LEBANON, and with it the rest of the world, heaved an almost audible sigh of relief with this disastrous war coming to an end on Monday. The guns have fallen silent, after incessantly spitting fire for more than a month. It looks like the tenuous truce is holding, for now. The ever optimistic and enterprising people of Lebanon have started returning to their homes, or whatever is left of them. But even for them, used to the long civil war and earlier Israeli occupation, rebuilding their country all over again from a scratch is not going to be easy. The once booming Lebanon has been reduced to rubble and ruins. Rebuilding it is going to be a truly Herculean task.
More than the task of rebuilding their country and their lives, it is the fear of their uncertain future that is hard to handle for the people. While peace prevails now, there is no guarantee that it is going to continue tomorrow or in the days to come. Especially since Israel has failed to achieve any of its original or stated objectives — the return of its captured soldiers and the elimination of Hezbollah threat — there are fears that a frustrated Israeli leadership could resort to familiar war games.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is already under fire at home for ‘mismanaging’ the Lebanon crisis and swallowing more than he could chew. So the Israelis yesterday listened to Olmert’s jingoistic rhetoric in the Knesset with a heavy dose of scepticism. Even as the prime minister was vowing on Monday never to ‘forget and forgive’ Israel’s ‘enemies’ (read Hezbollah), Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah was declaring a ‘historic victory’ in the war.
It is not possible to question Hezbollah’s claim. After all, this rag-tag army of irregulars, with their antiquated arms, managed to hold against one of the most powerful armies in the world for more than a month. Although there are no winners in this war, if any side can claim victory, it is certainly not Israel. It’s the people of Lebanon who have prevailed. They have managed to accomplish what many powerful Arab governments and armies failed to achieve.
But now Lebanon needs all the support and help from the international community it can get. Sweden is hosting an international aid conference later this month with representatives of more than 60 governments and organisations taking part to discuss the urgent relief and rebuilding effort in Lebanon. It is time for the world community to show it cares for the unfortunate people of Lebanon.

Confronting the past

As we hope the echoes of the Lebanese conflict fade away, on the other side of the world memories of another bloody war have been stirred. Japanese Premier Junichiro Koizumi has again paid his respects at a Tokyo war shrine which honors Japan’s war dead; the shrine includes the names of 14 individuals executed for war crimes after the country’s defeat. Koizumi’s continued insistence on attending this ceremony has produced renewed protests from the Chinese and South Koreans whose people suffered terribly from Japanese aggression.
Yet the Yasukuni Shrine, originally built in 1869 to commemorate the dead in a civil war, is also a memorial to the 2.4 million Japanese who died in World War II. The majority were ordinary soldiers and civilians who, all things being equal, should quite rightly have been shown a mark of respect by later generations.
But all things are not equal. Japan may have apologized for the barbarous behavior of its armies but there is enduring evidence that they have not themselves accepted that their nation was in fact guilty of terrible crimes. The controversial school textbooks, which sought to gloss over the facts of the horrific protracted 1937 massacre of possibly 300,000 Chinese in the captured city of Nanjing, are only part of the evidence of this refusal to admit the reality of what their ancestors did. Instead, largely because of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atom bombs which claimed over 214,000 lives and the equal death toll in the Tokyo firestorms caused by American bombing, the Japanese have chosen to see themselves as victims rather than aggressors.
The Germans, on the other hand, have not only admitted but accepted in their hearts the murderous depravity of the Nazis. If Chancellor Angela Merkel were to make a high profile visit to a war memorial to German dead, there would be no protest from Russians or Jews or any other victims of the Hitler regime. The Japanese, however, have been unable to look their past squarely in the face. Because of this, their former victims can take the view that the arrogant racial supremacist beliefs that informed Japan’s appalling treatment of those they conquered have not really changed.
Nevertheless, it is hard not to suspect that the Chinese and Koreans are trying to make political capital out of Koizumi’s behavior. It is notable that there have been no similar protests from other Southeast Asian countries which were also subject to Japanese occupation. Nor have Allied governments whose troops died by the thousands in POW camps raised objections. Perhaps this is because there is a wider recognition that, in the end, it is the Japanese who will suffer from this continued denial of their past. The balance of world power is swinging inexorably to Asia, following the path of economic growth that the Japanese themselves pioneered in their remarkable postwar recovery. But as long as Japan denies its own history, it will also deny itself the key role that it should play as the region’s most mature and sophisticated economy.

—Arab News