TRAVEL|Lebanon Diary 2005
PROLOGUE
May 2004. A friend returning from Lebanon says: ‘Beautiful country. Coasts, mountains, vineyards, distances no problem. Mosques, Crusader castles, Byblos, Beka’a Valley, the Roman temples at Baalbak - and Tyre and Sidon. Get there soon before mass tourism takes it over.’
2 February 2005. The sown seed germinates during our dull, damp, grey winter. We book our own trip, fully paid up, departing London-Beirut 9th April.
TO GO OR TO CANCEL
14 February. Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is assassinated by massive car-bomb and the St George’s Hotel devastated again. 19 people killed, over 200 injured. Place names like Beirut, Beka’a, and Syria jump suddenly into the news again. To our ears, they carry their old baggage, the risen shades of the bitter, seemingly endless civil war, over 150,000 killed during its 15 years, evoking again names like Walid Jumblatt, the Druze, Nabih Berri and Hizbullah.
Immense and immediate demonstrations on Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut express a huge drive of feeling on the streets for change and freedom and, above all, peace. Like another Ukraine, some say. The demonstrators want Syrian troops to leave their country after 29 years’ occupation. They want the truth about the killing, suspecting Syrian involvement. Only days later, President George W. Bush demands that Syria get her military butt out of Lebanon – and fast. The reaction is almost instantaneous. Syria and Iran declare a mutual self-defensive partnership. Syrian troops move quickly towards the border up the north-eastern end of the Beka’a Valley. President Assad announces publicly that, anyway, it was high time his troops left Lebanon. Later still, large numbers of well-organised Hizbullah protesters hit the streets, in support of Syria and its works.
7 March. We reflect. Having never been to the Middle East, we do want to visit Lebanon. We want to see the restored Beirut, the ancient castles, souks, mosques, and the caravanserai; the high snow-topped mountains, the blue Mediterranean, some of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, in a country of around four million people with seventeen religious communities. Our mood and instinct are positive. But you can’t help wondering: Will it be safe? Should we go? We already know that, despite the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) global warning about the worldwide risk of indiscriminate terrorism, most travel insurance does not cover events definable as war or terrorism. It’s clearly time for apprehensive travellers to consult the FCO website for the latest news.
Whatever the advice, everyone makes their own decision in the end. Travel anywhere involves acts of faith. There are too many elements you can’t control and some you can’t even predict. Nearly all journeys by car, plane, train or ship are completed safely. The chances of a disaster are slim, and that you will be involved in one even slimmer. The FCO tells us:
We do not warn against travel to every country where there is a risk
of terrorists operating. If we were to do so, it would cover a large proportion
of the world, serving only to cause panic and disrupt normal life. That is
precisely what terrorists are striving to achieve . . . It is rare that our
government will warn British nationals against all travel to a country.
When we do, we hope that you will heed that advice.
Our first look at the website shows advice against all travel to only three countries: Ivory Coast, Somalia and Togo, each suffering from varying degrees of severe internal uncertainties. On the other hand, there are long lists where the FCO advises against all, or all but essential, travel to parts of particular countries. For example, Ecuador has internal political troubles, periodic disturbances on its north-eastern borders and the threat of a volcano erupting near Baños. Lebanon comes into this category with a warning to avoid:
. . . all but essential travel to the Beka’a Valley north of Baalbak and areas
of southern Lebanon close to the border with Israel south of a line between
Tyre and Marjayoun.
The zone north of Baalbak is very near the Syrian border and has recently contained large concentrations of Syrian troops. The area south of Tyre is close to Palestinian refugee camps and to the border where Hizbullah intermittently annoy the Israeli authorities in various impertinent ways. Our proposed itinerary excludes both these areas. Now we consult the FCO daily, hoping each time that Lebanon won’t appear in the LATEST TRAVEL UPDATES column. But it does.
19 March. A car bomb explodes in New Jdeideh, a residential/business area of north Beirut; eight people injured, none seriously. FCO repeats its warning to ‘avoid any political gatherings and/or demonstrations’. This one is reported on BBC radio news. The overall level of FCO warning is unchanged today, and remains so long after our return home, despite a few more bombs.
23 March. In the early hours, a bomb explodes in a shopping centre in Kaslik, north Beirut; three killed and five injured. Only two-and-a-half weeks away from our planned departure date, the FCO now refers to recent events as ‘a spate of bomb explosions in and around Christian areas of Beirut.’ Most of us probably wouldn’t call two or three of anything a ‘spate’. Its use here introduces an extra sense of discomfort, a more dramatic flavour.
