Adonis Diaries

Testimonials of a civil war: Fatema recalls events in 1988
Civil war in lebanon 1975-1991

The issue of daily Al Balad, May 4, 2005

Fatema Rida was nine years old when the Taef Agreement (a revised Constitution for Lebanon) put an end to the war, which was signed on March 28, 1990.  Fatema thought that her memory did not register anything from the war period, until the conflagration of the thousand kilo of dynamite detonated in the vicinity of the St. George hotel and killed former Prime Minister Hariri and twenty other people.

Fatema then started to recall events. In 1988, a shell fell in her kitchen injuring her and her brother.  In the hospital they cried hard but tried to sooth one another that they are not suffering.  Her mother relocated them from Zkak Blat in West Beirut to her grand father’s in South Lebanon.

Fatema’s mother worked in Beirut and visited her children every two Saturdays because the trip used to take 6 hours instead of the regular one hour-trip. Fatema also lost her best blond girl-doll because the girls in the new location kept emptying the stuffing from the burned area of the toy. A newly purchased Barbie doll never replaced her former doll love.

Fatema’s father was killed by a militia faction when she was nine months old and the leader of this militia is in power now. At twenty one, her uncle gave her a cassette of her father talking about the family and she sometimes used to laugh because she realized that he had trouble pronouncing the R.

She recently met Issam, a member of the militia that killed her father, and who was in charge of keeping the security at the door of her school Batriarkyeh.  When Issam was sitting in guard, the school could resume as usual. When Issam was standing then the school prepared to close immediately, and students went home under a rain of bullets.