6) Under Martial Law

 

From: garynelson@hotmail.com
To: kieran_nelson@hotmail.com; kristennelson@hotmail.com
Subject: Civil War in Lebanon
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 08:47:47 -0800

Mes chers enfants:
 
The CBC reported last night that open civil war in Lebanon is imminent. Imminent being TOMORROW (i.e.. Friday). If Lebanese politicians locked in a Beirut hotel cannot agree on a new President by tomorrow, the country is expected to dissolve in civil war.
 
This was not the usual Chicken Little CBC report. This was Nahleh Ayed’s report. She’s there, she speaks the language, she’s a marvelous correspondent AND she knows that when you want to find out about the prospects of war, you interview the waiter in the (empty) popular restaurant, the teacher in the (closing) local school, and the politician (trying to put on a brave face) in the only room the hotel that can be made available for interviews for security reasons.
 
The Lebanese do civil war like no one else. Afghans and Congolese don’t hold a candle. All the pressures of the Middle East are reflected there; allegiances and alliances shift with a speed and complexity one cannot follow.
 
My advice:
 
Don’t go there; don’t even think about ‘citizen journalism’ (which anyone with an AK47 will read as ’spy’); tell Sean to get his ass out while he can; and if it ’starts’, whether by open street battles or simply an increase in bombings and assassinations, be very, very careful wherever you go. Every conflict in the region that I have observed has had unforeseen repercussions in other countries. The US, Israel, Syria and Iran will all be in the thick of it.

——

Yes, indeed. Lebanon was on the brink of Civil War. There was an election that was supposed to be held merely a week before we planned to arrive. Sean had left early to check out the situation in Beirut: he wanted to arrive before they refused to let foreigners in the country. If there was going to be a war, he didn’t want to miss it.

Meanwhile, Nickie and I were busy filming Garbage City in Cairo, and my sister Kristen was arriving that day from a long flight from Vancouver. Beirut was our next stop. Also, it was a very important next stop: through some loophole in the visa system, the only way we could really travel to both Lebanon and Syria without wasting time and money at embassies, was to arrive at Beirut international airport and then take a taxi to Damascus. It was Beirut or bust.

But…a civil war? I hadn’t expected things to get this bad.

You see, Lebanon has been having civil wars since it was founded. Every thirty years or so, the place descends into chaos…namely, the six or seven tribes or so that are mashed together in the tiny country fight for political power. The most recent of these wars, begun in 1979, did not stop for fifteen years. It was a bloodbath, and civil society could barely function…but the Lebanese lived on.

The inside joke is that Lebanon isn’t really a country. Lebanon was a little corner of Syria in which true power was held by the Christian aristocracy. The Christians are known as Maronites: a sect that imitates French Catholicism. When Syria was given to the French by the British after World War One, revolt broke out. King Faisal of Syria had fought alongside Lawrence of Arabia and the British against the Turks…they were fighting for an Arab nation independent of colonial rule. And as soon as the guns cooled, Syria was deemed unfit for independence by Britain, and was given to France. King Faisal then started a revolt to liberate Syria, and gain the independent state that he was first promised.

The Christians in Lebanon saw their chance. They immediately declared allegiance to the French government, fought against the Syrians, and created their own flag: the French tricolour with the famous Lebanese Cedar in the center. Once France had quelled the revolt, they gave the small territory of Lebanon to the Maronite Christians as a gift.

There was only one problem. The Christians weren’t the only people there.

Lebanon today is made up of many different tribes. There are the Sunni Muslims, who have been there since time immemorial. There are the Druze: a sect similar to Islam that inhabit the Shouf mountains. There are the Shia Muslims…these used to be simple farm labourers on the large Christian estates, and they remain Lebanon’s poorest class today. There are the Orthodox Christians, who actually are the largest population of Christians in the country. And finally, there are the Maronites.

The Maronites rule Lebanon through their wealthy and powerful mafia clans. On the outside, the country appears to be a democracy. This is nonsense. It is a democracy, with the stipulation that the president must be chosen from the Maronite Christians, and a Prime Minister from the Sunni Muslims. Each seat in the parliament contains a mafia don. Every tribe has power in the government comparative to their power in the country.

