Hezbollah Prisoner Exchange
Beirut - 16 July 2008
I began my day at four thirty in the morning. The electricity was out at the Orange House, but Poopy and Sour were barking and the two old ladies had emerged from their bedroom, bustling around in preparation for their daily sea-turtle regimen. I sat on the patio and thumbed through Fast Food Nation as the sun began to peek from around the banana leaves and orange trees. “That bird,” she told me, pointing up, “is the one that wakes me up every morning.”
It was five when we walked through their garden, over the disused train tracks, down the dirt road that cut through their orchard and unlocked the gate down to the beach. It was warm, just right, and strange looking crabs scrambled in terror from Poopy’s lazy march down the sand. We scoured one side of the beach, picking up random bits of trash that had washed in from other Mediterranean countries, and stared out at the wonderful mix of turquoise and purple that was slowly giving way to day. Fadi, the taxi driver from Beirut who was fixing for a journalist from the Frankfurter Allgemeie Zeitung, was there with us. He took out his Beiruti post-war traumatic stress disorder with a short bamboo rod on unlucky crabs. Meanwhile, we dug up turtle nests and fitting them with protective cages to discourage foxes and people. 
The eggs were soft, and she only dug up enough to see that they were there before covering the hole up. The whole thing was done quickly enough. I went back to the house and continued to read the good parts of the book. It was peaceful, quiet, for a bit. At breakfast I had toast with labneh and watched intently as flies feasted on poisoned sugar. I swiveled my head around and looked through the leaves of the trees and spotted UNIFIL helicopters zooming back and forth over the sea. By then, the cars had begun to zoom triumphantly south down the coast road to Naqoura, the border town with Israel where the day’s prisoner swap was happening. I went out to the road and watched as heavy Mercedes zoomed with young men hanging from the windows waving Amal and Hezbollah and SSNP flags, and they waved to my camera as I snapped photos of them. I left Mansouri with the German and the cabbie and went back north to Beirut. Nobody was on the highway; a lot of people were taking the day off to celebrate. I got dropped off at the Kuwaiti Embassy by the highway in a part of Beirut I didn’t know and I asked the incredulous embassy guards if they knew where Dahiyeh was. They squinted through the sun at me, listening hard, and after they deciphered what I was trying to say, they gesticulated wildly. Turn right, their hands said. I walked some more, past the infamous Sabra Palestinian refugee camp, and past a few relics of the 2006 Israeli bombing (emphasis on few). I got a little lost, so I ducked into a juice shop as the electricity flickered out and the blenders sputtered to a halt. I had a lemon ice slushie, and I sat sipping it and writing down thoughts. A sunglassed man was sitting at a table on the sidewalk, and I could see from inside that he had a thin, curled clear tube leading from under his collar to his ear. I only then realized that I was in the security zone, the area in the southern suburbs where Hezbollah reins supreme, checks passport, grants permission for access, and generally functions as an independent state. I walked out, careful to check over my shoulder to be sure that he wasn’t slowly tagging along, and walked down toward the route indicated by the man at the embassy. I had my camera backpack and my camera slung over my shoulder, and soon I heard “Psst, psst” coming from a teenager wearing tight black clothes with a walkie talkie sticking out of his pocket. On his brown baseball cap, I could make out the faded image of the fist holding a rifle – the symbol of Hezbollah. “Soura? Soura?,” he asked, and I knew he was talking about the camera. A few others swarmed up around him and stared at the scene, fingering their walkie-talkies. I had only experienced their tight control of images once in 2007, but then I was with a tour organized by the press office. I tried to explain that I was trying to find Jamya al-Qai’m. He looked at me bewildered. “Party?” I said, trying hard, “celebration? Nasrallah? Woo-hoo!?” “Ahh, okay,” he said, getting it. He pointed with his walkie-talkie over toward the other side of the street where there stood a black structure that looked like a miniature air traffic control tower. As I walked across the street I looked around and noticed the dozens of men with brown hats and walkie-talkies that were watching me from stores, from balconies, from windows with the curtains suddenly pulled back. They were everywhere. I stayed calm, knowing that you just need permission to be there, so I took out my passport and my press card and handed it to the man, trying to stay cool. “American?” he asked, lip curling, as he looked down at my passport. “Yep,” I said, resigned. (I had failed once before in pretending to be Canadian in sticky situations, so I just decided to never do it again.) “Daily Star?” “Yes, here for the celebrations.” He took my camera and slung it over his shoulder and went to a telephone and talked quickly to someone. He came back and told me to show him what I had photos of, so I showed him the photos of the beach and the turtle nests. He seemed confused. I said “Sour,” and he relented. He told me not to take any pictures of the neighborhood. I said I hadn’t, and I wouldn’t. But I told him that I wanted to get photos of the celebrations later in the day. “Okay,” he said, and then he walked away, with my camera over his shoulder. I followed him, a little worried. He brought me to the Hezbollah Media Relations Office, somewhere I had been before. 
