January 3, 2006	Tuesday	Zilhaj 2, 1426

BEIRUT: On this morning, as on every morning since October 17, 1985, Audette Salem cleaned the rooms of her son and daughter. She left 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. Others are not sure. Behind them, their children’s faces stare from pictures tacked to billboards, blank faces with generation-old haircuts, 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, organizers 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. History textbooks address nothing more recent than 1975. And many factional warlords serve in government, their portraits staring down on streets they once wrecked.

“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 Ghazi 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 — struggles to craft an alternative to the old Syrian order. Under the former system, Syria exercised the last word on virtually everything in the country, and its security services, along with their Lebanese allies, enforced compliance through arrests, intimidation and patronage. But now, long-discouraged subjects — including the perhaps more than 600 Lebanese taken to Syrian jails — are now being aired as calls for accountability have mounted.

At the protest in Khalil Jibran Park, staffed 24 hours a day, women wear name tags with their relatives’ pictures, next to the words “How long?” In a tidy tent where the women sleep, a poster reads, “She’s waited for him for 20 years.” Next to the green canvas tent are the relatives’ pictures, some so faded by time as to be barely recognizable.

“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. Their mother had prepared a dish of rice and a stew of peas, carrots and potatoes. She waited, then contacted friends, who visited hospitals, restaurants, political parties and others with connections. Then she kept waiting.

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.”—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service