Or not. That is what all the fighting has been about. The Christian-dominated parliament system was created when the Christians were the dominant demographic. And for almost a hundred years, the population of the other groups has been growing: most prominently, the Shia Muslims. They created an armed front to fight for their position in power: known to most Westerners as the terrorist group Hezbollah.

That sounds like a lot of tribes…but the story isn’t over. In 1948, the Jews in Israel declared independence, and the Arab nations declared war. The Jews, greatly outnumbered and outgunned, fought a heroic battle and won large tracts of land. The former occupants of this land, the Palestinians, scattered in all directions. Some went north to Lebanon. And there they have lived for sixty years: unable to return to Israel, and unwanted and unaccepted by the tribes of Lebanon.

On the outside, Lebanon appears to be a real country: it has a real flag, a real government, and a real army. On the inside, Lebanon is an overcrowded postage stamp of land filled with tribal hatreds, and it retains order by a thread.

And I had to see it. I became obsessed with the place after reading “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, by Thomas Friedman, and I wanted to go and see the country with what might be the most complex politics in the world. But it was on the brink of civil war. On the BBC, on the CBC, on CNN, on the Guardian, on Fox News…it was everywhere. Lebanon was going to erupt. Even Sean’s blog started to take on a stormcrow’s tune.

And then it all changed. The president left power, and left the army in charge. The ‘election’ was postponed again, until the mafia dons could negotiate a leader amongst themselves. And lo–hey found one. General Suleiman was decided upon as a candidate.

And suddenly, the press shut up. The CBC started running articles on the Annapolis conference. The BBC started running articles on the English teacher in Sudan who got arrested for naming a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. The international media, in an embarrassed moment, conveniently forgot what last week’s sensation was about, and began to run Chicken Little reports on something else.

We bought tickets for Beirut the next day.

——

My first impression of the city was a crowd of a few hundred people waiting for arrivals in the airport. The rain outside was pouring down just like good old Vancouver. After negotiating an overpriced taxi, we shuttled off to the hotel where Sean was staying.

The Hotel Talal was run by Zaher and Wessam, whom Sean affectionately termed “The Druze Brothers.” Wessam would always croon or sing in a pretty little falsetto. Zaher would make animal noises. Every once in a while you would come down to the fridge to get a beer, and you would here the soft mewing of a cat, or the rough grunting of a gorilla. They ran the Hotel Cheap, where they had cheap beds, cheap rooms, and cheap cervezas.

For dinner, we ambled down to a shop called Makhlouf’s. “Surly George” Makhlouf had a shop stocked with Christian insignia, a fridge full of stale pastries that we ate anyways, and a sandwich iron that he would use to grill us two-dollar sandwiches.

In the warm common room of the hostel, we cracked open some cold ones and laid back to celebrate our reunion with Sean and our arrival in Lebanon. Some of us sat on the couches, while my sister typed away on the common computer. Sean told me how all of his friends had a large laugh over my father’s email. With a beer in hand, he leaned on a table. “Dangerous? Oh yeah, it’s totally dangerous. Right now we’re in a country that’s technically under martial law. How unsafe do you feel?”

——-
The next day was the time for some sightseeing. We all jumped in a cab and shuttled off to Baalbek, an ancient Roman ruin that is preserved wonderfully well. It was a two-hour ride there from the capital. On the way, we passed a high bridge that had two large sections missing. Dozens of twisted pieces of rebar poked out of the shattered concrete. “Bombed by Israel” said Sean.

In 2006, the Israelis fought a war with Lebanon. Hezbollah kidnapped two soldiers from the Israeli Defence Forces, and the IDF retaliated strongly. They blanketed the south of the country with bombs, they bombed Beirut airport, and they even bombed the bridges out of the Shia communities so the people could not escape.

