'Hope is durable'

Mothers press issues of war that Lebanese want to forget.

As on every morning since October 17, 1985, Audette Salem cleans the rooms of her son and daughter. She leaves his razor, toothbrush and comb as they were on the day her children were abducted from the streets of Beirut during Lebanon's civil war. She fiddled with her daughter's makeup and straightened her bed. She dusted the three guitars, the papers still on their desks and the pack that holds a 20-year-old cigarette, the artifacts of two lives interrupted.

"Everything is there as they left it," she said. "I haven't changed a thing, nothing at all. It's all still there."

At 70, quiet but determined , Salem is a woman who clings to memories in a country that prefers to forget.

In the heart of downtown Beirut, ravaged by a brutal 15-year civil war, then rebuilt into a graceful, if somewhat soulless, urban hub, Salem joins other women every day in a protest demanding to know the fate of their children. Many believe they languish in jails in neighbouring Syria. Behind them, their children's faces stare from pictures tacked to billboards and the dates of their disappearances reading like a war memorial yet to be built.

The protest by Salem and dozens of other mothers serves as a stark reminder, organisers say, that Lebanese society has yet to confront, much less resolve, the legacy of the most cataclysmic event in its modern history - the 1975-90 civil war. Fifteen years later, that conflict is still shrouded in silence. Under a 1991 amnesty law, all but a handful of killings were placed beyond prosecution.

"When you discuss the truth and you know the truth - who was responsible, who prolonged the war - then you can have true reconciliation. The door to bring in a new generation is to find out what happened in Lebanon," said Gazi Aad, who heads Solide, an acronym for Support of Lebanese in Detention and Exile, the group that has led the protest since April 11 in downtown Beirut. "Without that, you're just sweeping the dust under the rug. You cannot reconcile when you don't know what happened."

The protest's longevity reflects the changes unleashed by the departure of Syrian troops last spring after a 29-year presence. It is a sign of new transparency in public discourse as Lebanon - still deeply fractured along the lines of its Christian and Muslim sects - struggles to craft an alternative to the old Syrian order.

At the protest in Jibran Khalil Jibran Park, staffed 24 hours a day, women wear name tags with their relatives' pictures, next to the words "How long?"

"It's in us to hope," Salem said, sitting on a plastic chair next to the tent, sipping bitter coffee. "That is what a mother does."

Her children, Richard and Christine, were abducted on a road in West Beirut, probably at a checkpoint, as they drove home in an orange Volkswagen for lunch. Twenty years later, last spring, a former Iraqi intelligence officer released from a Syrian prison visited the Beirut protest. He gazed at the pictures, Salem said, then stopped at a photo of Richard. He had seen him in 1992 in Tadmur, one of Syria's worst jails.

"Hope is durable," Aad said. "It's so durable because they don't have an answer."

At the start of the protest, Aad had the names of 280 people who had disappeared and were perhaps in Syrian jails. Since then, more families have come forward, bringing the number to 643. Hundreds of other cases remain unresolved by families who believe their relatives were detained by Israeli or allied forces in southern Lebanon during its occupation, which ended in 2000. (Only one Lebanese detainee officially remains in an Israeli prison.) Both numbers pale before the 17,000 still unaccounted for from the civil war itself. But for Aad and others, the detainees in Syria - mostly unacknowledged by its government - remain the most pressing.

"There are people who are still alive in Syria," he said. "It's a matter of the living."

Some of the answers may rest beneath the deep brown soil of Majdal Anjar, where Syria once maintained a de facto headquarters for its presence in eastern Lebanon. There, last month, a shallow grave that many had long looked at with suspicion was unearthed on a hill overlooking the Bekaa Valley, with as many as 30 corpses.

The town's mayor, Shaaban Ajami, said he had known about the grave since 1999, "but they told me, 'Don't say a word'."

"There are still more bodies," Ajami said, nodding his head.

Amnesty International criticised the exhumation as unprofessional. On a visit after the search was finished, a reporter for the Daily Star, an English-language newspaper here, found bones still strewn across the hilltop. Some activists suspect the government is wary of making too large an issue of it - willing to unearth the grave to perhaps put more pressure on Syria, but not to risk furthering demands by victims' families to unearth civil war-era mass graves that still litter the country.

"You can't just open this mass grave and say that's it," said Habib Nassar, a human rights lawyer in Beirut.

For a country of 3.8 million, Lebanon's civil war exacted a breathtaking toll. Official figures put the dead at more than 144,000. Nearly 13,000 were abducted, and more than 17,000 remain missing. The task of addressing the war's legacy has fallen to a handful of intellectuals. A conference, "Memory for the Future," was organised in 2001. But its proposals - a war memorial, for instance - are overshadowed by what some activists call officially sanctioned amnesia.

The amnesty law meant that none of the warlords were prosecuted, save Samir Geagea, a Christian leader opposed to Syria at a time when it controlled the country's politics. (He was released in July after 11 years in prison.) Government efforts have been directed more at closing cases by declaring the missing dead than in determining their whereabouts. One committee formed in 2001 to look into the missing never released a report; its chairman said he was pressured by pro-Syrian officials. A Syrian-Lebanese committee was formed last year, charged with resolving the fate of missing in each country's jails, but has yet to issue any findings.

"All the factions, without exception, committed atrocities," Nasser added. "They are united in their atrocities."