26 March. Northern Beirut again: a bomb explodes late at night causing considerable damage to property. Five people are injured. Who is planting these bombs? Members of a single group? Unconnected smaller groups? Are there any specific targets? Is it simply a destabilisation gesture in the run-up to the parliamentary elections in May? By now, Beirut bombs have dropped out of the BBC news.
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GO, YOU'LL GO!
3 April. No website updating over the Easter weekend. With less than a week to go, today we learn of a bomb late on 1 April in a car park at Broumanna in the Metn Mountains east of Beirut, injuring nine.
The daily website visit has become marginally tenser, but our optimism is untainted. The simple fact is that, having decided to go there, we want to go. No further incidents are reported as Lebanon drops off the FCO’s UPDATE column. We head for Heathrow on the due date, the wedding day, as it happens, of the heir to the throne. We can see Windsor Castle from the windows of the airport departure lounge while the huge television screens show us royals and others arriving there, a weird juxtaposition of the real and the mediated.
9 April. During the descent to Beirut International an eccentric Irish woman won’t remain seated or belted in, despite the steward’s repeated firm announcements. She seems to be searching through all her belongings, perhaps trying to locate an errant contact lens. Dreadful thought: will she turn out to be a member of our group? We disembark at 10.30 pm (they’re 2 hours ahead of UK time), and the Airbus carries on to Damascus. The arrivals building is modern, big, bright, clean and echoingly empty. You can get your Lebanon visa from the Embassy in London before departure, or at the desk on arrival here. It’s entirely straightforward and takes no more time to issue than the baggage takes to reach the reclaim carousel. It’s a necessary formality, not an obstacle, and costs about US$15. Currencies circulating here interchangeably are Lebanese Pounds (LL) and US dollars, generally at an exchange rate of LL1,500 to the dollar. Spend dollars and your change is usually given in Lebanese Pounds, occasionally a mixture. The trick is to leave at the end of your visit with the smallest number of Pounds you can achieve.
Our first few days will be based at Jounieh, a long, narrow resort and residential town about 20 km north of Beirut, where the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet is guarded at night by an armed Lebanese soldier. This coastal strip runs for some 200 km from just south of Tyre to north of Tripoli. Often only a few miles wide in the southern half of Lebanon, it soon gives way to the steep foothills of the Mount Lebanon range, beyond which lies the Beka’a Valley. This high, very fertile, plain gives way in turn to the Anti Lebanon Mountains and the border with Syria.
We’re positioned halfway round a semi-circular bay. From our hotel balcony, we see, across a two-lane street and past a few buildings, the deep blue Mediterranean lapping a small beach and rolling softly westward in the warm sunshine towards Cyprus, under an empty sky. As Beirut became increasingly unsafe during the civil war, Jounieh, once a quiet fishing village, expanded boundlessly, developing its hotel, restaurant and nightclub dimension to become, for a while, the latest new social ‘hot spot’ on the coast. This includes the famous Casino du Liban, first opened in 1959 and re-opened post-war in 1996 (jeans and trainers not permitted). At night, its electronic light show is beamed across the bay, signalling its eagerness to disengage customers from their hundreds of thousands of Lebanese pounds.
Along with the commercial expansion, in a process continuing today wherever a spare hectare can be bought or sold, its residential sector mushroomed. Apartment blocks have sprouted everywhere in an ugly and disorganised profusion, right across the coastal strip and onto the terrifyingly steep slopes behind the town. Any pretence at planning has been subsumed to the instincts of rabid property speculation – and, we’re told, the innate Lebanese need for a sea view. Holidaying Lebanese come here in the summer as well as Arab tourists from the Gulf, keen to escape their own even greater heat.
Dunkin Donuts, apparently not listed for armed protection, is nearly full of young people early in the evenings but restaurants like Maklouf, Chez Sami, Toro Negro and others typically don’t begin their action until about 9.30 pm. As we want dinners earlier than this, we generally have a very large restaurant almost entirely to ourselves, receiving the close attention of potentially half a dozen waiters all at a loose end. Noticing that we’re English speakers, they help us to understand the menu, especially their puzzling names for fish, which, as all travellers know, are different in every country you visit. It’s the time, too, for discussion of Lebanese wines, produced mostly at the Ksara and Kefraya vineyards in the Beka’a. We find through experiment that the red Chateau Ksara and their Blanc de Blancs, fiercely chilled, do very nicely. (And you can buy Ksara wines in the Edgware Road).