My Maronite Christian friend Najat was there during that war. She and her father were about to cross a bridge in their car. She heard a screeching in the sky. “Dad, they’re bombing us!” she yelled. She watched as a bomb destroyed the bridge in front of her, right where she would have been two minutes later. She told me that for five or ten minutes, it was armageddon. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have bombs raining down around me, not knowing where the next one would strike

That was enough for her. The airport was closed, so she taxied to Syria. Now she’s working in Dubai.

On the way past the bridge, I asked a soldier who was in our microbus why Israel bombed that. I got a sneer that turned politely into a dark grin. “That’s not really a question I can answer, that’s a question for the Israeli High Command.”

——-

Baalbek was truly amazing. It was totally deserted, the tourist high season being at a different time. It was cloudy and cold, yet still wonderful. In such an archeological site in Italy, France, or Greece, everything would be fenced off, and there would be multiple guards around telling us not to touch this, and to be careful of that. But this was Lebanon. And Baalbek was my own personal playground. We could climb on anything we wanted, kick stones around, take souvenirs…it was fantastic. The ruins were colossal. It boggled my mind that the Romans found a way to move such mammoth pieces of stone: things that would be very challenging to move with today’s technology.

Outside, the Temple Townies were having a bad season. They swarmed us, peddling postcards, keychains, guidebooks, and Hezbollah T-Shirts. Well, we had to buy some of those. We chose between yellow and black, and went off blissfully, having funded terrorism in a very touristy way.

Then, in the microbus on the way back, we debated prices with the cabbie, while the dirty Arab in the front stared at Nickie and my sister the entire way home. I peered out the window thought fully.

Something had bothered me deeply on the way to Baalbek. It was all the bullet holes.

We had driven through a fair amount of Beirut to get to the highway. And along the way, I saw evidence of the civil war. So much evidence in fact, that I felt like a complete green tourist for remarking on it. There were bullet holes everywhere. On any building that was over twenty years old, the face was pock-marked with holes that ranges from the width of your thumb to the width of a glass. This was not only the case on important buildings, or buildings on major routes. This was true of simple homes that were tucked away in the corners of neighbourhoods. Shop owners would pull down the metal curtains to lock their store for the night, and the curtain would be riddled with holes. There were bullet holes covering the building across the street from my hotel…and when I looked closely, I realized that there were ample bullet holes on my hotel itself.

Downtown Beirut was interesting. It was a plethora of new buildings. I had never seen so many construction cranes in one place. I learned that twenty years before, the area in between Christian West Beirut and the rest of town was a flat gravel patch laden with shrapnel. Since the days of peace, developers had bought up the land, and were desperate constructing buildings so as not to lose even more money. Despite the imminent civil war.

A few of the buildings downtown did not just have bullet holes. They had bomb holes. Large, gaping holes the size of a human that had been blown open by some rocket or grenade. The buildings had long since been abandoned to become eyesores in the center of town: evidence of a war-torn past.

Across the street from my hotel was a place called Martyr’s Square. It is a statue of the goddess Liberty holding a few young men who are dying: it was built by an independent Lebanon to commemorate four people who died trying to gain independence from France. It was a classic monument to fake modern nationalism. Yet a closer inspection revealed something far more eerie.

The entire statue was shot up. The goddess Liberty looked like a pasta strainer. One of the young men had the lower part of his arm blown off, and a fist-sized hole in the center of his back. There are bullet holes in the cheeks of the dying men, giving the frightening impression that they are dying because they were shot.

This monument chilled me. I had never seen a monument that was a more perfect symbol of the country–and it was totally accidental. A statue of independence riddled with bullets. An independent Lebanon that barely keeps from tearing itself apart.

Yet, to walk along the street, you could never tell. There are women dressed in gorgeous fashions adorning the bars, French businessmen sipping cappuccinos in the cafes, and Makhlouf was constantly selling sandwiches. Everything seemed tense, but on the whole quite normal.

I thought for a while about the dozens of faces I saw waiting at the airport, and a chill creeped across my skin. They all seemed so normal: well-dressed, content, waiting for their loved ones to get off the plane from Egypt. Yet just one week before, how many of those people were ready to murder each other in the name of their respective tribes?