A few days after the massacre of Palestinian refugees in 1982, preceded by a forgotten deadly assault by Palestinian groups on the Christian village of Damur – the Middle East is a chained history of horrors that are difficult to remember… or to forget -, I entered the mouth of a tunnel, next to the municipal stadium of Beirut, which the Fedayeen had turned into a powder room.
In a clearing there was a large opening closed by a grate between slopes of ocher earth. The French contingent of the multinational force sent to Lebanon to pacify the country discovered it when it occupied the vicinity of Sabra. Passing the entrance, there was a steep descent, the mouth of Beirut’s underground labyrinth to communicate with each other the refugee camps, armed fortresses. Palestinian organizations had undertaken the construction of the tunnels years before. At the same time, they were guard bodies, weapons and ammunition depots.
The relentless military search by the Lebanese army exposed the entire network of galleries and catacombs. The tunnel, two meters high and three meters wide, through which you could drive in a jeep, penetrated the earth. With a patrol of French soldiers we advanced, by the light of the lanterns, along a reinforced concrete floor. As we progressed, we discovered crossroads, galleries, an exit that led to the door of a house, in the middle of the refugee compound.
The basement was unfathomable. After a long stretch, it narrowed, and to continue you had to lower your head. “If we continued to the end – the French military man told us – we would go to another refugee camp, that of Burj al-Barajneh, two kilometers from Sabra.
In the neighboring camp of Xatila he showed me the entrance to the refuge, the mouth of another much shorter gallery, from which other galleries started, some lit by fluorescent lights on the vaults, with an incredible arsenal of Grad rocket launchers , Katyusha rocket launchers (the so-called organs of Stalin), shells… But the weapons depots were also hidden in other neighborhoods of the Muslim sector of Beirut, where the Palestinian guerrillas resisted that summer of 1982 the army of Israel
At the time, there was a legend in the city about the existence of another tunnel that reached the sea that Yasser Arafat had built as access to the Mediterranean.
The culture of the tunnels of the decade of the eighties of Abu Amar, Arafat’s nom de guerre, founder of Al-Fatah and top leader of the OAP, who brought together very diverse political forces and who had studied Architecture in Kuwait, emirate with a more liberal disposition to accommodate a large colony of Palestinian refugees who longed to return to their occupied homeland. After the defeat of the Palestinian resistance in 1982, Sabra and Xatila suffered the merciless siege of the Syrian army that fought them for months.
In these unfortunate suburbs of the Muslim area of ??Beirut, next to the municipal stadium, near the airport, there are two museums – one of which is a cemetery – dedicated to their victims. The largest is dedicated to those who died in the months-long attacks by the soldiers of the Baathist regime. Because they were able to rebuild the gunpowder underground, they withstood the relentless attacks of the Damascus soldiers.
This tunnel culture, probably inspired by Arafat, the architect of the PLO, spread to other Lebanese regions far from Beirut, such as the refugee camps of Nahr al-Bared, or Badaui, near Tripoli. They possibly allowed their defenders to receive help to face the Lebanese army, in bloody battles in which they lost more men than in their rare clashes with Tsahal soldiers.
Israelis, Syrians and Lebanese have fought for several periods against the Fedayeen of lost Palestine, refugees after the nakba – the catastrophe of 1948 -, the defeat that has dramatically marked their history.
