ZAWTAR WEST, 22 January: Deminers clearing Israeli-dropped cluster bombs in south Lebanon are turning up an average of 10 new sites per month, while Israel continues to ignore requests for data that would assist clearing the estimated one million unexploded bomblets, which continue to kill and maim civilians and decimate rural livelihoods. A single cluster bomb can disperse hundreds of bomblets.

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Plusieurs villes à travers le Canada et dans le monde participent à une semaine entière d’actions contre l’apartheid israélien du 3 au 10 février. Cette semaine d’actions a été initiée au niveau local en Palestine et en est à sa quatrième année d’existence. En 2008, la semaine contre l’apartheid israélien a lieu au moment de la commémoration des 60 ans de Nakba palestinienne (‘catastrophe’) -60 ans de dépossession, de nettoyage ethnique et d’exil pour les Palestiniens, résultant de la création de l’État d’Israël. Tadamon ! Montréal vous invite à participer à une série d’événements afin de marquer cette semaine contre l’apartheid à Montréal…

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Nahr el-Bared, camp de réfugiés palestiniens situé au bord de la Méditerranée, au Liban près de Tripoli, a été le théâtre d’un violent conflit entre l’armée libanaise et la faction armée Fatah al-Islam, du 20 mai au 4 septembre 2007, obligeant ses 40,000 résidents à évacuer contre leur gré. Aujourd’hui, il ne reste que des ruines, la plupart inhabitables.

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Craig Appleby did not take part in the Second Lebanon War. The 36-year-old Briton from Farnham came to Lebanon in September 2007, more than a year after the end of the fighting. A month later he had joined the list of war dead.

An Israeli cluster bomblet, one of hundreds of thousands of bomblets contained in cluster rockets that the Israel Defense Forces fired at Lebanon during the war, blew up in his hands not far from Bint Jbail. Appleby, a British Army veteran who was head of one of the UN cluster munition clearing teams in South Lebanon, was killed instantly. A week earlier, a six-year-old Lebanese boy and a shepherd were also killed by bomblets.

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Lebanon ended the year much as it had begun, in political limbo. In November 2006, six ministers’ resignations paralysed the government and crystallised the two-year-old split between government loyalists and the opposition. A year later, president Emile Lahoud’s term ended without a successor, leaving a dangerous vacuum at the top. As the year drew to a close, it looked as though Lebanon would drift rudderless until either fractious politicians resolved their power struggle, or frustrations spread to the streets.

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BEIRUT: For the contemporary art scene in Beirut, 2006 was a tough year, as it was for nearly every other sector in the country, creative industries and otherwise. Twelve months ago, few might have guessed that 2007 would be worse. But it was. The opposition protests in Downtown Beirut turned epic. Riots broke out on Black Tuesday. Explosions and assassinations continued. The fighting at Naher al-Bared and the displacement of thousands of refugee-camp residents made vibrant cultural life remote, irrelevant and impossible. The ongoing fiasco surrounding the failure of Lebanon’s political class to elect a president is at best bad theater.

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