Lebanon: The human cost of war

Rami Zuraik has yet another excellent post on his blog today. It is about the vulnerable and encircled small informal settlement in West Beirut in the area known as “Behind Sports City.” (At one point, I lived not far from there. I know exactly what he’s talking about.)
He focuses on the experiences during the recent fighting of one BSC resident, a house-cleaner called Najwa:

On Wednesday, Najwa told me, the Future militia established armed presence around her and shot at the houses of opposition supporters. Many left. When the skirmishes started on Thursday afternoon, the neighborhood filled up with armed men. She looked out of her door and saw her neighbors sitting outside the house. Their 17 years old stood up and walked towards the street. He was shot and died there.
Najwa and her son left the house in a hurry and ran down the hill to seek shelter in Sabra. The Palestinian camp was boiling, filled with armed men. Hamas and Fateh supporters were eying each others menacingly. Hama’s people support Hizbullah, and Fateh are sympathetic to Hariri and the Future movement. But when the night fell, they all joined rank as the camp began to tremble. As the sound of explosion and gunfire increased, a rumor had spread through the camp: Samir Geagea men, the Lebanese Forces, were coming back to massacre everyone, as in September 1982. Najwa tells me that as of this moment, the camp established serious guard rounds till the morning, and only relaxed when the news came that the Opposition had taken over the city.
When she went back to her house, Najwa found the neighbors in mourning. Being Shi’a, their grief and anger had been adopted by the Amal militiamen. These had gone around shooting and terrorizing some of the known Future supporters. The Nawar [i.e. Roma] people, she told me, paid the price. But her neighbor’s son was dead.
The poor, regardless of color, race or creed, always pay the price.

You can only imagine how vulnerable these BSC residents were if they felt that fleeing into the Sabra refugee camp could make them more secure…
(That reminds me of the period in Beirut in the late 1970s when Turkish Kurds started pouring into the city. Beirut was in the full throes of the civil war… but those Kurds felt that even Beirut was more secure than their own home areas in Turkey at the time. I visited some of the places where they lived in Beirut: half-destroyed houses very close to the Green Line. It was truly Dickensian– but still, better than staying where they had been in Turkey.)
As Rami says, when there’s war and insecurity it is always the poor and marginalized who pay a disproportionate amount of the price.