Untold Stories

India: Guerillas in the Mountains

To smooth over a nerve-wracking encounter with their village militia, the Naxalite cadres went on a hospitality offensive. An additional four hours’ trek into the dense mountain jungle ended at one of their many camps situated on a high plateau where we were welcomed as their “honored guests”. Ploughed fields and a vegetable garden were tended by a tribal family living on site, who welcomed our group with a mashed corn drink served in hollow gourds. Their faces bore none of the resignation common to the displaced I had met in the roadside camps. I asked the patriarch, Ram, how he felt about the Naxals’ presence. He said he didn’t mind them so long as their war never touched his home.

Lebanon: One story of many

I spent almost all day among the Nahr al Bared refugees who are staying in temporary shelter in schools and community buildings at Baddawi camp in Tripoli.

Beddawi is the closest Palestinian camp to Nahr al Bared and so received many of the refugees fleeing the conflict when it broke out in May.

Most are still there. Original Beddawi residents are angry because their children can no longer be schooled as before and the Nahr al Bared displaced are desperate, as the winter cold sets in, to return to the ruins of their old camp and resettle.

Lebanon: Nahr al Bared, Tabula Rasa

I had been a little worried about getting inside Nahr al Bared and the camp. Since the conflict ended and it had been partially reopened for some of the camp's residents to return, it had 'shown' just once - for a few hours - to the press in a sort of horse and pony show of destruction. Since then, journalists have been barred and all volunters are strictly forbidden to take photos.

Today, through a mixture of good luck and playing dumb, I managed to get through the stiff army controls (with two cameras in my bag) and into Nahr al Bared. Only a part of Nahr al Bared has been reinhabited, the rest is sealed off, deemed too dangerous to enter right now. The buildings are also said to be "completely destroyed."  Driving through the streets that have been returned to, it seemed hard to imagine degrees of destruction more than this.

Lebanon: Is Annapolis casting a shadow on exiled Palestinian refugees?

The international press made big bones of the fact that the world’s powers, gathered in Paris yesterday, pledged almost $2bn more for the creation of a Palestinian state than the Palestinians had requested or indeed expected.

But here in Lebanon, the news may not bode as well for the country’s estimated 400,000 Palestinian refugees. On the surface, the dream of Annapolis may fall – but only in a large sense – under most of their collective political aspirations: full recognition as a people and the establishment of a sovereign homeland. It will not, of course, bring most of them home because for the majority of them, home is Galilee in Northern Israel.

In the short term, Annapolis has shifted the focus towards the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and amid the diplomatic backslapping and nay saying, the over four million Palestinian refugees exiled in neighboring countries had been moved to the shadows.

Lebanon: Nahr al Bared military mastermind laid to rest

All summer, the conflict at Nahr al Bared between the Lebanese Army and the Islamic militants Fatah al Islam raged on. And while reminders of the ongoing fight showed up across the country on roadside banners of support for the Army and in the almost daily press updates and soldier body counts, in Beirut – where I was based – the trouble felt very remote – it was happening “up there,” meaning the city of Tripoli 85km north.

The fighting was reaching its final stages when I left in early August and the Nahr al Bared conflict had lost its sense of urgency in the Lebanese public consciousness. People were beginning to worry about the presidential election scheduled for September. The question on everyone’s lips was would the government, which has been in stalemate crisis for over a year, manage to agree on and elect a new president?

India: Point of No Return

If our reception by the village militia the previous night was less than warm, the next morning was chilling. Already, Chandan, Arvind and I had been told that while we'd come by choice, there was no guarantee they would arrange a meeting with the guerillas. And either way, leaving was not up to us. So we really fell on the side of prisoners rather than guests, though no one wanted to acknowledge this openly.

We were to receive a verdict at 7:30 am. We stepped outside into the dirt square at the appointed time, and waited. The air felt wrong. No one was out and about working the fields as they'd been before; the dozen-odd children that stuck around and stared at us when we arrived were nowhere to be found. Even the pigs and roosters had fled. Just heavy silence. Chandan nervously started singing to himself, Arvind tapped his feet and I scanned the barren hillsides for a sign of something.