Hundreds gather to hail heroes of Khiam
Former detainees share experiences as former hellhole becomes a tourist trap

Hundreds of families flocked to what used to be the Khiam detention center over the weekend, singing along to patriotic songs blaring from loudspeakers as they walked up the meandering path to the hilltop prison.
Some stopped to buy Hizbullah paraphernalia at one of the stands selling flags, caps and cassettes at the gates of the prison, while others posed for pictures in front of the cells.
“Every day I’m more astounded by the beauty of the landscape in the liberated villages and horrified by what happened in Khiam,” said Shadi Kreidieh, 22, who lives in Beirut but has been staying in the South for a week.
Cameras flashed as schoolchildren from around the country made a pilgrimage to get a glimpse of what the detainees’ daily lives were like.
“I don’t want to go in there because I’ll get claustrophobic,” said Fatmeh, a 15-year-old from Nabatieh, as she posed for a picture outside one of the many tiny solitary-confinement cells. “My God how did they survive this for months, years?”
People crammed through the narrow corridors, pinching their noses and covering their mouths against the stench of urine. They gasped in awe at the small cells where former detainees’ clothing still hung on washing lines tied to the ceiling. “May God help them” said a woman from the Beqaa who brought  her children. “How could they have lived in such conditions?”
It seemed that everyone knew someone or was related to a former detainee and exchanged bits of information about them. “This is where my brother-in-law Hassan lived for eight years,” a young woman told her companions. “Can you believe it?”
Signs guided visitors around the prison and they were free to enter the rooms. Some signs asked that items in the rooms not be touched but several people took souvenirs anyway.
Ibrahim Kalash, a former detainee who spent five-and-a-half years in Khiam ­ and is now the vice president of the National Committee for Detainees in "Israeli" Prisons ­ explained that there were plans to set up a committee to manage the detention center as a tourist site. Kalash has spent the last two weekends giving impromptu tours of the prison to friends and relatives.
“This is where I lived for seven months with four other men,” he said as he walked into a 4-square-meter cell with a tiny hole in the ceiling ­ to let in light and air ­ that he and four other men shared for months. Their daily rations consisted of five olives each and three boiled eggs to share among them. They were allowed to shower once a month.
The prisoners tried to make prayer beads out of the olive pits but the guards started asking for them back to prevent their use, he recalled.
“But this wasn’t the worst place,” Kalash added. “The torture room and courtyard where newcomers were beaten continuously for days was Hell on Earth.”
As he stood in the room where he and other detainees were tortured with electric shocks, a crowd gathered and listened in silence to his detailed first-hand experience.
“You know what the worst thing is?” he asked his audience. “That those same “Israeli”-proxy militiamen men who tortured us are free.”
A middle-aged man walking past one of the tiny confinement cells (just 1 meter by 2),  with a little crack in the ceiling for sunlight to filter through and a black trash bin, stopped to light a cigarette.
“I was in there for four months without any sunlight but that was before the Red Cross came and improved conditions,” whispered Ali Ismail Hussein, stressing that the cell he was confined in measured just half that size.
He had to sleep against one wall with his legs up against the opposite one because it was too small. The only thing that kept him going, he said, was his faith, adding that he even had to pray sitting down.
Hassan Jaber, 32, was just 18 when he was imprisoned at Khiam for a year in 1986. He heard Hussein’s account as he was walking past. “I stayed in there too,” he said. “When we were in there we never knew when we’d be freed.”
An old woman scampering past in the darkness heard the conversation, pushed past the men, and peered into the tiny, dark room.
“Were you in here?” she asked, squinting to get a closer look at the two men, who nodded silently in unison in the half-darkness.
“May the people who did this to you be damned in Hell,” she screamed. “They should be imprisoned in here so that they get a taste of what it was like.”
Jaber shook his head vigorously. “This was a place for martyrs who stood up for their beliefs,” he declared. “Dirty traitors don’t deserve to be in the same place.”
Standing within the barbed-wire exercise area, 60-year Issam Kadri, from Rashaya, said that the government had a responsibility to punish the militiamen and convict them of treason instead of setting  them free.
“A traitor’s a traitor, no matter what sect he’s from, and should not be pardoned,” he said. “The collaborator,” he added, “never had sympathy for the men and women they tortured, so why should we pity them for whatever excuses they’re giving?
“If the government doesn’t take responsibility for them,” he predicted, “I’m sure the public will take justice into their own hands and punish them.”

The Daily Star, 6-6-2000.