10 April. We’re eased in first with a visit to Harissa, high on the cliff behind the town. Here are churches of several faiths, including the strikingly modern Maronite Christian cathedral, spectacular inside and out with its great, curving ribs of concrete. The huge white statue of the Virgin of Lebanon, brought from southern France in the 19th century, dominates this small hill-top area. A party of Iranian tourists, men in black suits, women completely covered in black, swarm up the spiral staircase around the base of the statue, look quickly at the view of the bay below, and rush down again to their waiting coach, like a flock of enormous crows.
The drive into the Chouf Mountains provides our first taste of spectacular and dramatic upland landscape. On a good road we skirt steep gorges high above the deep valley floor, catching long views of the Mount Lebanon range, its topmost ridges still under snow, up to 10,000 feet. Then twisting bends fling us down to the base of the towering tree-covered mountains. On the tighter bends the drop is so deep and steep at the road’s edge that some of us can’t quite bear to look out of the coach window. When you do, the panorama is simply magnificent.
You can easily experience three levels of history in Lebanon. For the aeons of geological time, the breath-taking Jeita Grotto probably surpasses even the best of the great cave systems we’ve seen in southern France for size, extent, beauty and pure wonder. With only a small group of Japanese visitors, we have the entire system to ourselves and can take our time along the concrete walkway. ‘Cathedral-like proportions’ simply understates the hugeness of these fantastic chambers. The lighting on the formations is sensitive and sufficient, lacking any forced attempts to dramatise our surroundings. They do that for themselves, just by being there. At the end, we meet traditionally dressed Arabian tourists from the Gulf as we ride in flat-bottomed boats on the underground river.
Then it’s lunchtime at a nearby restaurant, perched on the edge of a steep valley. There’s another Japanese group, one from northern Europe and ourselves. Lunches or dinners in Lebanon, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries feature the mezze, a tremendous selection of starter dishes. You find vine leaves variously stuffed, tomato salads, small savoury hot pastries, lentils, beans, goat’s cheese, radishes, potato salad and the large bowl of tabbouleh (parsley and tomato salad), hummus and other dips, as well as tasty items you may not readily identify. The thin, flat bread called khoobz Arabi comes with every meal here, including your hotel breakfast. Eat too much mezze - it’s easily done - and you won’t manage your main course. This is often kebabs of chicken, beef, and lamb, frequently all three of them. Later we have trout near Baalbak, and at Byblos a delicious baked dish of small meatballs, tomato and potato. And chips! Bowls of proper piping hot crisp French fries with every meal: Lebanon as culinary Belgium of the Middle East.
11 April. For the long millennia of human activity, Lebanon has some of the best sites of ancient monuments in the Middle East. The question is not ‘Who has occupied Lebanon at some time in its history?’ but rather ‘Who hasn’t?’ Trawl the main towns and cities, especially those on the coast, and you’ll find signs of Bronze Age, Iron Age and Chalcolithic peoples, Amorites, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Crusaders, Mamluks and Turkish Ottomans. On the single site at Byblos, which can claim continuous human habitation longer than almost anywhere on earth, there are the signs of prehistoric buildings alongside ruins from Roman, Phoenician, Crusader and Arab occupations at least.
This morning we’re on the snow-line some 6,000 feet up in the Mount Lebanon heights, passing en route the steep narrow Qadisha Valley with its monasteries cut into the rock. Up here we see the officially protected grove of cedars, Lebanon’s national symbol, trees capable of living for many hundreds of years. The tops of the snowy ridges are still another 3,000 feet higher. After lunch, to Tripoli, buzzing, crowded capital of northern Lebanon, just as the muezzin begin their electronically amplified afternoon summons to prayer across the whole city. High above its streets, the immense Crusader citadel of St Mary displays a bewildering selection of architectural styles, vividly illustrating its varied history of occupation from the early 12th century onwards. At our end of the time spectrum, the steep sides of the river opposite are packed with terrace upon terrace of low-rise apartment blocks, clustered and crammed together, all flying the colours of their daily washing over the balcony. It’s like the time-share from Hell. We’re welcomed to the Great Mosque courtyard, then wander through the gloomy souk, where one street is devoted exclusively to objects made of gold.
