RUMOUR AND VIOLENCE FUEL LEBANON ANXIETY !

Martin Asser has returned to Lebanon, a year after covering the war between Hezbollah and Israel for the BBC News website. His series of articles will examine how the country has fared since that conflict.

Thousands of Palestinians have been displaced from Nahr al-Bared. It is with a terrible sense of deja vu that I walk into the first school on my itinerary to see the washing hanging from windows, the crowds of unruly kids, and their parents and grandparents camping out in bare classrooms.
Less than 12 months after the displacement of hundreds of thousands of southern Lebanese during Israel's 34-day bombardment, a new crisis has struck in the north causing a new wave of homelessness.
Now it is Palestinian refugees from Nahr al-Bared camp, suffering what many characterise as a greater catastrophe than their loss of Palestine in 1948 with the establishment of Israel.
Fewer lives have been disrupted compared with last summer - the camp held about 35,000 people before fighting erupted between Lebanese forces and a small group of armed Jihadists called Fatah al-Islam.
But it appears to have had a profound effect on the national psyche in Lebanon, a country battered by decades of war and unrest and now facing the future with great uncertainty.
Combination of conflicts
It is not very often - at least I have never experienced it - that within 24 hours of arriving in a country, you are repeatedly asked by inhabitants whether you think they should flee or not.
There is a heavy security presence on the streets of Beirut.
A typical gambit goes something like this: "So you've just arrived; how do you see the situation? Do you think there will be war? What's your advice? Should we leave?"
In the swirling rumours and jumpiness of Beirut, people seem to think that someone who has followed events from outside the country might be able to read the crisis more clearly.
It is not only the continued deterioration of civil and economic life since the July war, as Lebanese call the 2006 conflict, that has shaken people's confidence.
Nor is it the return of violence in the Palestinian camps, though it is well-known that the destabilising Palestinian ingredient in Lebanese life has been the trigger for devastating conflict in the past.
Now it seems that to that ingredient has been added elements of al-Qaeda inspired Jihad which have found refuge there - out of reach of the security forces.
There is also the string of assassinations of members of the governing anti-Syrian coalition, and the ongoing political stand-off between the government and the powerful Hezbollah-led opposition.
There is the possibility of more attacks against the international peacekeeping force Unifil, which lost six soldiers in a roadside bombing towards the end of June.
Then there are the more remote fears of being caught up in a regional war, perhaps between Iran and the US.
Then there is always the potential of renewed conflict between Hezbollah and Israel - which ended last year's war without securing the release of its two soldiers captured by the Lebanese militant group.
Vivid memory
Over the next few days, I shall be looking at the pro- and anti-Syria stand-off, the position of Unifil, the post-war reconstruction effort and the Palestinian refugees.
I saw an arm lying in the street... There was a ring on one of the fingers. Someone picked it up the arm, despite all the damaged flesh and pulled the ring off to steal it -Hotel employee, Beirut.
In the meantime, one rumour doing the rounds in anti-Syrian circles at the moment centres on 15 July, the date apparently set by neighbouring Syria as a deadline for its workers in Lebanon to leave the country.
There is probably nothing in it, but we're told to "expect some major event" on that day, and in the febrile atmosphere of the moment some imaginations are running unchecked.
Yesterday an employee in my hotel, too young to remember much about the 1975-91 civil war, asked me what I knew about 15 July.
We got talking and she told me about fights now breaking out in her district of Beirut between Shia and Sunni Muslims, pro- and anti-Syrians respectively.
I say she cannot remember the war, but she is haunted by one vivid recollection.
"I saw an arm lying in the street, just lying there, I don't know why. There was a ring on one of the fingers. Someone picked it up the arm, despite all the damaged flesh and pulled the ring off to steal it."
The battles now involve fists, clubs and knives, she says, but even the young know what horrors might be ahead if Lebanon's delicate religious mix is plunged into a new period of violence.

BBC NEWS REPORT.