He pressed the button for the elevator and we stood as it rose up, silently, awkwardly, and he knocked hard on the door and we were let into the office. A stern, teacherly-looking woman looked at me, noticeably unhappy to see someone there. “Yes?” They took my passport and photocopied it and she told me to go away and come back when the party had started. “Watch TV,” she instructed, “and come back when the helicopters land at Beirut airport.” As she was leaving the room I called out and told her that I had met her before, when my university had visited Dahiyeh last year, and she looked at me suspiciously. She didn’t remember. I asked for directions to Jamya al Qai’m, the mosque where the thing was supposed to happen and she wrote it for me on a piece of paper. She looked happy when I left. She had more important things to attend to - it was a big day. I went out from the office and was immediately redetained by forgetful Hezbollah security forces, who gesticulated at each other wildly in Arabic as I stood, frustrated, waiting for them to work out the misunderstanding. “I’m going away. Going, away, this way, I swear, no pictures, leaving. Coffee. Where can I have coffee?” They told me to go that way, and so I went. I sat in a long, handsome restaurant and drank many rounds of Turkish coffee as all the patrons watched Al Manar as the prisoner swap began. A few of the wealthy people there waved Hezbollah flags as if they were at some sort of unenthusiastic baseball game. I watched as trucks laden with coffins draped in the Lebanese flag crossed the border in front of a bandstand that read, “Freedom is guaranteed by Hassan Nasrallah, Humilitation is guaranteed by Ehud Olmert.” I forgave them for their awkward construction and realized that the group was trying to move its message to people like me. Those who it had not already won over. The whole entourage was there at Beirut airport to greet the prisoners when they arrived in the afternoon, including a visibly unhappy-to-be-there Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, whose new unity government included the celebrators. He gave the customary three cheek kisses stiffly, with little emotion. President Michel Suleiman, on the other hand, seemed very happy to be there. Since the prisoners had landed, I left and walked back to where I was going. I’ll cut out all the boring repetition of the various circles I made trying to figure out how to get in. On the way, a boy of maybe ten years asked me “You are American?” and groaning, I said, “yes...” “You love America?” I thought to myself “I could explain my sense of nationalism to you, but you would not understand...” He cut off my inner monologue with “And you love Israel?!” “No, please, go away,” I said, looking around and seeking to avoid a scene. I found the press tent eventually. It was a huge warehouse with the stylized portrait of Imad Mugniyeh, the recently assassinated Hezbollah terror mastermind. I was greeted with a smile by the sharply dressed media liaisons who took my bag, my press card, and asked me to sit down. They very quickly ran my name against a database and came back out, holding my press card (on which my name was misspelled) and asked “Are you still a student at Tufts University, or are you a journalist now?” I gulped. I hadn’t told them anything about anything having to do with Tufts. But I had interviewed a Hezbollah MP in 2007 with a Tufts delegation. They had a good database, and they wanted me to know it. “I’m still a student, but I’m just working at the Daily Star for the summer.” “Okay, just one moment,” he said with a smile. Someone brought me an Iranian-funded bottle of Tanourine mineral water and I sipped, waiting. They came back and tagged my camera and bag with security clearance slips and gave me a press pass which had a specially-designed logo for the event, and a serial number stamped into it with gold foil. They put me in a minibus and drove us through the layers of roadblocks and directly to the press stand. We passed guns and buns and an “ultra-realistic” paintball course and walked up into the crowd. 
The square was packed. The press stand was in the middle, with half of the area already packed with screaming, adoring, chanting fans all posing for the cameras. The tall apartment blocks surrounding were filled with people hanging from their balconies, waving flags. There were many security personnel on every building’s roof... In front of us, the VIP section was set up and largely empty. The stage had an enormous cutout fist punching the air – a new symbol I had 
seen on a few billboards – and a band singing rousing party music. The scene was truly incredible. There were boom cameras swinging over the scene, broadcasting live on Al Manar. The two jumbotrons were showing the festivities as they unfolded at Beirut airport: the President, Prime Minister, Speaker of the Parliament all lined up, kissing the prisoners as they disembarked in Hezbollah uniforms. President Suleiman gave what, despite my lack of Arabic, was certainly a rousing speech. The crowd behind me booed and cheered at all the right moments – whenever a member of the March 14th movement appeared on the screen, they all hissed and booed, and whenever anyone allied with Hezbollah came on, they went crazy. Like clockwork. 
There were also hundreds upon hundreds of security guards, of different levels. There were some wearing suits and carefully shuffling along the press so we didn’t stray, and there were also crowd managers who wore yellow Hezbollah hats and sunglasses, and told the people to stop littering and things like that. Three young girls wearing abayas were certainly spying on all the press on stage, covertly filming us as we took photos, typed up stories, and talked on our cell phones. I guess this is how Hezbollah builds its database.
There were a few speeches, and from the jumbotrons I could tell that things were getting closer. The motorcade was making its way from the airport to the square, and off to the side there appeared to be a commotion. Soon afterward, the prisoners themselves burst onto the stage, Samir Kuntar (the most notorious, and perhaps, most guilty) in the lead. They broke through the bars that were in the back of the stage, looking as if they had been practicing the stunt for some time, and not like they had just walked off of a helicopter fresh from thirty years in a foreign prison. Eventually Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah came on stage, literally wearing his security guards, who were hugging his large frame - likely already clad in many layers of Kevlar. The leader looked triumphant, hugged Kuntar, and began to give a speech. The crowd behind the press stand was euphoric; everyone was standing on their folding chair, and some even fell backward near me in a domino scene, but quickly regained their spot and threw pebbles at the heads of journalists for us to sit down. 
This was one of Nasrallah’s first public appearances in many months (I had heard two years, but I’m not sure), but he was gone quickly. Kuntar gave his speech, and by the time he was done, Nasrallah was back on the jumbotron, at his safehouse, giving the rest of his remarks. The whole thing was so incredibly carefully staged. We left the stage soon after, still in shock at what we had seen, the sounds, the organization of the whole event. As we walked through the dark streets of Dahiyeh and tried to find a taxi, Nasrallah’s speech echoed from every home, store, and passing taxi. It was eerily similar to what being in a totalitarian state must be like when The Leader gives a speech. Everyone was listening. My thoughts of the event will be posted soon. They are less organized, but that is a rundown of what happened.
