A few days after the massacre of Palestinian refugees in 1982, preceded by a forgotten deadly assault by Palestinian groups on the Christian town of Damur - the Middle East is a chained history of horrors difficult to remember... or forget - I entered the mouth of a tunnel, next to the Beirut municipal stadium, that the fedayeen had turned into a powder keg.
In an open field there was a large opening closed by a fence between slopes of ocher earth. The French contingent of the multinational force sent to Lebanon to pacify the country discovered it when occupying the outskirts of Sabra. Once through the entrance, there was a steep descent, the mouth of Beirut's underground labyrinth to connect the refugee camps, armed fortresses, to each other. Palestinian organizations had undertaken the construction of these tunnels years before. At the same time they were guard bodies, weapons and ammunition depots.
The relentless military record of the Lebanese army brought to light that entire network of galleries and catacombs. The tunnel, two meters high and three meters wide, through which one could drive a jeep, penetrated into the earth. With a patrol of French soldiers we advanced, by the light of flashlights, along a reinforced concrete floor. As we moved forward, we discovered galleries, crossroads, an exit that led to the door of a house, in the middle of the refugee compound.
The underground was unfathomable. After a long distance it narrowed, and to continue you had to lower your head. “If we continued until the end,” the French soldier told us, “we would end up in another refugee camp, Burj el Brajne, two kilometers from Sabra.
In the neighboring field of Chatila he showed me the entrance to the refuge, the mouth of another much shorter gallery, from which other galleries started, some illuminated by fluorescent lamps in the vaults, with an incredible arsenal of Grad rocket launchers, Katiusha rocket launchers (the called Stalin's organs), howitzers... But the weapons depots were also hidden in other neighborhoods in the Muslim sector of Beirut, where the Palestinian guerrillas resisted the Israeli army that summer of 1982. There was then a legend in the city about another tunnel that reached the seashore that Yasir Arafat had built as access to the Mediterranean.
This culture of the tunnels of the eighties of Abu Amar, the nom de guerre of Arafat, founder of Al Fatah and top leader of the PLO, who brought together very diverse political forces and who had studied architecture in Kuwait, an emirate with a more liberal for hosting 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 Shatila suffered the ruthless siege of the Syrian army, which fought against them for months.
In those unfortunate suburbs of the Muslim area of Beirut, close to the municipal stadium, near the airport, there are two museums – one of them a cemetery – dedicated to his victims. The largest is dedicated to those who died in the months-long attacks by the soldiers of the Baathist regime. By being able to rebuild the underground magazine, they resisted the relentless attacks of the soldiers from Damascus.
This culture of tunnels, surely inspired by Arafat, the architect of the PLO, spread to other Lebanese regions far from Beirut, such as the refugee camps of Nahr el Bwred, or Badawi, near Tripoli. They possibly allowed their defenders to receive help to confront the Lebanese army, in bloody battles where they lost more men than in their rare clashes with Tsahal's soldiers.
Israelis, Syrians and Lebanese have fought at various times against the fedayeen of the lost Palestine, refugees after the Nakba – the catastrophe of 1948 –, the defeat that has dramatically marked their history.
