Cannabis Chronicles

Continuing our look back at the most recent historical spike in the production of Lebanese hashish, we’ll continue with another addition to the archive of articles from 2001. . .

Lebanon: Hashish Grows Again In The Fields Of Lebanon

Why Farmers In Hermel Have More Faith In ‘Gold’ Than Government

Sun, 01 Jul 2001
by Robert Fisk

originally published by the UK Independent (UK)

archived by the Media Awareness Project (MAP)

At first, it looks like a cornfield. But step a few metres into the corn and the stooks turn into little bright-green trees with spiky leaves, all swaying in the breeze up the narrow mountain valley. When my guide started gesticulating towards another, smaller field, I pleaded with him not to point. There are gunmen aplenty in these hills ­ in the same dark Mercedes they used in the civil war ­ but the man laughed.

“You’re perfectly safe with me here,” he said.

That’s when I realised this was his hashish field. “You know what we are doing?” he asked. “It’s a kind of challenge from us to the Lebanese government, a challenge from an impoverished people.

The Beirut government boasted back in 1994 that it had eradicated the drug fields of Lebanon, burning and poisoning the thousands of acres of hashish and the smaller though more lethal dunums¹ of poppies that produced Lebanon’s heroin exports.

The Americans and the UN’s anti-drugs units clapped their hands. We were even invited to watch the army burn the fields. But today “Lebanese gold” ­ the finest hashish grown in the country ­ is back, albeit in comparatively small quantities. “This is not 1 per cent of what we used to grow in the civil war,” the Hermel landowner insisted, a point he rather spoiled by inviting us to see a larger field a few miles down the road.

The air is clear up here, the midday sky pale-blue against the hot grey mountains, a tributary of the Orontes river, green and cold, irrigating the hashish.

“What can we do?” the man asks, opening his hands. “We were promised aid from the government in return for destroying our fields, new agricultural projects, new crops to take the place of hashish. But my four sons and three daughters, some of them married, are all living in my home because they have no money for a house of their own. We live off the only one of my sons who has a job ­ and he brings home just 500,000 Lebanese pounds ( pounds 243 ) a month.” Which is true. The dealers make the money; the growers do the work.

Nor does his assessment meet with any surprise in the office of the United Nations Development Project chief technical adviser down the Bekaa Valley in Baalbek. Mohamed Ferjani hands me a document he sent to his superiors in 1994, the year the Lebanese announced the end of illicit crop cultivation and the start of a programme to encourage alternative crops.

“The absence of development efforts and international community support will mean the return of illicit crops and border traffic,” Ferjani had presciently written. His voice rises as he explains his frustration. “There was no regional development plan and the government’s programme for the area was launched with high expectation on the part of the beneficiaries [the farmers] ­ but with less than 6 per cent of the estimated required funds.”

After the civil war, the Hermel men at first believed in their new role as legal farmers, cultivating tomatoes, tobacco, wheat and water melons. A Hermel schoolteacher and his wife told me of the outcome of broken promises: “First the government gave us a ton of seed potatoes and then, without warning, it became half a ton,” the teacher said. “Then many of the families who applied for licences to grow tobacco were refused permission. I don’t know why.”

On its near-desert plateau, Hermel got a bad name. It became known ­ unfairly, according to its 83-year-old mukhtar ( town leader ) ­ as a drugs town and, because of the location of nearby Hizbollah guerrilla training camps, as a town of “terrorists” and gunmen. Old Haj Asaad bin Daibis-Jouheri, smoking a cigarette from a holder in his thin wiry hands, tried to explain his town’s story. “We used to survive on wheat, barley, chickpea growing, and we were simple people. Then there came schools and new clothes and people needed money. People became more reliant on earning. But we got no real help. People really go hungry here. And now the media have started a war against this region.”

Nor are things going to get better. “At the time of the government’s new programme, Lebanon was an exporter of vegetables and fruit, especially to the Gulf and Iraq,” Mr Ferjani says. “Then came the Second [1991] Gulf War and Iraq was sanctioned and the Turks, Egyptians and others started exporting to the Gulf. And the people here grew much poorer.”

You only have to drive round the Hermel area to understand what this means. There are patches of wheat and a few watermelon farms. But much of the landscape I passed through was sand and rock and acres of rubbish, the ground, even along the banks of the Orontes, blossoming with old plastic bags and rusting car parts. Up in the hills, the gunmen follow all visitors ­ “they have no ideology,” Mr Ferjani warned ­ and I suspect they are working for men in Amsterdam rather than Beirut. So far, the government has done nothing and the police turn a familiar Lebanese blind eye. Because, I guess, the fields are still few and far between, scarcely 10,000 dunums in all, according to a foreign aid worker. And after all, the farmers are not growing poppies for heroin and opium. Not yet.

According to what we’ve read, hash making traditions survived Lebanon’s more recent political turmoils most strongly in the Bekaa Valley north of Baalbek. This puts Hermel, the Lebanese town at the northernmost end of the Bekaa Valley, right in the thick of that traditional hash making region.

In case you were wondering, the majority of the inhabitants of the northern Bekaa districts of Baalbeck and Hermel are a mix of Shia & Sunni Muslims. The Bekaa Valley north of Baalbek is also where the rule of tribal law is still most strong in Lebanon. Inhabited by heavily armed families and extended clans who are often defacto masters of their own domain, with what centralized government there is either unwilling, or afraid, to intervene.

Sound familar?

Could it be that the real problem in Iraq is that the US and her Allies haven’t brought Shia & Sunni together with a united and interdependent financial interest in hashmaking?

Perhaps some bumper stickers are in order - Make Hash Not War!

1. ‘Dunum’ refers to a measure of land of approximately .1 hectares. [↩]