While the situation of displaced people from the southern and Bekaa regions of Lebanon is worsening, after the displacement period has reached nearly three years, and with the promises of return fluctuating under a ceasefire with unclear results, media campaigns and direct meetings are being held by party institutions, civil society organizations and public figures, adopting a systematic discourse aimed at alleviating or mitigating the displacement crisis.
This discourse, which can only be described as outwardly concerned and pragmatic but inwardly deliberately procrastinating, seeks to make the displaced accept their losses as minor or resigned to their fate. At times, this discourse even stifles the voices of the displaced before they can be heard, preventing them from expressing their pain and catastrophic suffering, as if they have no need for any solution that might alleviate their anxieties or open a door to mercy.
This discourse deliberately ignores the fact that our homes, which were destroyed and bulldozed, have a right upon us to raise our voices to stop the war, and that we rebuilt them breath by breath until they became the lungs of our lives. Are not the homes in which we were raised our families? And are not the homes in which we were born our children?
In one of the meetings at the beginning of the war, a displaced person who worked in the health sector in the border towns objected to the meals provided, which were “not even fit for dogs.” The people in charge promised him a hot meal, and the objection ended there! That is, at the point where the displaced person swallows his voice, his losses, and his despair of returning to his land, which has become a “geography” that neither advances nor delays in strategic and political calculations, and he accepts that his feelings belittled in exchange for a food ration, under the roof of steadfastness and the promised victory.
In that same meeting, only two dissenting voices were raised, and although their objection was cohesive and confident, it contained sighs of sadness and fear of the confiscation of the right to expression and freedom, and anxiety about the logic of betrayal and threats. It is not surprising that in what is known as the “nurturing environment,” which has never nurtured us, our voices are confiscated; we who object to this devastation, and they are turned back upon us, so that our sadness increases as a result of every act of oppression that one of us is subjected to, even though our sadness, in turn, increases for the martyrs and victims of this environment, most of whom are our students, acquaintances, and relatives…
In contrast, many voices rise that differ from the voice of the owner of the “stale meal,” saying: “Our home is a sacrifice for…” and “We will remain steadfast,” and “Our children chose the path… so congratulations to them and their reward is with God.” These voices seem more ideological, politicized, and showy, and most of the time they are an echo of the power rhetoric repeated by the “displacement orators,” which only serves to feed the tendency to be stubborn in the broken spirits of the displaced, their losses, and their destroyed and abandoned homes, which have become known only to God and the enemy. Instead of these orators being honest with the displaced about the gratuitous losses of lives and livelihoods that the war has left behind, they impose upon them mystical notions that make them happy with defeat and victorious with destruction.
I knew implicitly that with my voice, my anger, and my oppression, I could not change what the people of this environment had been accustomed to for so long. But this war surpassed its predecessors in its brutality, making change a possibility. I found that many of them were secretly objecting and suppressing their oppression. But what value does a suppressed voice of truth have? And does the description of the voiceless apply to this group? Is this situation a result of their human and material defeat, which befell them simultaneously with a political and religious mobilization that removed them from the circle of citizenship in the state and placed them in the realm of partisan and sectarian favoritism? And led them down a path of no return?
It is a dark reality that can only be dispelled by returning to ourselves, to our attachment to the places we lived, our homes, and the details we loved, and to what we left behind to preserve our bodies. We must consider returning as a driving force that allows us to lift from our weary souls the empty pride that seems inherent to us, when it is not. I know this from my active engagement with them in life, and I know that beneath their skin—our skin—lies much dust from the stones with which we built our homes and gardens, and from the soil of our land with which we wiped our faces, planting trees and roses within it so that we might grow together in God’s protection.
We displaced people, whether the few who object or the silent majority, if we continue to suppress our anger, we will not be rewarded for our silence. I am almost certain that God does not accept our humiliation and submission, for He is the Most High who called for the elevation of the soul and its rising above humiliation, and commanded us to preserve our bodies and souls from gratuitous destruction, and not to waste our dignity in tents on the roads, and not to offer our homes as a sacrifice to anyone, and not to trade our land for settlements and power equations. I ask: Why do our voices not rise? What are we waiting for?
In the midst of a war that has not yet ended, and despite an agreement that we do not yet know whether it includes us or not, I fear that our displacement will become a permanent exodus. No one or entity, neither a party nor a state, has promised us a time for return, but rather they have left us on the path of the unknown, on the path of deliberate and unintentional deception.
However, I am hopeful that the few among us will become many, and that our voices will rise without fear or anxiety, and only then will we elevate ourselves towards true citizenship, a citizenship lost even within the state itself, which has distanced itself for decades from the South and its people, thus establishing the monopoly of known entities to control us, entities that do not recognize the state, but throw upon it the responsibility of devising solutions, helping the displaced, stopping the war, and reconstruction!
That is her duty if she cleanses herself of those who contributed to emptying her of her function and meaning, and only then will she build for us a homeland in which there is no foreign investment.