The Daily Star - The notorious Roumieh prison and the unfortunate town it sits beneath - April 11, 2011

April 11, 2011 12:00 AM

By Patrick Galey

The Daily Star

ROUMIEH: Jihad turns away from his card game and tries to remember a time before the prison. He makes an inquiry to the men huddled in plastic chairs around the improvised table, wrapped in tweed jackets and woolly hats as more early April rain begins to fall. “When was it built?” he asks. In 1963, is the general consensus. The town of Roumieh nestles on a bluff hillside swathed in greenery, the outline of Beirut’s port against the gray Mediterranean visible from any promontory on all but the smoggiest of days. It is peaceful and verdant, just a few kilometers from the Gulf tourist playgrounds of affluent Broummana and Ain Saade. But Roumieh’s name precedes itself. Further down the tree-lined road snaking southwest lies Lebanon’s largest and most notorious prison. More than 3,700 inmates crowd into a space originally designed to house a quarter of their number. The vast majority of prisoners are held without charge, yet to see the light of a courtroom. Even before the riots of the past week, which saw the death of two inmates, Roumieh, and the unfortunate town it sits beneath, had become a byword for dark incarceration and human rights abuses. Residents Friday were reluctant to talk to the press. Those who did only gave their first names as waves of trucks filled with soldiers coursed periodically through the quiet streets. “We called for the Interior Ministry to label the Roumieh prison as Lebanon’s Central Prison,” Jihad says as the card game rumbles on behind. The idea, he concedes, would have only a limited impact on the reputation of a town already ingrained in the national psyche as a place where murders and terrorists go to rot. “They should remove the jail from here. People are scared. I am from Roumieh and when I go to university everyone makes fun of where I come from,” says Chris, 23, who owns a money transfer shop on Roumieh’s high street. He lives less than 300 meters from the prison. “They ask me always about the prison and that is a bad thing for the town. They don’t think of Roumieh as a town, they only think of it as a jail.” Some shop owners have already noticed a sharp decline in business since riots began in the prison Saturday night. They take umbrage with relatives of Roumieh inmates blocking the main road to and from the town, severing the principal artery bringing in customers. “For the last five days we haven’t been able to leave the town,” says Adib, a hardware store owner who has lived his whole life in Roumieh. “We always are worried that people may escape from the jail. There are no rules and no security around it.” Some of Roumieh’s cellblocks have spent the last six days in varying degrees of mutiny, beset by protests from prisoners who object to the complex’s chronic overcrowding, poor living conditions and indefinite incarceration periods. Adib doesn’t hesitate to point the finger at the government for failing to address Lebanon’s derisory prison situation. “It is the government’s fault. There is no regulation. If somebody steals $10, they will be put in the same cell as 10 people, some of whom are murderers,” he says. “If you go there, you end up spending years, no matter what you did. If the government had taken the necessary steps, this would never have happened.” Chris is equally quick to apportion blame. “All that is happening is a game. People in the jail, they do drugs and kill people and they want their freedom? Only one party is behind this and that’s Hezbollah. I have seen them coming past here in vans and they make their women to go and throw stones because if the men come, [security forces] will capture them,” he says. Amid the chaos caused by protests and the intrusive security presence they have spawned, there is a limited sense of sympathy for what some prisoners are demanding. “What prisoners are demanding is important,” says Jihad, who has received several phone calls from relatives abroad who hear the news coming from Roumieh and fear the worst. For Adib, the standoff between security forces and prisoners is all about proportionality. “Prisoners should be given their human rights. If someone made a small mistake they should be allowed to go free but if someone killed people, say if they worked for Fatah al-Islam, then they must stay in jail,” he says. Another Army convoy trundles down the high street, drowning out Adib. He gazes at the men in green fatigues, rifles bolted upright between hunched legs. Adib waits for the din to subside and repeats what he uttered as the trucks went by. “If there is no law in jail, then what hope do we have of controlling the country?” he asks.