Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have felt jealous. ‘President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon’s sovereignty,’ he proclaimed. ‘France is determined . . . now more than ever [to] defend Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence.’ Now I’m not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender ‘on earth’ - funny, isn’t it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard - and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I’d certainly want to tread carefully around France’s interest in Lebanon’s ‘independence’.

I hasten to add that - compared with the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra²⁵ - Chirac’s dealings with France’s former colonies and mandates are positively Christlike in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman Empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites - France’s favourite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel - and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a minority that may now number 29 per cent or less. But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon’s ‘independence’ - but they wanted it to be in France’s favour.

Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority - the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this - the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus would rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek. From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities were too small to sustain - and created a new Ulster whose six counties ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.

The other Lebanese problem - which the people of Northern Ireland will immediately spot - is that a sectarian state, where only a Maronite can be the president and only a Sunni the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way - I suspect - as the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian Albert Hourani wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946 - and apply it to Iraq. To live in such a way, Hourani wrote:

is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either - to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it . . . It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one’s own. It reveals itself in lost-ness, cynicism and despair.²⁶

Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for Westerners to see these people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them. Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon - Shias at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq - Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous ‘Sunni triangle’, though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.²⁷

The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine dry sherry. But we do not draw these maps of our own British cities. I could draw a map of Bradford’s ethnic districts - but we would never print it. Thus we divide the ‘other’, while assiduously denying the ‘other’ in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain our homogeneous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the ‘democracy’ to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the people - in every sense of the word - at the ‘bottom’. And the French are going to ensure that the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains ‘independent’.

Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and its banlieus?

The Independent, 25 November 2006

Alphonse Bechir’s spectacles

Something was strangely familiar when my Beirut optician put me through my latest eye test. Antoine Bechir is a Chaldean - yes, as in Ur of the Chaldees, that ancient Mesopotamian race - and he must be the only Chaldean I know. His family business was started by his dad, Alphonse, and it was he who initiated the family eye test album. And it reads like this: ‘Waterloo-Staines-Reading Wednesdays - Afternoon. Waterloo 1.20, Vauxhall 1.23, Queen’s Road 1.26, Clapham Junction 1.28 . . .’ Yes, it really is a Southern Railways timetable, circa 1948, and Antoine tells me he has many times stood lovingly reading out the name of each station which - he fondly imagines - must lie in the sleepy folds of rural England. ‘One day I shall travel to your country and go to all these places,’ he says. ‘Wandsworth, Clapham, Putney, Hounslow, Ashford . . . Aren’t they beautiful?’

Checking my vision is therefore a ramble down an imaginary memory lane in which viewers are firmly recommended to visit Theodore Hamblin, Dispensing Opticians at 15 Wigmore Street (Phone: Langham 4343) and practise their eye capabilities with this wonderful text: ‘The streets of London are better paved and better lighted than those of any metropolis in Europe. There are lamps on both sides of every street, in the mean proportion of one lamp to three doors . . .’ Or try the following extract for those with myopia: ‘Water Cresses are sold in small bunches, one penny each, or three bunches for twopence. The Crier of Water Cresses frequently travels seven or eight miles before the hour of breakfast to gather them fresh - but there is generally a pretty good supply of them in Covent Garden.’ Was postwar London really so well lit? And how did you qualify as a Crier of Water Cresses? Old Alphonse Bechir, however, not only collected London railway timetables. He was also a buyer of spectacles in bulk, and this is how he came to have a little problem in the Second World War. Indeed, when Antoine produces his father’s passport - issued by the ‘High Commissioner of the French Republic in Syria and Lebanon’ (under the terms of the old League of Nations French mandate) - I spot the snag at once: three bloody great German eagles on page 29, each clutching an evil little swastika in its claws. It’s a real Nazi visa, issued by the German consulate in neutral Turkey in July of 1941, together with entry and exit stamps from Hitler’s Reich.

