The organisation Dawruna launched the advocacy paper “Voices from Jabal Amil: An Attempt to Emerge from the Nakba” through its “Dawruna Nehki” — “Our Turn to Speak” — initiative, at a ceremony held at the Monnot Theatre in Beirut on 30 July 2026, under the patronage of the Minister of Culture, Dr Ghassan Salamé.
The paper was prepared by the journalist Badia Fahs and by Ali Mosarrah, executive director of Dawruna, following a participatory process of more than a year in which journalists, researchers and cultural and civic figures from Jabal Amil and the South took part. It sets out a political and social vision for the future of the South after the war, on the premise that reconstruction is not confined to repairing homes and infrastructure, but requires restoring the role of the state, protecting freedoms, supporting public institutions, and widening the space for pluralism within southern and Shiite society. It is addressed to eight government ministries.
Daraj and Manateq were media partners to the initiative; over fourteen months we published forty-nine articles, investigations and films drawn from the same work. Alia Ibrahim, co-founder of Daraj, gave these remarks at the launch. They are published here in English translation; the speech was delivered in Arabic.
Friends at Dawruna and colleagues on the “Dawruna Nehki” initiative; distinguished guests. Good evening.
I will start with a confession. When these recommendations reached me, I did not read them as an advocacy paper. I read them as a timeline of my own life. As though every recommendation opened a door onto a memory, onto a moment, a story, a milestone I have lived — and through which I understood a little more of how we arrived here.
I don’t think that is mine alone. Most of the people in this room have lived part of this story, each from where they stood.
I grew up in Tripoli during the civil war. In my memory as a child, the war in Lebanon was between Muslims and Christians. I had barely heard of the Shiites, or of Shiism, as a distinct political identity, and I knew nothing about Jabal Amil, or about the complexities of what we now call “the Shiite question.”
I came to those complexities later, when I started at the American University, and the war had only just ended.
I remember young women from Hezbollah knocking on my door in the dormitory, inviting me to their meetings, telling me they could help with my tuition.
I say it today with a certain professional regret: at the time, I wasn’t curious enough to go and see. I did not go in order to understand — and it took me a lifetime to understand.
When I remember that story now, I read it differently. It was not simply an invitation to a political meeting. There was a party project that knew precisely where to enter — through the doors the state leaves open. Education, social assistance, a sense of belonging, and the need for protection.
Because the vacuum the state leaves does not stay empty.
In 1996 I was still a student. The coverage of the Qana massacre was one of the main reasons I wanted to become a journalist. It was not a calculated professional decision. But for the first time I felt, with real clarity, that journalism can document what is meant to be lost, and can carry people’s experience and their losses from somewhere far from the light into the centre of public debate.
Then I reached the recommendations on education — and went back to the first investigation of my life.
It was about the Lebanese University, the Faculty of Law in particular. I don’t remember what I wrote. I remember exactly how I met the students: in cars, away from campus. They were afraid of being seen speaking to a journalist.
That was perhaps the first investigation in which I encountered this kind of “sensitivity.” It was also the first time I received a call from the office of the Speaker of Parliament. God rest him, Arafat Hijazi told me: “The Speaker is upset about the investigation.”
It is one of the few stories that is thirty years old and in which most of the protagonists have changed. The students graduated and left, and their children are graduating now. Except Speaker Berri, of course, who has not changed.
I say this because the recommendation in this paper — to halt party interference in the appointment of teachers at the public school and the national university, and to place clear limits on political propaganda inside schools — is not a technical recommendation. It is a recommendation about fear. And about a situation that has become, after thirty years, harder and more tangled.
The Lebanese University remained, through the war and every crisis that followed, one of the few national institutions left standing.
After the collapse of 2019, during a mobilisation by university teachers, I spoke to a professor who had lived and taught through all the war years and had never left the university. As we spoke, he began to cry.
“Through all the war years I never left. But now I can’t do this any more. There is no electricity at the university, and the classroom is on the sixth floor. There is no paper to print instructions for the students. There is no internet to teach remotely. I don’t know what to do.”
That sentence has stayed with me. There was not only helplessness and anger in it. There was fear.
Because the collapse of the Lebanese University does not mean the loss of an educational institution. It means the collapse of one of the last institutions that still brought Lebanese together, gave their children a chance, and preserved — against everything — the idea that a state exists, and that there is a public right which ought to be available to everyone.
When I read the recommendations on education and on the writing of history, I also remembered a story I once covered about the dispute in parliament over the history textbook.