12 April. The roll call of occupation and building is similarly long and varied at Byblos. This coastal town north of Beirut seems to charm everyone, and always has done. There’s evidence here of settled fishermen and early agriculture in the 5th millennium BC. A major Phoenician centre, it was invaded by Persians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Crusaders. The archaeological result on a single site is thus a bewildering array of ruins across seven thousand years: Neolithic huts, temples from several periods, vertical royal tombs, a Roman amphitheatre, and the dominating Crusader fortress - some side by side, others buried beneath other later ones. Part of the small Roman amphitheatre was dismantled and reconstructed in a new location on the site to assist the excavation of a set of ruins from another historical period. Most of the recently ongoing archaeological works in Lebanon are currently suspended for want of funding.
Byblos today has, among other features, a small souk, narrow, winding streets lined with flowering trees, and a very picturesque harbour with superbly positioned restaurants. One is the Byblos Fishing Club, once internationally famous magnet for film stars and others who had to be seen and photographed on the Mediterranean celebrity circuit. Today, with the tourist season not begun yet, the souvenir and postcard shops are open, and the temperature hits 28º Celsius, our hottest day so far – ideal for chilled bottles of Almaza, the popular 5% pilsner made in Lebanon under licence from Amstel. (Not that you need to wait for it to be that hot before trying Almaza). There’s a quiet, sunny, spacious calm about the town today, but it’s easy to imagine it a few months on, packed with holiday crowds, throbbing in the high summer heat.
Now installed at our Beirut hotel, in the busy commercial suburb of Hamra, we’re near the American University and a reasonable walk to the Corniche. Every evening, Beirutis stroll, talk, smoke, jog, eat street-vendors’ snacks, and parade the latest fashions along here, while the mellow Med slaps the rocks below. Young women aged 15 to 30 parade the latest high fashion uniform on their tall stilettos. You see many more of them in Downtown Beirut, negotiating the pavements and decorative cobblestones with all the postural delicacy of people wearing outsized rubber flippers.
Glittering white apartment tower blocks of sympathetic design command their essential sea-view, balconies overflowing profusely with trailers of luxuriant greenery. It’s a matter of contemporary note that the garden centre, which the Lebanese call a ‘Garden Centre’, is unexpectedly (to us) a growth industry here. The evening streets of Hamra buzz with hairdressing, hot foods, shirt makers, cobblers, tailors, dry cleaners, newsagents, internet cafes, practically anything you’d expect to find on Streatham High Road or around The Angel, Islington. On Friday and Saturday nights, you’d be much safer and far more comfortable here in Hamra than on the clubbing streets of any town centre in Britain.
A word from our tour guide this afternoon: There are no railways in Lebanon - though there were some once, and we see the remains in places – and there’s no oil. Equally, there’s no American base. Even so, one is naturally suspicious of the American-Lebanese Language Centre offices that we see in most sizeable towns.
13 April. To Sidon. This much smaller seaport city 40 km south of Beirut, founded at least four millennia BC, has a small Crusader Sea Castle, originally built on a rocky island just off the shore, now joined to land by a stone causeway. The Great Mosque was converted from an original Crusader fort, though its oldest mosque is of even earlier origin. Sidon was seriously damaged during the civil war, targeted in turns by Syrians, Palestinians, Israelis and Hizbullah. Fortunately former Prime Minister Hariri was born here and, prior to his recent death, had directed substantial funds towards its restoration. Sidon has only become of interest to visitors since this time in 2000 when the Israeli forces withdrew from the Lebanese South. The town still appears to be an active port, though no longer a major shipbuilding centre. It’s increasingly known today for its banana groves and orchards of citrus fruits.
Without our knowing it beforehand, today is Lebanon’s National Unity Day, marking the official 30th anniversary of the beginning of the civil war in 1975. In Beirut we’ve seen preparations for big concerts this evening, and a variety of other events have been organised, largely by Hariri’s sister, the MP for Sidon, and by Nora Jumblatt, wife of the Druze leader, himself the leading member of the opposition. At the same time, The Daily Star, Beirut’s English language daily paper, reports that Prime Minister-designate Omar Karoumi has run off to Tripoli, his home town, because of too much squabbling among his allies over jobs in the new cabinet. The lack of a government provokes two fears now: first, that the promised elections at the end of May won’t take place; second, that violence in Beirut will increase. (Incidentally, the Star refers to the recent bomb explosions, not as a ‘spate’, but a ‘raft’.)
