Khiam’s tortured victims relive ordeal

Ranwa Yehia 
Daily Star staff 
The notorious Khiam detention center, the cause of periods of intense suffering and lifetime
illnesses to so many residents of the occupation zone, has become a place of pilgrimage and
a symbol of Israeli atrocities. 
"I remember every detail of the pain I experienced here but still, I came," said 38-year-old
Ali Khesheish. 
Some four years after his release, Khesheish, who spent 11 years in Khiam, returned on
Wednesday to the place that changed his life. 
Clutching a pair of handcuffs he found in an office used by prison interrogators to torture
newcomers, Khesheish calmly explained that he was detained in 1985 for "cooperating with the
resistance." 
"I want people to know what we went through, I want the government to turn this place to a
museum that people can come visit," he said. 
Khesheish appeared at ease in the facility, which was flooded by curious people who arrived
to celebrate the liberation of the south from 22 years of Israeli occupation. 
Every time he noticed a visitor picking up an item to take away as a souvenir, he would
snatch it from him and return it to its place. 
"The place should remain as is. Exactly as is for people to see for years to come," he
insisted. 
Making his way to the main interrogation room where "fresh"  detainees were first brought to
be tortured, Khesheish enacted his own experience: "I stood right here, with a cloth bag
over my head, my hands and feet handcuffed, an electric cord in my mouth." 
SLA militiamen, he explained, used to force detainees to bite hard on a cord while they
answered their interrogators’ questions. "Every now and then, they would pull the cord and
we had to keep it between our teeth. It was painful," he said calmly. 
Next on his impromptu tour was the open-air torture area, where detainees used to be tied to
an electrical pole for hours on end. Floggings and dousings with hot and cold water were
some of the tortures militiamen practiced on the detainees while they hung from the pole. 
Moving on to another bloc, containing rows of cells, Khesheish pointed at the iron-barred
windows. 
"They used to handcuff us on these bars and keep us there," he said. "Militiamen walking by
would kick us and shove our heads hard at the iron bars ­ this was their fun time." 
Khesheish said he felt very proud to return to Khiam a free man, but he was still extremely
affected by his mistreatment. One of his most painful experiences came when the SLA
militiamen seized his 55-year-old father and beat him in an attempt to extract information
from Khesheish about the resistance movement. 
He also remembered one day in 1988 when the SLA hung him on the electrical pole when it was
snowing. "When they took the handcuffs off, my hands were frozen and I couldn’t move them,"
he recalled. 
In another bloc, housing larger, 12-bed, cells 60-year-old Sukna Faour wailed. "I’m crying
at the sight of this. My people were being forced to live in these conditions. May God kill
the militiamen. I swear that if I had the chance, I would kill them myself for doing this to
my people," said Faour, a native of Khiam. 
A third bloc contained rows of cells where female detainees were kept. 
Two drawings by Cosette Ibrahim were stuck on the wall of one of the cells where she spent
nine months in detention. 
Under the drawings, dozens of books lay strewn across a bed, among them Victor Hugo’s Les
Miserables and The Teachings of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. 
One drawing showed a half-naked woman pounding the traditional dish of raw kibbeh. Written
above it was the phrase: "We were that free." 
The second drawing, also signed by Ibrahim, showed a kneeling woman staring at the sky. A
phrase written above, in French, read: "It is so much easier to dream my life than to live
it." 
Ibrahim, a 21-year-old Lebanese University journalism graduate, was released on Tuesday when
the prison was stormed by Hizbullah fighters and southerners. 
A stream of politicians, party members and curious visitors continued to flood into the
Hizbullah-manned detention center throughout the day. By the end of the day Ibrahim’s two
drawings had disappeared. 
 

DS 25/05/00