Politics

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Lebanon, Two Months Later

By Iason Athanasiadis

After a year of traipsing around Afghanistan and Iraq while being based in Iran, it was supposed to be a carefree summer in which I would leave the Middle East and its troubles far behind. Leaving monochrome Tehran stewing in its midsummer traffic, I briefly touched down in Dubai and Kuwait before flying through the last dregs of night to swoop over the Aegean as the first glimmers of light spilled over the horizon. The Middle East has a way of psychologically entrapping its victims, however. Once hooked to this dysfunctional, always troubled region, it’s hard to let go, whatever the pain. Life in a normal part of the world just doesn’t appeal anymore.

At least this time I was forewarned that I might be headed back soon. A nasty little war between Israel and Hezbollah had flared up at the beginning of the summer: one of those conflicts waged between the faceless fighter jets of a First World power and the shadowless guerrillas of a “non-state actor.” Fourth-generation warfare, it’s called, and it has a knack of bogging down superpowers, usually at the expense of thousands of dead civilians. Modern war is almost impossible for journalists to cover. There are no glamorous military set-pieces, no pitched battles between rival armies; just short, sharp exchanges in which concepts such as valor or strength appear increasingly outdated. The media is left to parrot the line touted by rival military establishments, and to cover the streams of refugees, produced by each conflict.

At home in Tehran, the crossfire of the international TV coverage seemed to reflect the war itself. Switching from CNN, which divided its reporting “fairly” between Haifa and Beirut even as Israel’s destruction of Lebanon became glaringly disproportional, to pro-Hezbollah al-Jazeera and Saudi-owned al-Arabiya, I always came back to the BBC’s riveting, mostly balanced coverage. Meanwhile, away from the Beirut rooftops where satellites fed a constant stream of live reports into the skies, the Lebanese were caught in lethal showers of razor-sharp shrapnel. Their country was also being tossed about on the airwaves by the cut-and-thrust of competing world-views.

Everybody knew that Israel’s invasion had nothing to do with the two Israeli soldiers “kidnapped” by Hezbollah during an ambush. (Once upon a time, enemy combatants were captured, to use the term still applied when the operation is executed by Israel against Hezbollah.) This was a straight-out, proxy slugfest between Tehran and Washington—a scuffle prior to the real campaign—over who would dominate the Middle East in the new era. Both were pushing their rival policies for the area. Perhaps the only sunlight between the two agendas was that, due to its greater proximity to the Arab world, the Iranian perspective was more grounded in the region’s social realities. Modern war throws up surreal paradoxes. Israeli aircraft circled over Beirut, picking off targets at will, obliterating an apartment block that might have contained a Hezbollah-affiliated office or a refugee car loaded down by mattresses on the suspicion its driver was a Hezbollah courier. At the other end of town, journalists tapped out the last paragraphs of their stories after a day’s reporting and dispatched them to their editors over invisible Internet networks before going off to the brightly lit but deserted city center for a drink.

Those Lebanese fluent in English and with access to the Internet also typed out their daily reality into the ether, offering unprecedented insight into the conflict. Lebanon is no sanctions-weakened Iraq, with most of its educated class having fled to the West and the rest forced by need to regress to just scraping by. A polyphony of voices eloquently described the experience of seeing one’s country ripped apart. One, from the outside, was that of Dana Kahil. A film editor and the daughter of the Arab world’s best-known political cartoonist, Kahil and her French husband had made the decision to move to Beirut and packed their bags when the war started. With Beirut Airport bombed, however, they got stuck in London and in the kind of anxious frenzy that comes from being trapped outside, rather than inside, a war-zone. Obsessed by every twist and turn of the conflict, Kahil started a blog, I WANT TO GO HOME (http://forafreelebanon.blogspot.com/2006_07_16_forafreelebanon_archive.html), to let out her nervous energy. “London 3AM on a very very early morning, still dark, very quiet but eery [sic] because the sound of the tv is projecting the noise of Beirut aching….I am in London, cannot sleep, worried, heart broken…lost…,” Kahil wrote in her first entry.

Al-Dahieh
It is hard to comprehend the scale of devastation in al-Dahieh without walking its shattered streets. I had seen the television images of Beirut’s sprawling southern suburb, which has soaked up successive waves of poor, Shi’a rural workers coming to the capital to find work over the past decades, but the reality was far more tragic. Costas Barkas, a Greek doctor on his first visit to the area, was staggered by the effect of actually being there—far stronger than any photograph or television report. Eight days after the end of hostilities, a pungent smell rose from the ruins and collapsed apartments, which locals said was a mixture of decomposing garbage, bodies buried under the concrete, and the tang of the depleted uranium-coated bombs used by warplanes to target the Hezbollah leadership’s underground bunkers. One taxi driver told me that the thriving market for scrap metal from al-Dahieh ended immediately after the ceasefire following rumors that the commodity involved was contaminated with depleted uranium.