Alphonse had decided to bulk-buy hundreds of pairs of new spectacles in wartime Germany - but he chose the wrong moment to travel and got caught up in a truly Lebanese mess. For when France fell in 1940, Lebanon became part of Vichy territory and the Bechir family, like every Lebanese at the time, found themselves allied with the Nazis. In theory, this should have made Alphonse’s journey easy. Or so he must have thought. However, just a few days before he collected his visa in Istanbul, the British and Australian armies invaded Lebanon from Palestine and ‘liberated’ its people from the Vichy French after a bloody and costly campaign south of Beirut.

It was only a few days later that the luckless Alphonse Bechir headed back to Lebanon with his hundreds of pairs of brand-new German spectacles, only to find that things had changed while he was away. On the Syrian border, the new French authorities did not take kindly to page 29 of the passport and those governessy eagles with their swastikas. So along with up to a hundred fascist suspects he was bundled off to the Mieh Mieh prison camp above Sidon. By grim irony, Mieh Mieh is today a Palestinian refugee camp housing the descendants of those Arabs who fled northern Palestine in 1948, crossing the same Lebanese border that the Allies had traversed seven years earlier. Their fate was still unknown, of course, when Alphonse arrived behind the prison wire near Sidon.

It remains a mystery to me - and to Antoine - why his father should have risked a wartime trip to Nazi Germany, profitable though it was to be. The RAF was raiding Berlin by night and the Germans were preparing their vast armies for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Alphonse was lucky to have made it back to Lebanon. ‘My father spent eight months in the camp before he could persuade the authorities that he was just an innocent optician,’ Antoine says. ‘Can you imagine being locked up for having the wrong visa in your passport?’ Actually I could well imagine just such a scenario in wartime Lebanon. But like so few Lebanese tales, this one has a happy ending.

‘While he was locked up, there was a huge spectacle shortage in the Middle East and when he eventually persuaded the military that he wasn’t a Nazi spy, they gave him all his spectacles back - and they had increased in value by 800 per cent. That’s the money he used to set up our optician’s business.’

Which is why, every year, I study Alphonse’s Southern Railways timetable, wonder at the Criers of Water Cresses and cringe at the sight of that wretched visa.

The Independent, 3 June 2006

The cat who ate missile wire for breakfast

Walter was a street cat, a pusseini baladi as they say in Beirut, brown and black with sharp ears and sharper teeth, the only creature of its kind to consume part of an Israeli wire-guided air-to-ground missile. On warm evenings, she would sit on the balcony and survey the seafront Corniche, the coffee stalls and the Mediterranean as it lapped idly against the green rocks below. She occasionally appeared in the pages of The Independent , not least when it seemed certain that our seafront highway was to be renamed Boulevard du Président Hafez al-Assad after the Syrian leader. This extraordinary honour eventually went to a road near the airport.

As a kitten, Walter liked the sofa, even at the height of General Aoun’s lunatic bombardment of West Beirut. Where is Walter, we would ask every time the shells started to hiss over the house? I found her once, still sitting on the sofa, following with her eyes the lights of the tracers and targeting rounds as they flitted over the rooftop. One tough puss.

The missile wire? Well back in 1993, in Israel’s week-long bombardment of southern Lebanon, I came across the guidance-wire of a missile that had exploded in a truck. The wire interested me because I suspected it might have been manufactured in Britain. So I took back about six feet of the brass cable and laid it on my desk, intending to send it off to The Independent’s defence correspondent for examination. Which is where Walter found it one afternoon. And ate it. ‘Missile wire?’ the vet’s wife shrieked in terror. She is German.

Her husband, Dr Musri, saved Walter’s life. Liquid paraffin was poured into the beast and - within hours - the wire emerged from the wrong end of Walter. I spared our defence correspondent what was left. Walter shrugged it off and returned to her favourite game - playing with toy mice. Indeed, she enjoyed this so much that when a real live mouse walked up the side of the balcony one day and trotted across the floor past Walter’s feet, she merely yawned.

