THERE HAS BEEN MUCH BLOODLETTING in the Middle East over the ages, the chronicles tell us. But nothing like this had ever happened before, not on this enormous scale of bloody retribution and bombardment. In Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s the killings were often accomplished with a kind of barbaric intensity that was almost apocalyptic.
First there were the Black Saturday massacres at the eastern end of Beirut’s Ring Road in December 1975. Four Christians were found murdered in a car at the head office of an electricity company. Bashir Gemayel, one of the most popular Christian leaders to emerge in the war – and a brilliant tactician to boot – was as ruthless as he was tough. He ordered his Phalangists to kill 40 Muslims in reprisal.
The first large group of Muslims to arrive at a Christian roadblock – some of them on an afternoon outing with their wives and children – were targeted. The Islamic community retaliated and hundreds more innocent people were killed. Within days, these irregular, sporadic outbreaks resulted in a massive wave of reciprocal killings on both sides. It didn’t take long for Lebanon to be plunged into a civil war. As somebody said at the time, this corner of the Levant typified the old homily that it is easy enough to start a war, but sheer bloody hell to bring it to an end.
Killings intensified still further and the conflict see-sawed back and forth. With time, a few significant differences with conflagrations elsewhere emerged. Many more women and children were being murdered than fighting men, underscoring the perception in certain circles that traditionally the Lebanese have a predilection for soft targets.
Also, it didn’t take long for torture to become the norm. There were instances of victims not having been shot outright, but subjected to unspeakable acts of cruelty. Some innocents had their eyes gouged out before a coup de grace was delivered. In the end, there wasn’t a single family, Muslim or Christian, that hadn’t been affected by the carnage.
These days, those few Lebanese who might be prepared to discuss their woes will talk guardedly about the events of 1976. To some it might have happened yesterday. Robert Fisk, then of the London Times, described it as ‘a kind of catharsis for the Lebanese… who have long understood the way in which these dreadful events should be interpreted’.
He went on to say that in Lebanon during those extreme times, ‘victories were the result of courage, of patriotism, of revolutionary conviction. Defeats were always caused by the plot; the mo’amera… a conspiracy of treachery in which a foreign hand – Syrian, Palestinian, Israeli, American, French, Libyan, Iranian – was always involved.’
In his book on Lebanon, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War,1 Fisk – no apologist for either the Lebanese Christians or the Israelis – makes a reasonable attempt to explain the origins of this conflict. What he concludes is as relevant to what is going on in Lebanon in the 21st century as it was 30 years ago.
The causes of conflict go back centuries, Fisk suggests, but the consequences of Christian Maronites (who owe their name to a 5th-century Christian recluse from Syria) unwisely associating themselves with the Frankish crusaders are still visible.
With the defeat of European Christendom, the Maronites too retreated, up into the mountains of northern Lebanon, where their towns and villages still stand, wedged between great ravines, clinging to icy plateaus of the Mount Lebanon range. Under assault by Muslim Arabs, they found that these pinnacles provided their only protection and they clung on there, up amid the remains of the ancient cedar forests. They were a pragmatic, brave, distrustful people who learned that responsibility for their continued existence lay exclusively in their own hands, that their ultimate fate depended solely upon their own determination and resources. It was a characteristic that they were to share with all the minorities of Lebanon; and later with the Israelis.
Certainly Robert Fisk has the measure of these issues.
Ultimately, strife between Christian and Muslim, when it came, was both prolonged and bloody. The history of Lebanon is full of disasters in which the casualties are numbered in tens of thousands. There was the Christian–Druze war of 1860, which left at least 15,000 dead. Some historians say it was more than 20,000 and the final tally depended rather on who was doing the counting; if anyone bothered. This butchery was serious enough to result in French troops being brought in to protect the Christians.
History repeated itself when the Americans arrived a century later. US Marines landed in Beirut for the first time in 1958 at the behest of the Christian President Camille Chamoun. That happened because the threat from Islam had become still graver after Nasser’s strident call for what he termed an ‘Arab revival’. That event took place a few years before Britain and France made their half-cocked attempt to invade the Canal Zone.
By the 1970s, for reporters trying to write about the war, there was only one safe way for a Westerner to enter Lebanon once Beirut International Airport had been closed by the machinations of Muslim fundamentalists and that was by sea.
We could, of course, drive in through Damascus and Syria, but that still meant an overland haul through the Beka’a Valley, across the Litani and over the Shouff. It also meant being stopped at perhaps 30 roadblocks by the PLO, Amal, Shi’ite freebooters, local warlords, ideologues or another anti-Western group. Most liked to brandish their AKs in our faces as they plundered baggage for booty and occasionally arrested somebody for no evident reason.
There was always more than a whiff of danger. Some of us ended up feeling very uneasy, especially if we’d spent time in one of the Christian enclaves. An Israeli stamp in a passport meant certain arrest and that could be followed by a death warrant. As subsequent events showed, being a journalist counted for nothing; in fact you avoided that marque if you could.
In theory, it was possible to enter Lebanon through Israeli lines in the south, but that was difficult and only possible with connections in Jerusalem. I went through the Good Fence on numerous occasions on assignments with the South Lebanese Army (SLA) at the time of Sa’ad Haddad and afterwards, once, with my wife Madelon. We were shuttled across by the enigmatic journalist-appointed-colonel Yoram Hamizrachi, who originally created the SLA.