Essentially a closed military zone during the war and the target of repeated Israeli bombardment, the area was opened to the foreign press, and to the waves of refugees flooding back to their ruined houses, after the August 14 ceasefire. Within al-Dahieh, Haaret Hreik also happened to be Hezbollah’s stronghold, containing the nerve center of the organization’s bureaucracy. A week after the ceasefire, crowds of war-tourists—mostly Lebanese but including several Arab nationalities—started flocking in to behold, through the viewfinders of their camcorders and mobile phones, the destruction caused by the advanced military technology deployed against al-Dahieh. One of the more thoughtful visitors was Abir Bassam, a writer and fixer for foreign journalists, for whom al-Dahieh was an old stomping-ground. “To see a whole apartment block lying on the ground is unbelievable,” she said. “…all those memories of a lifetime…all gone….”

The South
Leaving Beirut behind, I headed south. The further south, and toward the border with Israel, I progressed, the more the wreckage increased. At first, the only thing wrong with the landscape were the downed bridges, often ruined by a single death-blow delivered from on high straight through the middle. But as I left behind the Mediterranean cities of Sidon and Tyre, the evidence of chaos multiplied, until I was rolling, awestruck, through eerily empty, razed villages, upon which apparently indiscriminate violence had been perpetrated. Shrapnel bursts decorated those still-standing walls, fanning out a trail of high-pressure molten metal across their surfaces.

Eventually, I arrived at Maroun ar-Ras, the strategically located village spread out across a hilltop, close to a UN base. Its tragic fate was sealed after 12 Israeli soldiers from the Maglan reconnaissance unit reportedly ran into a Hezbollah ambush and two were killed. Several more soldiers from the elite Egoz brigade were killed in a second ambush when they rushed to their comrades’ help. It took several hours of firefights before the Maglan and Egoz platoons were able to drag their dead and wounded back across the border. Israel’s revenge was to flatten the village and then occupy the mosque, one of the few buildings still standing. Now, as the ludicrously cheerful red van marked “PRESS” that I was in steered into the village, the full extent of what had transpired became apparent.

Next to the blasted mosque, under the decapitated minaret, lounged a trio of United Nations peacekeepers. Dug into the rubble a few meters from them was a UN flag, fluttering its pastel blue globe over a blasted landscape of lunar proportions. An overpowering aroma of putrefaction emanated from the carcass of a cow, its bones half-exposed, lying next to the tank-treads of Israeli tanks crisscrossing the heaped dust. “We’re probably the first journalists to make it here,” said Ziad, my traveling companion and cameraman, as the UN soldiers peered at us quizzically. “The Israelis only abandoned this position two days ago.” An old jeep carrying two Hezbollah cadres labored up the gutted track, rolling over the ruins strewing the remains of the road and past us. They nodded as they passed, signaling that we shouldn’t film them, while studiously ignoring the UN peacekeepers. Back in the car, we inched past a bombed graveyard, the weeds that once covered it burned to a sooty crisp. Behind it rose another mosque, also damaged in the street-to-street fighting between Hezbollah and Israeli soldiers. Heading down the hill on the way back toward Beirut, we passed another almost-erased settlement: Bint Jbeil. Tons of rubble carpeted the hill, burying cars, furniture, and the remains of humans and animals.

“The place to be on Saturday”
Five hours later, I was back in Beirut, showered, fed, cologned, and staring down at hundreds more human bodies. But the setting this time was Cristal, Lebanon’s premier nightspot and rumored to be expanding its franchise to New York. An exhibitionist frenzy gripped the club as lean, scantily clad male and female bodies requisitioned seats, tables, alcoves, and even the bar, gyrating to the beat. The philosophy appeared to be that the higher and more visible one was, the better. My companions for the evening—a Swedish-Syrian television producer and her blonde, American-raised Lebanese friend introduced as “the Paris Hilton of the Middle East”—clued me into the scene.

“Cristal is the place to be on Saturday,” said Lena Lahham, a television producer. “But they’re opening it up to just anyone tonight because many people are still outside the country,” added Ayah Ajam, her friend, who weathered the 34-day Israeli bombardment and invasion of Lebanon in Monte Carlo. “The same crowd has the same tables every week,” continued Lena, pointing out the corner her brother used to occupy before going off to Dubai to work for a Western financial institution. “Then, the management turn on the lights at about 1 AM, when the place is full, so everyone can check out who’s here, who has a new babe with him and so on.” As if on cue, the strobes and spotlights faded and a fierce yellow light flooded the club, illuminating everyone. Hundreds of revelers were captured frozen in the radiance, hands above their heads, hips thrust out in mid-dance move, cleavages offered up promisingly. “HELLO BEIRUT!!! HOW ARE WE DOING AFTER THE WAR?!” roared the DJ in English down at the crowd. Rapturous cheers greeted his inquiry.

