Some of the most radical Muslim or Palestinian fighters came from there. When they joined one or other faction, they might have been given a bit of cash, perhaps enough to keep their families alive or they would simply take what they needed from travellers like us at roadblocks. For these journeys, I used my second British passport because it had no Israeli stamps in it.

The Islamic rebellion had its start in a string of festering slums south of Beirut, including those at Sabra, Bourj al Barajneh and Chatila. Almost all were as fetid as anything I’d seen in Lagos, Accra or Luanda after the Portuguese had been evicted; cesspits that had become home to millions. Journalists came and went and reported what they saw, but let’s face it, they really couldn’t even begin to relate to the squalor because none had ever experienced it for themselves.

One American journalist, having been taken around a camp near Sidon, said in a report home that he thought it ‘quaint’. Commonly described as ‘refugee camps’, these dreadfully impoverished ghettos underscored the oldest of axioms: poverty and conflict tend to spawn euphemisms that are rarely appropriate.

In fact, the Muslims in those days didn’t hold any kind of a monopoly either in misery or poverty, and a generation later almost nothing has changed. The truth is that Christians living near the Green Line in the 1980s hardly suffered any less than their former Islamic neighbors, gathered together as they both were in clusters and little more than a holler away from each other.

As some of us were to discover later, those stuck (or abandoned) there had neither the means nor the will to leave. Why should they? They’d been there all their lives. In any event, the majority were too old or too sick to go anywhere.

The churches helped of course, almost all of them Maronite, that staunch and uncompromising Eastern following that embraced Constantine and forsook Rome, even though Catholicism has persisted, always a powerful presence among Christians in the Levant.

It was the Maronites who were able to breach the gap and provide the adhesive that kept Lebanon cobbled together for a thousand years. They were still doing it in 1980 and they’re at it again as we reach into the second decade of the new millenium. With that fair sprinkling of Catholics, they do what they’ve always done, quietly and without bother. Remember, these Christians had been fighting for survival even before the first of the Crusaders arrived. They espoused a fundamental credo that encapsulated the oldest communal philosophy of all: one for all and all for one…

With time, even that touchstone became flawed. More recently it has been viciously exploited by Syrian leaders who have expansionist dreams and created schisms within the Lebanese Christian community. The Franjieh crowd who travelled on the ferry with me from Larnaca to Jounieh were among these dissidents. With all the assassinations that followed over the years, there were wounds generated that will probably never be healed.

The last President, another old friend, General Emile Lahoud – whom I got to know in the days when he was still Lebanon’s army chief – seemed to have become used to taking his orders from Damascus, which was a pity because I regarded him an as enterprising fellow. He even brought the civil war to a halt, something I covered in some detail for Washington’s Middle East Policy.¹

In the hours I spent at the building that housed the Lebanese Force Command near Beirut harbour after I’d come off the motor vessel Ali from Cyprus, I was asked scores of questions by a succession of officials. They had good reason to be suspicious. Why should anybody who had not been specially sent to Beirut by a news agency or network wish to come to such a dangerous place? Didn’t I know that I might get killed?

I showed them some of the tracts that I’d written on other wars, but it was my books that probably won the day. Also, they could have checked with their friends, the Zionists (I’d been there often enough in recent years), and no doubt they did.

I knew that there were good links between the Lebanese Force Command supremo, the youthful, ever-charismatic Bashir Gemayel, and Jerusalem. Even after he’d been assassinated, again with Syrian collusion, the Jewish State continued to cooperate with the Christian Forces. Many of the weapons used by his Lebanese Force Command troops came from the south by sea, usually at night. A common enemy explained this apparently unnatural alliance: the enemy of my enemy…

Gemayel was always cautious of Israeli motives. He was wary, as his spokespeople would indelicately phrase it, of getting into bed with the Jews. That could also have been because there was a link between the Phalanghists and the Iraqis. Some of the weapons then reaching the Christians had been sent by Saddam Hussein in a complex attempt to weaken relations between the Iranians and Arab fundamentalists who were then supporting another group of Islamic zealots.

It was certainly a hotchpotch of ideologies, all of them convoluted and more times than not, conflicting. By then almost the entire Arab world, in one way or another, had been dragged into the fray, even the Saudis.

There were also strange little groups of European radicals from France, Germany, Italy, Ireland and elsewhere working closely with the PLO. Meanwhile, Americans trained Christian soldiers in close combat. Lurking everywhere, we all knew, was Shin Bet, whose influence extended northwards throughout Lebanon, though we would never know who their agents were.

The plot was murky, and to us relative innocents, impenetrable.