“I Screamed And Screamed But No One Answered...”
When 28 people died in an Israeli massacre at Qana, Lebanon, the Derry Anti-War Coalition occupied Derry's Raytheon Plant. Eamon McCann reports on their visit to Qana.
Eamonn McCann, 28 Aug 2007
It was the sudden eruption at the back of the room upstairs at Sandino’s which brought us eventually to the burial ground at Qana.
At the edge of the Lebanese village, pictures of each of the 28 victims were displayed on a wall around the canopied space where the graves are laid out in a precise, neat pattern by the place where the building under which they were crushed once stood.
Mayor Mohammed Atiya made a formal speech of welcome while relatives of the dead stood sentinel by the graves. Shane Cullen, who had designed the memorial plaque we’d brought over, explained that it had been hewn from Irish blue limestone because we wanted “to leave a little bit of Ireland here in Qana, as a sign of our sorrow.” I talked of how we’d heard of the massacre, and why we’d occupied the Raytheon plant in Derry in response. Goretti Horgan sang a Gaelic lament. Jimmy Kelly played the tin whistle.
Afterwards, we were invited into the homes of some of the victims, where we sat around awkwardly and sipped the glasses of sweet tea that were offered to us everywhere in Lebanon.
Our hearts grieve with yours, I told Maryam Shaloub, who had moved into the home of her sister to look after what was left of the family. Five of her clan had been among the 28 who’d perished in the basement when a Raytheon bunker-buster brought the house where they’d sought shelter tumbling down. Some were squashed to death, some choked on dirt and debris. Most were children.
She bustled around, affecting crossness with two teenage survivors for being tardy with the tea, then beaming with pride at how well they are doing in school. We grieve for our loneliness that those we loved are not here, she said with a determined smile of seeming serenity. But we do not grieve that they are dead. We are joyful to know they are in paradise. They are martyrs now.
But there was no semblance of joy from Hala, who had lost her husband, her two children, her mother and father; sitting on the sofa alongside me, she was stiff, immobile, unspeaking, impenetrable, her face a mask of frozen pain.
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