September 16, 2007	Sunday	Ramazan 03, 1428

BEIRUT: Watched over by guards, workers lay concrete blocks for brand new housing to replace Hezbollah’s former command quarters, destroyed by Israeli air strikes last year in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

A year after the devastating war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas, the Shia Muslim bastion has been turned into a vast construction site, criss-crossed by trucks carrying cement.

Visitors and even contractors are escorted to the building sites by Hezbollah’s “Indibat” (discipline) guards, wearing uniform camel fatigues and brown boots.

The guards, communicating with walkie-talkies, wear caps that say Waad, meaning ‘the pledge’ in Arabic.

Waad is a project of Hezbollah’s reconstruction arm, Jihad al-Bina, to rebuild the teeming southern suburbs of Beirut where Israeli strikes destroyed or badly-damaged nearly 300 multi-storey buildings.

The project was named after the ‘truthful pledge’, the name given by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah to the capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12, 2006, in order to secure a prisoners’ swap.

Israel responded the same day with a massive assault after which Nasrallah declared that his guerrillas’ fierce resistance to the 34-day offensive was a ‘divine victory’ over the Jewish state’s mighty army.

“Waad is rebuilding 196 destroyed buildings, while the owners of 68 other destroyed buildings have decided to rebuild them themselves,” Waad director general Hassan Jashi said.

He said: “We chose 42 of the country’s best firms to carry out the reconstruction works. Works have already started in 75 buildings.

“Works should be complete by early 2009,” said Jashi, sitting in his air-conditioned office, watching security camera footage of offices in the building and the street on a television screen.

Waad spokesman Maher Assi added: “There will not be security perimeters anymore” in the southern suburbs where Hezbollah once kept areas off-limits to government forces despite criticism from political rivals.

“We don’t need security perimeters, we are all over the place now in Lebanon,” he said.

Jashi said the southern suburbs – buildings of shoddy construction towering over a labyrinth of narrow roads, with cars parked chaotically on the sidewalk – will experience a major face-lift.“We plan to have larger roads, lined with trees. We even bought lands to build public gardens, with underground parking lots. The buildings will be built to resist earthquakes and reduce noise.” In an apparent bid to maintain its power base, Hezbollah has granted families that lost property about $10,000 each. Hezbollah has been evasive about the source of its funding but Iran is generally suspected as the main financial backer of the Shia party.

As for the Lebanese government, Sanaa al-Jack, spokeswoman for its reconstruction projects, said: “The project costs 340 billion (Lebanese) pounds ($227 million), of which we have so far paid 141.34 billion pounds.” The government has granted citizens whose units had been completely destroyed about $53,000. Compensation for damaged property is assessed on a case by case basis.

“The process has been slow because originally many people did not have proper legal documents for their properties which were built illegally, and some other people have lost their documents during the war,” she said.

The government has only granted the checks to property owners in person, as it did not agree to give a party – namely the opposition Hezbollah – the compensation on their behalf.—AFP