CHAPTER THREE

Levantine Woes

‘Now I watch from another continent, but I find those same emotions resurfacing. The conspiracies, the car-bombs, the threatening rhetoric and political deadlock are all eerily familiar. The actors are like shadows from a long gone past. They are more grey perhaps – those who have avoided assassination. But the cast in Lebanon’s tragedy has changed little in two decades. Then, as now, a presidential election is the setting, and the struggle where religion and clan play the main roles threatens to set Lebanon back 20 years.’

16 November, 2007: Octavia Nasr, CNN’s senior editor for Arab affairs, on how little had changed in Lebanon’s political hierarchy since the 1980s.

BEIRUT, THEY USED TO SAY when I first came ashore from Cyprus in the early 1980s, was a city of shattered facades, bad dreams and few prospects. To this newcomer, it was impossible not to perceive a fundamental, visceral antipathy towards peace, which is how it often is when people are trying to kill each other.

The war had been going on a while. Dawn was greeted each day by the unholy trinity of Israeli reconnaissance planes in the sky, mortar bombs exploding at intersections and muezzin calls from the minarets in the foothills of the Shouff. All that and more car-bombs than you could care to count, along with roadblocks on the outskirts manned by factions that were almost exclusively Islamic and at war with one another and anybody else who came into contention. Anarchy ruled.

In its day, Beirut had been among the wealthiest and most delightful of cities; ‘Pearl of the Mediterranean’, aficionados would call it. With its boutiques that rivalled those of the Avenue Montaigne, it had the best on offer from the world’s capitals including its own up-market versions of Harrods and Bloomingdales, chic cafes and the finest patisseries east of Lyon. It had long ago put Cairo to shame as the finest city in the Islamic world. Still more important, Beirut was the hub of the oil-rich Arab banking world.

By the time I got there, few vestiges of that old exuberance remained. Half the population had fled and the other half was fighting a rear-guard action that was hopeless. The future, one sensed, was a narrow tympan of confidence so easily shattered by daily bombardments that sometimes resembled earlier European wars. Still, the people who stayed could only hope for better because for the majority, there was simply no other option.

Also, this was Beirut, their beloved Beirut. Public buildings and private houses that sometimes gave the city a look of Tuscany or Provence were still there; at least those hadn’t been destroyed, although just about all had been hideously disfigured by gunfire. Their occupants – the ones with the money – were long gone. Others had retreated to high ground outside town, especially those with children.

While war waged, there were stark contrasts. There were many Christians around who were extremely well off, many having made fortunes in West Africa’s diamond fields. In contrast, to the west of the Green Line – the ‘World of the Mullah’ as some liked to call it, and still do – there were warrens of poverty where people with nothing to lose but their faith gathered in semi-permanent camps. They did so amid a stench and pestilential filth that was utterly unforgiving.