Soha Bechara Quote

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"For my friends and I, there was life after Khiam. For a time, with the great joy of the liberation of the South, life even became beautiful. It was a rare moment of unity for the Lebanese. For fifteen years, with guns in hand, they had torn each other to shreds, and after a peace that refused to deal with the damage they had done each other, they remained deeply divided, too irresponsible to heal such painful wounds. The liberation showed how our civil war had been, like any fratricidal conflict, a vain illusion when compared with the strength of our resistance against the Israeli occupation.

Khiam grudgingly returned to life so many damaged human beings, cracked and broken. Like all camps of its kind, its goal was to humiliate, to crush, to deny the existence of those it fed upon.

There remains the basic cause for which I fought: a free Lebanon, a country at peace. This is above all a question of memory. If the people of Lebanon let themselves forget, then this hope will be lost and the spirit of the Resistance vanish.

I accepted the idea of dying for my country. I feel connected to the whole planet, to all of humanity, but Lebanon was where I was born and where I grew up. For me, the idea of my country is as simple as the air I breathe. I belong to this piece of earth, and it was from this piece of earth that they tried to banish me. I became a child of war. We never appreciate what it means to live in peace until that peace is no more. It must be understood what it is to grow up under an occupation, to live at the mercy of checkpoints and curfews, stripped of liberty and identity. At some point, with all the massacres, with all the killings, my own blood began to beat in rhythm with the blood around me. I decided to join the struggle. No amount of indoctrination can drive someone to act if that person does not believe in the cause, has not understood it, has not decided to live or even die for it. I knew what was in store, but this knowledge had no power to stop me. When I joined the Resistance, after four years of searching, I did not go alone. My family, my friends, my people—everything that made me who I am—all of it went with me. In the same way, I did not act in my own name as an isolated individual. I felt like all the Lebanese were at my side. My act, the operation itself, was a letter sent to them. In the face of the madness of civil war, it was a message of resistance directed again the real enemy.

In Khiam, I tried to keep resisting. It was the same struggle fought with different weapons, still against the same occupying power. Now the struggle became constant, a matter of holding your own at every moment. Those who broke down, or became informers, were those who did not understand the reality of occupation and resistance, those who could not grasp the radicality of freedom. To have stopped fighting would have been to turn my back on what it means, for all of us, to be human.

Every day, every minute, you hold yourself together—you try not to end up in that other prison, horrible and definitive, the mental hospital. You hear voices of men screaming, of women pleading, you see a mother whose son is torn from her, a grandmother dragged into the torture room, you try to tell the girl in the next cell not to scratch the eczema that devours her body. You don't give in, you don't give away any emotion, or the enemy has won. The prison locks you inside your thoughts, time washes away your memories, your loves, your childhood. Fear is always there. You know that in yourself you have found your ultimate adversary, and that you must once again go beyond yourself to find your freedom, once more, you must resist.

Sometimes in the camp, a laugh, a little improvised scene was enough to overcome the horror. Today, some innocuous things can take me back for a moment to my solitary cell with its floor of beaten earth. But only for a moment. It is not this memory which fills me now, but that of a whole people and its future—the spirit of resistance. Because what I did, I did for tomorrow's children, for that fragile time when they will play in the shade of trees, and the air will echo with their shouts of joy."

- Soha Bechara, imprisoned in 1988 at the age of 21 for attempting to assassinate Antoine Lahad, leader of the Israeli-proxy South Lebanese Army. She was held in the Israeli-linked Khiam camp until 1998. Khiam was liberated on May 24, 2000 as Israel pulled out of South Lebanon.



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