Years later, helping my daughter study history and civics for her baccalaureate, I experienced for myself what those compromises produced in the texts we teach our children. The least that can be said is that it is a tragedy, in every sense of the word. Not only because we failed to agree on a shared narrative, but because the narrative we did accept is repressive — like everything else in this country — and is quite capable of deepening the distance between people.
Since the war ended we have been trying to agree on what to say about the past, how to say it, and what to teach our children. And we have not agreed: not on a shared narrative, and not even on a safe space in which to disagree about one.
Then came the wave of assassinations. And 8 and 14 March. And the Shiite duopoly rose further still. Then 7 May, and we moved gradually into a period in which Hezbollah’s control over political and security decision-making became a fact that marked the whole country.
Most of the people in this room lived all of that, personally and professionally. We did not read about how we got here. We lived every detail of getting here.
And the truth is not that we did not try. The truth is that we tried a great deal — but in a fragmented way. Each of us in our own small space, each institution inside its own project, each initiative trying to close a separate gap.
Every initiative I have been part of began from the same question: there is work the state should be doing, and the state is not doing it — so what can we do?
And so civil society found itself doing part of the state’s work. The media doing part of it. The university, the professor, the local initiative, each doing what they could to stop one more piece of the country from falling.
But civil society cannot remain a permanent substitute for the state. And recommendations cannot become an elegant way of managing its absence.
Because what we are reading here is not a list of separate demands addressed to eight ministries. These recommendations are, in essence, a single project: rebuilding the relationship between the citizen and the state.
When we talk about education, we are not talking only about curricula and textbooks, but about a shared memory, a national university, and a place where Lebanese meet one another as citizens.
When we talk about the ministries and the social and administrative institutions, we are talking about the state recovering its responsibility towards people. Because a party builds its power precisely when it becomes the source of education, assistance, protection and work.
And when we talk about culture, media and public space, we are saying that Shiite society is not one voice and not one experience, and that protecting plurality inside it is not a Shiite matter. It is a condition for building a state of citizenship for all Lebanese.
What will make these recommendations different is not their content alone. It is a will to work together, a clear responsibility for implementation, and genuine cooperation between the ministries, the institutions and civil society — with a timetable and a mechanism for follow-up and accountability.
As for Daraj, we did not take our role in this project to be speaking on behalf of the people of Jabal Amil, or deciding for them what they think and what they want.
Our role was to open the space so that they could speak — in their plurality, their disagreements, and at times their contradictions. And to carry those voices out of closed circles and the margins into public debate.
Within this project we produced 49 pieces of journalism: 29 articles and posts, and 20 videos and reels. They covered four themes: citizenship and pluralism; governance, Hezbollah and dissenting voices; war, reconstruction and displacement; and culture, environment and local resilience. For us the articles were the foundation that gave the project its depth, while the videos carried those ideas and experiences to a wider audience.
But the pieces that had the most effect were not the ones offering abstract political analysis. They were the human testimonies, and the voices speaking from inside the experience.
Among them, Hanaa Jaber’s question, speaking about the destruction of Bint Jbeil: “Why do they hate us?” And Issmat Faour’s words: “Hezbollah must stop lying.” And the question: “Why does Hezbollah fear internal dissenting voices?”
Those pieces confirmed something we believe at Daraj. People may disagree with the analysis, the slogan and the political position — but they cannot easily dismiss honest human testimony, and a voice that dares to speak from inside the experience.
Total documented exposure reached roughly 630,000, and we recorded more than 14,500 engagements. Sixty-one per cent of that reach came through video and reels, and Instagram and Facebook were the main engine of distribution.
Those numbers matter, but they are not the point in themselves.
What matters more is that voices which had spoken in fear, or in narrow closed circles, became part of a public conversation — and that it became difficult for anyone to claim that Shiite society is a single bloc, or that one voice has the right to speak in its name.
The role of journalism is to listen, to document, to open the space, and to connect personal experience to the public question. But it cannot implement recommendations, and it cannot stand in for the state.
Perhaps this is not the first time recommendations have reached a government. But I want to believe that this time it can be the beginning of a different way of working.
Because what is at stake is not only the future of the South, and not only the future of Shiite society. What is at stake is the shape of the country we all want to live in. A safe country, where the state is present, where citizens are treated as equals, and where no one needs a party, a leader or a broker in order to obtain their right, to feel protected, or to secure an education and a future for their children.
We have spent long years trying, each from where we stand, to fill the vacuum left by the state.
Perhaps it is time we worked together — not to manage that vacuum, but to end it.
Thank you.