From Sidon, another brilliant trip into the Chouf Mountains to reach the dazzling complex of the Bieteddine Palace (‘house of faith’). Completed in 1818, it became the stronghold of the Ottoman-appointed governor Emir Bashir and symbol of his power. There’s an extravagant variety of buildings and rooms, and the Palace stables house some of the most exceptional examples of Byzantine mosaics, accidentally discovered elsewhere in 1982.
The Palace was badly damaged and very seriously looted after the Israeli invasion, but later splendidly restored on the initiative of Walid Jumblatt, who declared it ‘Palace of the People’. The architecture is a mixture of Arab and Italian styles, with courtyards, arcades, luxurious rooms, and outside terraces, poplars and flowering shrubs. On the way back to Beirut, we stop at another tremendous work of recent restoration, the village of Deir al-Qamar, apparently a quiet place except for tourism, where Fakhreddine, the Druze governor of Lebanon, moved his capital during the 17th century. It’s hot enough anyway this afternoon, about 26-27º C, but the bright new stonework of these buildings reflects the sun’s light and heat back at you with unrelenting force. Even committed warmth lovers like us are looking for some shade, or the inside of the air-conditioned coach.
14 April. Aanjar and Baalbak provide the greatest archaeological treat of all, with the drive up the Beirut-Baalbak Highway a treat in itself. It’s another dramatic mountain climb, then continuing upwards more gently along the Beka’a Valley. One after another we overtake ancient trucks, seriously (over-)loaded with agricultural produce, building materials, goods of every kind, grinding up and down the steep hills in their lowest gears, heading for Baalbak and the Syrian border. The Beka’a is a fertile plateau, once a major source of cannabis, now growing tomatoes, citrus fruits, bananas, almost anything that will grow if you just chuck seeds at the soil - and grapes. In the area round Zahlé, the Ksara and Kefraya vineyards flourish in climate and soil conditions that need very little additional attention from humans to produce good reds and whites, acceptable both for cellaring and for drinking now.
Aanjar is unique in several ways. The contemporary town is now largely Armenian, only 25 km from Damascus and noted for its trout farms. The ancient trading town is one of the few in Lebanon not on the coast and has the only archaeological site in the country dating from a single period. It was discovered accidentally during the 1940s by archaeologists looking for Chalcis, another, much earlier, town. In fact, they’d found a walled city from the earliest years of Islam. It’s thought that the Umayyad caliph Walid I built it in the 8th century AD. Its location suggests both thriving trade centre and strategic or administrative hub, and the site represents a tremendous operation of knowledgeable reconstruction in our time. This means you can walk down what was the main street of the ancient city, seeing parts of two palaces, public baths, residential quarters and more than six hundred shops. There are Roman features here, particularly the layout, but the wall-building technique of alternating courses of narrow bricks and stone blocks is Byzantine. The city flourished for only about fifty years and, unlike other sites in Lebanon, was never used or built over by subsequent occupiers. It alone in Lebanon represents a single, very brief, period of history.
Beyond Aanjar, the Highway becomes dustier, its sides less populated with small villages or strips of trading premises. Now it has the true feel of border territory, that wilder, unsettled emptiness even detectable in the Scottish Borders or the Welsh Marches. You don’t come driving along here for a Sunday jaunt. Vehicles on the road now are going somewhere, very deliberately. Traffic is a mixture of the lorries we saw earlier, at this time of year the very occasional touring coach, and the swarms of car or mini-bus taxis en route for Baalbak and the border. Here and there a small town or large village still has a military roadblock with a couple of not very interested Syrian soldiers chatting and smoking, who wave us through or don’t even appear to notice. In roadside fields in places, we see their living quarters which, we’re told, rather resemble Bedouin encampments. Disappointingly, I suppose, we see no tanks. Along the further stretches of the road, the yellow and green flags of Hizbullah flutter in the strong breeze, reminding us of the Party of God’s mastery of this territory.
The Baalbak Roman site is simply stunning, not only for the impressive extent of the restoration work but also for the magnificent scale of the acropolis. Its hugeness strikes you the moment you tackle the monumental stairs leading up to the portico and colonnade at the entrance to the temple complex. The space opens out then into the great Sacrificial Courtyard and, beyond it, the gigantic Temple of Jupiter, over 300 metres in length where now stand six of the original 54 columns, the largest in the world. From here you look down to the Temple of Bacchus, a smaller (yet still big) building in a superb state of relative completeness. The Temple of Venus is across the road from the main site. A dedicated student of such sites would need several days to take in this archaeological feast and, despite another hot afternoon, we could have done with more time here. In all, this acropolis was built and added to over the course of four centuries, and now hosts an annual international summer arts festival.
