Beirut--Forty years after Lebanon's civil war began, the families of thousands of people who disappeared are still haunted by the conflict and fighting to learn of their loved ones' fate.
"We just want to know what happened to them... we want a grave where we can leave flowers," Wadad Halawani, president of the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared, told AFP.
The civil war lasted 15 bloody years from 1975 to 1990, killing more than 150,000 people and leaving some 17,000 missing, according to official figures.
The conflict primarily pitted Christian groups against Palestinian factions backed by leftist and Muslim parties, with significant regional and international intervention.
"Those who buried their children were able to weep for them, but we have not been able to mourn," said Mariam Saidi, whose 15-year-old son Maher disappeared in 1982 while fighting near Beirut.
"It's a cause that must not die," she insisted in her apartment on the old line that separated largely Christian east Beirut from the mostly Muslim west of the city.
Like the Argentine Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement, Saidi has since 2005 participated in a permanent protest camp outside the UN headquarters in central Beirut.
But despite the long-running protest and various campaigns, the parties to the civil war have refused to share information about the missing.
"They refuse to reopen the files, saying it will threaten civil peace. As if the country was at peace!" Halawani said.
Lebanon has experienced many spasms of violence since the war, and has been criticised by international NGOs for its "collective amnesia" about the conflict.
AFP