But she was a journalistic cat. She would snuggle down on winter evenings in my office, perched on top of copies of that venerable old Lebanese journal L’Orient Le Jour, the only newspaper to be written in Royalist French. Or sit like a teapot on the top of the UPS, the Uninterrupted Power Supply system that every computer in Lebanon needs as a back-up when Messrs Netanyahu or Barak bomb the country’s power stations. On one occasion Walter walked across the telephone and pressed the automatic redial. I found her standing beside the machine with a puzzled look as journalist John Cooley’s voice crackled down the line from Cyprus to demand why the caller was refusing to talk to him. Walter could strike anywhere. And the old telex machine - yes, I was still filing on telex until the Nineties - became a bed for Walter, its constantly running motor warming her underside night after night, the information from The Independent repeatedly garbled as the paper messages - unable to escape Walter’s furry bulk - hopelessly overprinted. When I was punching on the telex, she would attack the tape, ripping the holes with her claws. She could not escape journalism. And journalism couldn’t escape Walter.

She was even named after a newspaper editor: Walter Wells of the International Herald Tribune in Paris whose refusal to defend the journalist Lara Marlowe after the US military lied about an article she wrote for the paper prompted us to commemorate the event in style. Returning from a Gulf war or southern Lebanon or Ireland, Walter would always be there, waiting for her evening tin of Whiskas in the room where we stored the spare fuel for the generator. But when she went off her food last month, even the great Dr Musri could not find out what was wrong. Walter stopped purring and skulked under a chair in the living room.

After almost a week without food, I bundled her into her basket and flew to Paris, where two veterinarians were waiting for her. She sat meekly in her basket on the floor of Club Class. ‘What a well-behaved cat,’ the head of the Hariri Foundation charity remarked from the neighbouring seat. Neither of us knew that Walter was dying. She had an enlarged heart, myocardia they said, and water on the lungs was preventing her from eating. They drained the water and for a few days Walter was back munching roast chicken. Then she suffered a blood clot and the young female doctor said that she might go into convulsions. It was the end. It took a few seconds for Walter to go limp and an hour to cremate her. Under French law, her ashes had to remain unscattered for a year and a day.

But we broke the law and brought what was left of Walter back to Beirut. And where the waves lap the green rocks below the house, we threw her ashes, into the sea she watched so often and in which live the fish she ate so many times.

But I should have guessed that Walter’s presence had not gone. This week, the UPS started smoking as the fan stopped at the back of the machine and everything I need as a correspondent - computer, phone recharger, fax machine, printer - abruptly stopped working. A Lebanese technician lugged the heavy iron box away, only to return hours later with a mass of brown and black fur in his hand. ‘You have a cat?’ he asked. ‘There was about a ton of fur clogging the fan.’ Walter had struck again.

The Independent, 10 June 2000

The torturer who lived near the theatre

Scorched is the right title for Wajdi Mouawad’s play about Lebanon. The word ‘Lebanon’ doesn’t occur in the script and ‘the army invading from the south’ - the Israeli army - remains needlessly anonymous. But any playwright who calls a town ‘Nabatiyeh’, or refers to a prominent Shia figure called ‘Shamseddin’ - the late Mehdi Shamseddin was the leader of the Shia clergy in Lebanon - hasn’t tried very hard to hide the country in which his powerful, murderous scenario takes place. Suitably gory, Scorched is a story of love, family honour, civil war and barbarity.

Wajdi Mouawad, who is of Lebanese Christian Maronite origin but is now a French Canadian - his play was written in French and translated into English for its latest performance at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto - has written a programme note in which he acknowledges his own background, even the devastating Israeli-Hizballah war last summer. But his play, he says, is ‘anchored above all else by poetry, detached from its political context and instead anchored in the politic of human suffering, the poetry which unites us all’.