We have lunch today at the Chehrazade Restaurant, regular Lebanese menu and not very cheerful manager, with a fantastic view of the Roman site from the sixth floor of a shopping centre on the edge of the souk. On leaving, we fight off the persistent hawkers of postcards and souvenir tat, notice the specially imported tourist camel standing under a shady tree, and have a quick look inside the Palmyra Hotel, a faded, still functioning, grand hotel of the colonial period with its black-and-white photographs of world-famous visitors lining the lobby walls.
Yet for all the dazzling visual experiences of the caves, the breath-taking mountain journeys and the immense richness of the archaeological sites, it’s the third level of Lebanese history that makes the strongest appeal. Here in Lebanon, tomorrow’s history is being made now, today. Not for the first time, change, the very essence of history, is taking place before your very eyes, while you wait. That’s what carries the most insistent emotional charge. And for that, only Beirut itself can provide the stimulus.
We stay in the rue Jeanne d’Arc, just off Hamra’s main street, in the Muslim part of the city which, to use the historical term, was once called ‘West Beirut’, two words that carry far too much pain from the past for anyone to want to contemplate now. Today Beirut is simply called Beirut. Navigating to somewhere specific on foot isn’t helped by street names sometimes in Arabic, sometimes in French and sometimes in a version transliterated from Arabic. There’s often simply a street number to go by, such as ‘rue 19’. Different street-maps will show alternative versions. A woman sitting on a chair on the pavement in the same spot each day, trying to sell a packet of chewing gum to passers-by, provides us with a landmark. You hear Arabic, French, and often English used as a second language spoken between people of the same or different nationalities. We hardly hear American English all the time we’re here.
Since the civil war ended in 1990, this city has rebuilt and renewed itself from its own rubble, at least on the material level. It will still take more time to get central Beirut really buzzing with the confidence it so wants to enjoy. A few untouched shells of isolated buildings still stand among the restored and new-builds, frontages disfigured by bullet craters, window apertures shattered, interiors gaping empty and derelict, memorials as long as they stand to events too close for comfort in many people’s memories. A big black banner in Martyrs’ Square refers, simply stating PLUS JAMAIS. One of the first sites we’re shown is the St George’s Hotel, another empty shattered shell with everything else blasted to oblivion, where Hariri’s motorcade was blown apart on St Valentine’s Day. Chilling to reflect that this happened only two months before our arrival here. In countries where political history can and does take place violently before your eyes, contemporary thoughts of two hundred pounds off pensioners’ council tax back home fade to trivial insignificance. (This is why Graham Greene, suffering frequently from acute and debilitating boredom, was often so keen to travel to the lawless places where politics had a more active and challenging edge.)
15 April. We make our second visit to Martyrs’ Square. Three serious elements here keep your mind on the present or the very recent past. In one corner, not far from the enormous Muhammad al-Amin Mosque, close to completion but still under scaffolding, is the grave of Hariri and of his seven bodyguards, covered with masses of white flowers and dozens of photographs of him, as there are along the airport road and on lamp-posts and shop fronts all over Beirut. The 40-day mourning period is just over. People arrive to pay their respects, many wearing their best, some clearly in small groups, many of them women, on a day-trip put together for this purpose. These mourners come and go, standing in silence, some weeping. There’s a sole TV cameraman with furry microphone recording the comings and goings.
In the square’s centre towards the top end, clustered around the tall black statue of the martyrs, itself spattered with bullet holes, is the protesters’ camp, the tent city that promises to stay here until someone comes clean on the assassination, and until Syria’s influence over Lebanese affairs is totally ended. The demonstrations of only a few weeks ago are now down to a neat group of younger people, living here and waiting. In Arabic and English red banners around the camp perimeter declare INDEPENDENCE 05, while huge black ones demand THE TRUTH. And third is the open-air display of hugely enlarged press photographs depicting recent events in full colour. Each has a date, beginning at the assassination on 14th February and coming perilously close to the present day. Chilling again to see bomb damage in a northern Beirut street only a couple of weeks ago, the red glow of fire at night, shop fronts smashed, cars burnt, and the angular postures of people in panic. While we were wondering whether it would be safe enough for us to come here, those who live here don’t have the luxury of that kind of choice.
