I went many times to Lebanon between 1999 and 2009 for mostly for work, mostly meetings but for a large part of 2008 and into early 2009 I lived and worked there again. The strangest time was the first half of 2008 when I was based in west Beirut. My staff always laughed when I called it that but initially I found it very strange walking about Hamra after dark, I'd only been on the west side two or three times in the evening in the years I'd lived there before. Then in May Hassan Nasrullah made a speech late one afternoon. A colleague called me straight away to warn me to be careful. I popped to the office and got body armour and a helmet then to a supermarket to get a couple of days food. when I came out there were men in black balaclavas with AKs taking up firing positions metres from where I was staying. I had to pass them to get back and I had to assure them that I wasn't a journalist... they were Hezbollah and they took over large parts of west Beirut in support of their parties political aims.
Due to the organisation being very risk averse I was pulled out, ironically I could only leave after the fighting had stopped and had to take a taxi to Damascus and fly to the office I was working for in Cairo from there. I stayed there a few days and flew to Erbil to do an assessment of the work we were doing there and to advise on whether we should continue or not.
I'd spent the 2003 Iraq war based in Damascus which was still a beautiful city then, I'd been lucky enough to have a colleague also based there whose spouse was with the Austrian embassy and they had a spare vehicle with diplomatic plates which I tried not to abuse, honestly. At the end of the war I went to the Iraqi embassy to ask for a visa, there was a large courtyard absolutely full with your fighting age males when I got there. The crowd parted down the middle and I was ushered to a desk at the front and asked in a slightly truculent tone what I wanted. A visa, I said. To fight or as a journalist, he countered. Neither, I said, to work for an NGO. **** off, he said, so I did. Shortly after that I was helping an NGO into Basra from Kuwait without needing a visa for Iraq. Having got the agency settled in Basra after one or two recces and some nights in an hotel whose name I never knew but which was distinguished by a big banner stating that “The hotel is open” I moved north to Baghdad and took over an NGO office there. That didn't last long with attacks on the UN and on agencies which had years worth of contacts in the local community already happening it was pretty clear which way the wind was blowing so I had to shut down the recently opened office and move back to a relatively safe Erbil.
Anyhow, back to 2008, in early October I was phoned by a French NGO asking if I would go as interim manager for a a UXO project in north Lebanon. Being at a loose end I jumped at the opportunity. We were tasked with removal of UXO from a Palestinian camp which had been destroyed in fighting in the summer of 2007. we had been hired by UNRWA and there was a local company contracted to remove the rubble from the site, they had been contracted by UNDP, we were paid monthly until the job was signed finished and Al Jihad (the rubble removal company) would be paid on completion of the task. From the beginning, therefore, there was a lot of tension and politics as we needed to be painstaking and Al Jihad (AJ) needed to be quick. AJ wanted to flood the area with heavy equipment none of which was armoured whilst initially we had very quickly from scratch trained two search teams which we were later able to expand to four. I was lucky to have two good EOD techs. The Lebanese army with whom we were supposed to cooperate didn't always give us the whole picture and wouldn't always say what type of munitions had been used. After four months the long term manager was able to come out and take up the position.
Due to the organisation being very risk averse I was pulled out, ironically I could only leave after the fighting had stopped and had to take a taxi to Damascus and fly to the office I was working for in Cairo from there. I stayed there a few days and flew to Erbil to do an assessment of the work we were doing there and to advise on whether we should continue or not.
I'd spent the 2003 Iraq war based in Damascus which was still a beautiful city then, I'd been lucky enough to have a colleague also based there whose spouse was with the Austrian embassy and they had a spare vehicle with diplomatic plates which I tried not to abuse, honestly. At the end of the war I went to the Iraqi embassy to ask for a visa, there was a large courtyard absolutely full with your fighting age males when I got there. The crowd parted down the middle and I was ushered to a desk at the front and asked in a slightly truculent tone what I wanted. A visa, I said. To fight or as a journalist, he countered. Neither, I said, to work for an NGO. **** off, he said, so I did. Shortly after that I was helping an NGO into Basra from Kuwait without needing a visa for Iraq. Having got the agency settled in Basra after one or two recces and some nights in an hotel whose name I never knew but which was distinguished by a big banner stating that “The hotel is open” I moved north to Baghdad and took over an NGO office there. That didn't last long with attacks on the UN and on agencies which had years worth of contacts in the local community already happening it was pretty clear which way the wind was blowing so I had to shut down the recently opened office and move back to a relatively safe Erbil.
Anyhow, back to 2008, in early October I was phoned by a French NGO asking if I would go as interim manager for a a UXO project in north Lebanon. Being at a loose end I jumped at the opportunity. We were tasked with removal of UXO from a Palestinian camp which had been destroyed in fighting in the summer of 2007. we had been hired by UNRWA and there was a local company contracted to remove the rubble from the site, they had been contracted by UNDP, we were paid monthly until the job was signed finished and Al Jihad (the rubble removal company) would be paid on completion of the task. From the beginning, therefore, there was a lot of tension and politics as we needed to be painstaking and Al Jihad (AJ) needed to be quick. AJ wanted to flood the area with heavy equipment none of which was armoured whilst initially we had very quickly from scratch trained two search teams which we were later able to expand to four. I was lucky to have two good EOD techs. The Lebanese army with whom we were supposed to cooperate didn't always give us the whole picture and wouldn't always say what type of munitions had been used. After four months the long term manager was able to come out and take up the position.