By 2 AM, Cristal was so packed it was difficult to move and the option of sitting limited only to those who had booked tables. Drinks cost an average of $12, an unreachable sum for the average Lebanese. But inside the club, situated in the exclusive Christian area of Achrafieh, dozens of bottles of Moët were being consumed. Knowing its self-promoting clientele well, the management delivered every batch of up to four, fizzler-attached bottles inside large ice-buckets, while the DJ interrupted his set to pronounce each purchaser’s name. The palpitating bodies on the Cristal dance-floor were a far cry from the flattened ruins or comatose injured of the summer war. But this has always been the contradiction that has bedeviled Lebanon since its independence in 1943.

From Riviera to citadel to rubble
A French creation, Lebanon used to be the Christian-majority part of western Syria. Because of religious ties, its population enjoyed excellent relations with the French Mandate authority that superseded the Ottoman empire after the latter’s collapse following the First World War. Since then, Lebanon’s Maronite Christian community—which publicly insists it is not Arab—has consistently sided with outsiders, notably Israel. Lebanon has thus been the ideological and actual battlefield of a host of struggles, from the superpower confrontation during the Cold War to a more local battle over Washington’s new Middle East plan, which has provoked regional resistance from Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.

After the Second World War, two competing national projects ran in parallel in Lebanon. One aimed at building a Riviera, a Monaco of the eastern Mediterranean, while the other aspired to establishing a citadel or bunker on Israel’s northern border. “In the short term, Hezbollah—representing the Citadel project—has emerged victorious from recent events,” according to Nadim Shehadi, a Middle East analyst at London’s Chatham House (formerly the Royal Institute of International Affairs).“The Israeli military campaign and the US support for it has—wholly against their professed intentions—certainly vindicated much of the Citadel’s argument and dealt a heavy political blow to the Riviera.” This summer was expected to have been the best tourist season Lebanon had seen since its Seventies heyday when Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Lebanese officials expected their small Mediterranean country to make almost $4 billion from tourist receipts alone. But in a rerun of 1975—when the European and petrodollar-rich Arab jet-set abandoned Beirut as the Lebanese civil war broke out, reducing much of it to bullet-scarred rubble—tragedy struck. It appears that the bunker model has won out for the time being.

Back to al-Dahieh
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the rubble-strewn garden of Beit Slim in al-Dahieh. A rambling villa set in what must once have been a decadent garden, Beit Slim today is a war-damaged cultural center called Umam (Nations), covered by a pallor of dust and exhaust fumes, and hemmed in by the grim, gray apartment blocks that characterize the Shi’a quarter. The characters peopling Beit Slim are as anachronistic as the setting. Lokman Slim—unkindly described by one Lebanese bookstore owner as “the closest a Lebanese can get to being a Washington neoconservative”—heads Hayya Bina, a political movement that emerged from the ashes of the Hariri assassination and promoted an anti-Syrian, anti-Hezbollah policy that might as well have been cooked up in Washington as in Beirut. His wife is a glamorous blonde Austrian who works hard to marshal the remainders of a unique archive chronicling the Lebanese civil war. Ironically, it was largely destroyed during the recent war by an errant bomb that struck a nearby apartment block. Attending to them is Sheikh Bilal, a Sunni sheikh who hands out humanitarian aid to the neighborhood needy while puffing on his nargileh.

“We are a part of those who are paying the price of the Iranian normalization,” states Lokman, broaching the threat posed by Iran, one of his favorite subjects. “Hezbollah are claiming a divine victory at a moment when neither our ports nor our airports are under Lebanese sovereignty.” Slim has refused to sell his property to Hezbollah buyers during the last two decades, but he has watched as the neighborhood has transformed itself around him into a stronghold of the Shi’a militia. Despite believing that his political and cultural activities are monitored by it, Slim credits Hezbollah with more political savvy than to use thuggery to remove him from the area. He attributes the same sophistication to Hezbollah’s policies.

“It’s much smarter than a party which will exert overt violence,” says Slim. “It’s more like a very sophisticated Eastern regime than something like Syria. People have been invaded from their soul out, not the other way around.” The cars with tinted windows that have paused opposite Beit Slim on opening nights or film screenings have yet to make a move beyond the warning implicit in their presence. Following Israel’s bombardment of the neighborhood, Slim seems to have decided that he won’t be leaving al-Dahieh anytime soon.

“I live here because this war took place and al-Dahieh was its epicenter, and because I had this feeling that this region is central to Lebanon and is the new political center of the country,” he said. “Centrality has moved from the so-called centers to the southern suburbs.” Beirut’s battle-scarred districts reflect this truth. The civil war between Christians and Muslims may be over but the conflict’s legacy lives on in Solidaire, the Disney-like renovation of downtown Beirut, and the series of underground tunnels and junctions that connect the now-permanently separated Christian East from Muslim West Beirut. Slim is convinced that the future of Lebanon will not be decided in Hamra, a commercial Sunni area, or Kaslik, an entertainment district full of bars and casinos that is a favorite with holidaying Gulf Arabs, or in Christian Achrafieh. “History will take place here,” he concludes, in al-Dahieh.