KFARMATA, LEBANON — As Hala Haddad watched thousands of families return to their towns and villages in southern Lebanon last summer after a devastating war between the Islamic militant group Hezbollah and Israel, she remembered the night she was forced to flee her home.
After bombing intensified over their village, her father summoned Haddad and her four siblings to leave everything behind and run away. An 11-year-old then, she had to walk for miles, as her tiny, slippered feet swelled with pain.
That was 23 years ago, as fighting raged between leftist Druze factions and Israeli-backed Christian militias during Lebanon's brutal civil war. Haddad hasn't seen her hometown since.
Unlike the Shiite Muslim population of the south during the recent conflict, Haddad and members of hundreds of other Christian families were never able to go back to their homes and properties in Kfarmata, a picturesque town overlooking Beirut from the Mount Lebanon range.
"I have forgiven, but I still have many questions. With all the crimes that were perpetrated, the civil war cannot be forgotten like this," Haddad, now a 34-year-old journalist, said with a defiant look. "A real social reconciliation process has never taken place in the mountains to secure our return."
Once a symbol of coexistence, with Christians and Druze living side by side, Kfarmata is home today to about 5,000 people, only Druze. In what used to be the village's Christian neighborhood, the roads are lined with the rubble of stone houses, abandoned since the early 1980s.
The few remaining residences in the neighborhood are occupied by Druze, a close-knit religious minority that has time and again played a major political role in Lebanon. The sites where the two churches of the village once stood are covered today with wild plants. Even the cemetery is full of busted tombstones.
As millions of dollars in aid funds have poured into Lebanon over the last several months to help Shiites rebuild homes destroyed during the war last summer, discontent and frustration have been expressed by Christians who say they never received enough compensation for properties damaged during the civil war.
In 1993, a special ministry was established to help Christian refugees secure their rights and to assist them financially in their return to their homes and property in the abandoned Mount Lebanon villages.