The plot is simple. Nawal, an old lady, dies in Canada, and her son and daughter try to discover - from two sealed envelopes left to them by their mother - why she had remained silent for years before her death. In her youth in Lebanon, it transpires, Nawal’s lover made her pregnant and the child was taken from her to preserve her family’s honour. So she sets off, amid the massacres of the Lebanese civil war - there is a terrifying moment when blood from the victims of a bus massacre sprays over the young Nawal’s clothes - to find her missing child.

During the war, she poses as a schoolteacher to educate the children of a local militia commander - so that she can assassinate him once she has gained his trust. The militia leader is killed, but Nawal is caught and taken to a prison where she is regularly raped by the jail’s chief torturer. An old man later recalls for Nawal’s daughter - who has gone to Lebanon to find out why her mother endured those years of silence - that he was ordered by the jail authorities to throw two newborn babies into a nearby river. Instead, he takes the babies, covered in a cloth, to a local family who save their lives.

Nawal’s secret - which turns her from being ‘the woman who sings songs’ into a silent old lady - is that the original child for whom she is searching, the child of her long-dead lover, is her torturer and rapist. The torturer is the father of the son and daughter in Canada. He is also their brother. It is a secret revealed to the daughter by the militia leader called ‘Shamseddin’ and it breaks the mind of her brother/father. He, too, lapses into eternal silence. An Oedipal drama if ever there was one.

And I can accept the play on that level. The duty of an artist, I have always thought, is to place imagination on a higher level than history, to frame real events - if he or she must - to fit the interpretation that an author or playwright chooses to reveal about life. But as a witness to the Lebanese civil war, I find Mouawad’s work much more difficult to accept on the level of mere art. Shamseddin, as head of the country’s Shia, was the first to call on the Lebanese to fight the Israeli occupation army in 1982. And there really was a girl who posed as a schoolteacher to murder a militia leader. Her name was Soad Bshara and she was a Christian leftist, not a Shia - I’ve even met the man who gave her the gun to kill the militia leader - and she did indeed attempt to assassinate him.

But General Antoine Lahd did not die. He showed me his wounds - two bullet holes - not long after his return to Lebanon from hospital in Israel. He was one of Israel’s ruthless proxy warlords in Lebanon and he was in charge of the same brutal Israeli-controlled prison in which Bshara was subsequently locked up. She was not raped, but she was beaten and endured years of solitary confinement until the French government organised her release; she lives today in Paris while Lahd, after the collapse of his cruel ‘South Lebanon Army’ in 2000, now lives in Tel Aviv where he runs - wait for it - a nightclub.

However, there certainly were well-trained torturers in Lahd’s jail - its real name was Khiam prison and it was turned by the Hizballah into a museum until being largely destroyed in last summer’s war. The sadists of Khiam used to electrocute the penises of their prisoners and throw water over their bodies before plunging electrodes into their chests and kept them in pitch-black, solitary confinement for months. For many years, the Israelis even banned the Red Cross from visiting their foul prison. All the torturers fled across the border into Israel when the Israeli army retreated under fire from Lebanon almost seven years ago.

After watching Scorched, I went backstage to meet the actors and actresses - one of them gives a frighteningly accurate portrayal of a jazz-crazed sniper - only to find they had no idea that they were, in some cases, playing real people. They didn’t even know that Israel had farmed out Khiam’s torturers to Western countries as ‘refugees’ - on the grounds that they would be killed if they returned to Lebanon. The Israelis, of course, didn’t mention their role in Khiam’s horrors - which is why, several years ago, two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turned up at my home to ask if I could identify any torturers who might have been given asylum in Canada. I told them that their names were now written on the gates of Khiam prison.²⁸

But I do know that one of the torturers - who appears in Scorched as Nawal’s rapist - is believed to have found guilty sanctuary in Toronto, where he has set up in business. In other words, he probably lives less than three miles from the Tarragon Theatre in Bridgman Avenue. And who knows, maybe he will drop by for a ticket this month, just to enjoy the suffering he caused in a faraway land to which he will never dare return. Would that be history? Tragedy? Or art?

The Independent, 10 March 2007