis launch an all out war the next two weeks. It did keep me quite busy for a while.

Now how my paper knew what the Lebanese didn’t know, I don’t know. And why they knew this morning at 6:30 AM that 11 minister were going to walk out I don’t know either. But we are going to be ‘government-less’ for a long time, it seems.