One part of the city centre with a new name is the Downtown, officially the Beirut Central Area (BCA). Hariri’s funding and determination drove the restoration and redevelopment here and there’s already a memorial to him in the form of a trail of silver footsteps set into the pavement, marking his last walk down El Maarad Street through the restaurants to Nejmeh Square (Place de l’Etoile) where the well-guarded parliament building stands. You get the impression that, despite endemic issues of corruption and lucrative construction jobs for cronies, he was a popular leader and that his sudden death is genuinely felt. Every street in the centre has been rebuilt, almost always in its original architectural style, and shining white flyovers channel traffic over and out of the city. So there are tall substantial buildings, shady colonnades, wrought iron balconies, grand doorways, tall French windows and tasteful frontages of shops and restaurants. Most of the external stonework is yellow to orange, becoming richer in tone as the afternoon moves on. If you didn’t know the history, the immediate effect is of a dirty city centre that’s been extremely well cleaned, like many of ours. The truth is a city reborn from its own ruins in under fifteen years.
There’s still plenty of traffic at ground level and you soon detect a driving technique different from ours. It’s looser and more individualistic but not aggressive or dangerously competitive. They hoot all the time, not to get other drivers out of the way, but mainly to warn them that they’re there. When wanting to cross the road, we’re told not to stand on the pavement waiting because we’ll wait forever. Just walk straight out into the traffic and it will slow down for you. We do it, fearfully at first, and it works. Drivers even wave vigorously through the windscreen, encouraging us to cross in front of them. On the wide three-lane highways outside the towns, traffic flows sinuously, constantly changing lanes, hardly anyone just sitting there in their lane for miles on end, as we do on our motorways – and as Americans do even more strictly.
In Downtown, as on the Corniche, many of the young women parade along together in the latest Beirut uniform. On top it’s a tight T-shirt worn over a maximum uplift bra, sometimes with a slogan on the back, such as TRAINED TO KILL STICKY BOYFRIENDS. The bottom half, crammed into the tightest conceivable pair of jeans, is completed by boots up to the knee with stiletto heels at least four inches high, tapering way beyond the toes in a sharp point. Apart from the walking problems, it’s also clear that very tight jeans, viewed from behind, are not the most flattering thing to wear if you’ve already begun to develop chubbiness about the hip area. Still, they hobble along delightedly, preening in every plate glass window they pass. Young Muslim women, dressed to respect their convention of concealing the female form, nevertheless often wear jeans and fashion footwear beneath.
It’s a grave disappointment to find so relatively little use of Arabic script in public places. One expects at least to be faced frequently with language use completely beyond comprehension. When some of the biggest displays feature Virgin Megastor and KFC and McDonalds, the romantic lure of the exotic Levant is seriously diluted. Under the obvious influence of globalised commerce, we find advertising in central Beirut for Eurocar, Rainbow Island: Ask about our fantastic Birthday Parties, Super Night Club: The Best in Town, Aramex: Total Transportation Solutions, Paddy’s Irish Pub, Advanced Car Rental, Credit Financier: Speed and Quality, Fiordelli Men’s Wear: The Art of Attraction.
On our last complete day in Beirut we visit the National Museum to make connections with some of the archaeological sites we’ve seen. One of the vertically buried sarcophagi from Byblos is on show here, as are several of the larger and better preserved artefacts from Baalbak, Aanjar and Tripoli, such as thrones, elaborate capitals, statues and mosaics. Despite general practice all over the city, the Museum does not deal in US$, asking you to pay LL 5000 to go in, and we’ve just spent almost all our latest wad of Lebanese Pounds on a taxi from Hamra. The desk official, like all good business operators worldwide faced with someone saying ‘Take some of my money from me’ readily provides a solution enabling us to part with the necessary. The Museum is not too big and you can cover the whole of it gently in about two hours. The biggest mystery here is a large irregular chunk of something dark green, clearly labelled ‘Piece of unidentified vitreous material of uncertain date.’
