Arab-Americans upset by U.S. handling of Lebanon evacuation

By Brian Knowlton International Herald Tribune
Published: July 31, 2006

WASHINGTON In a borrowed cubicle in the offices of the Arab American Institute, barely back from an exhausting 58-hour evacuation from Beirut, Radney Wood and a friend, John Orak, were working the phones and sending out e-mails to spread the word about the trials of Lebanon.

Wood, a 26-year-old New Yorker of Lebanese descent, had been working for a United Nations development program when hostilities erupted. Orak, 25, a South Carolina native with Slovak roots, was teaching English in a State Department program for poor youth who Washington feared would otherwise embrace Hezbollah.

Like many Lebanese-Americans and friends of Lebanon, they are deeply worried by the fighting, and fearful of a growing backlash among Arab-Americans and people in the region over the U.S. role there.

They are also upset about the way the U.S. government handled the evacuation of Americans, viewed as slow and disorganized, and about the State Department's original intent to charge them for it.

"I've never been so disappointed, never felt so abandoned by my government," Orak said.

Among Lebanese-Americans and others there is a widespread sense that the U.S. government would have reacted differently if, say, there had been 25,000 Americans under attack in Israel instead of Lebanon.

"Even if the government claims that they didn't deliberately evacuate American citizens at a slower rate," said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, "then the best construct that can be placed on it is that the process for evacuating Americans from a foreign land is a broken system."

"Ridiculous" was how Samar Saad of Dearborn, Michigan, reacted to the government's original plan to charge people for their passage to Cyprus while other governments were bringing their nationals home without fees. "Our taxes are going to pay for bombs getting dropped on us," Saad said, "and now we have to pay for our own way out?"

The U.S. government ultimately waived payment, but only after days of uncertainty.

"A lot of people came back with the feeling the country doesn't care about them," Saad said.

The State Department insists that it has done everything possible in harrowing circumstances - beefing up embassy staffing and sending in navy ships and marines.

"Before the crisis," said Juliet Werr, an embassy spokeswoman, "we had two phone operators and an antiquated system."

Once the crisis erupted, she said, "We were getting 500 calls an hour. We made everyone answer phones. We set up a call center staffed 24/7."

Amid widespread outrage over the law requiring people to pay for evacuation, Representative John Dingell of Michigan introduced legislation to overturn it, but he said that congressional support for the bill had evaporated once the State Department waived repayment. And the State Department itself said it had no plan to push for change in a law, which, to the surprise of many Americans, has long required evacuation repayment.

As far back as World War II, when 80,000 American civilians were evacuated from Europe in 1940, "individuals were responsible for paying the passenger rates for this transportation," said Vijay Padmanabhan, a State Department legal adviser.

Legislation passed in 2002 at the Bush administration's request essentially codified that practice, requiring reimbursement by evacuees "to the maximum extent practicable."

The requirement is rarely enforced. But asked whether the State Department would favor permanently ending reimbursements, a spokeswoman, Janelle Hironimus, said "No," and added that people who left Lebanon on their own would not be reimbursed for their travel expenses.

Rita Stephan, a University of Texas doctoral student, who was in Beirut with two young children, does not know what else she could have done.

"I thought, 'I'm sure the embassy knows what's going on and has a plan,'" she said, "but I kept calling and the phone seemed to be off the hook."

E-mail messages from the embassy advised staying put, she said, but Israeli jets were "hitting targets we could hear." She said she told her children it was fireworks, then told them the truth.

Stephan, who has dual citizenship and a Syrian passport as well as an American one, called the embassy again and again until, after midnight, a duty officer answered and said, "If you have another passport, just go to Syria." She and her children made it to Damascus on a road bombed two hours later.

James Zogby said that his nephew managed to leave Lebanon on the third day of hostilities. But Lebanese-Americans, said Zogby, executive director of the Arab American Institute, are feeling that "because they are of Arab descent that they're kind of second-class citizens."