The building was smashed to bits inside and out during the civil war, and one of the most moving experiences in the whole of Beirut is the 15-minute video film they show. Shortly after the war had started, the far-seeing curators arranged for small objects to be removed to safer storage locations and the larger, extremely heavy items to be encased in concrete containers for the duration. The film showed, without any commentary except a few frames of explanatory text, the immense care devoted to this essential task of preservation. Even more dramatic and emotional, the momentous re-opening of the concrete cases after the war, as the slabs of protective material were crow-barred off to crash triumphantly onto the floor in a cloud of dust, out in the light of day again for the first time in fifteen years. It was as though these valued national artefacts, having survived for thousands of years anyway, were sharing in the rebirth of modern Beirut itself, undergoing like them, the painstaking work of cleaning, restoring and rebuilding for the future. Afterwards, we walk the former Green Line between East and West Beirut back up to the city centre for an excellent lunch.
While we were here, many people’s thoughts would have been focused on present and future: Hariri’s sudden death, sporadic bomb explosions, the withdrawal of Syria’s forces, and the hoped for elections. Declaring a Unity Day does not automatically mean national unity in a country like Lebanon whose religio-political fractures run so long and so deep. The Daily Star’s editorial on 13th April wants the elections to ‘clean Lebanon of this scourge of [political] small-mindedness and big mouths.’ But there’s a major fear that government figures, quarrelling over jobs, have insufficient links to the people they govern, and lack the courage of the tent city-dwellers to say clearly what they think and what they want. Until this month, anyone in power in Beirut was propped up and guaranteed by the complex string-pullings of Syria.
And down in the South, only last Monday, Hizbullah infuriated Israeli officials yet again by sending a surveillance drone into Israeli airspace. Surprisingly, the Israeli air force, proud of its mastery of the sky in the region, did nothing about it. Hizbullah are telling them that they have the technology and the clout. They may also be saying that, despite Syria’s departure (they were pro-Syrian), they can act independently for the good of Lebanon. What they don’t mention is that UN Resolution 1559 calling for Syria’s removal also requires the disarming of Hizbullah. How likely is that? However, we hear that Bush has just downgraded his disapproval of Hizbullah. Apparently they are no longer to be listed among the nastiest terrorist organisations in the world. America has no base in Lebanon and there’s no valuable natural resource there, so this may be an aspect of Bush’s move to get tougher with Israel during his second term. Friends of a practical armed bent in Lebanon might also help if Bush should decide to go and give Syria a kicking, something he seems increasingly keen to do next.
While here we were seriously impressed by the output of BBC WORLD television. Unhampered by the mindless mission to entertain at all costs, it provides analytical programmes of considerable range and depth, with sufficient time given to enable subjects to be explored thoroughly. Sad that we have to travel to the Middle East to see British-made television of a quality that simply isn’t available at home on the main ratings-chasing terrestrial channels. One evening, we saw an interview with a Druze veteran in his seventies, who proudly displayed his illegally owned handgun to the camera. He said that, despite one civil war in his lifetime, if fighting became necessary again he would fight again. And when he died, his family would fight on in his place. This may be Druze doctrine. Little or nothing is generally known about this secretive, completely closed group. You can’t join it. You can only be a Druze by being born one, and then wear the distinctive small white hat or head-dress.
One civil war in a lifetime must be quite enough for anyone. In fact, for most people, it’s already one too many. Some of the under-25s in the Martyrs’ Square tent city reportedly talk about having another one, but they have no direct experience, and relatively limited knowledge, of what the last one was like. Of course, they’re right to say that you don’t unify a country like Lebanon overnight. It needs another generation at least, especially with those old hard-liners up in the Beka’a, keeping their revolvers well oiled. The Hizbullah is an officially armed political party, the Palestinian camps are armed – and there have been considerable sales of personal handguns recently. The elections, if they do take place at the end of May, may not produce anything resembling a clean, fair contest or a straightforward result. But it could be a vast improvement on the traditional corrupt fixing of which most have had enough. None of the future will be easy, but Lebanon needs a chance now to build on the better developments of the past decade. As the Daily Star editorial says on National Unity Day: ‘It is time to work, and any destructive distraction should find its way to the dustbin of history before next year’s remembrance. The Lebanese have had enough.’
BACK HOME
Tuesday 26 April. POSTSCRIPT: It’s announced that all Syrian soldiers have gone home, just ahead of the deadline. They hold an official departure ceremony on the border where bands play the two national anthems. The occupation of three decades is over. Yesterday, the head of the Lebanese Security Services (the secret police) resigned. Probably the major instrument of Syria’s political control in Lebanon, some believe he knows far more than he would ever tell about the Hariri incident. Perhaps afflicted forever by uncertain futures, Beirut – and the whole of Lebanon - has more than one reason for celebration today.
_______________________________________________