The Ghost of Christmas Past

Before I start, I want to state unequivocally that I had an amazing Christmas in the Holy Land. What follows is simply a bit of a reflection.

* * *

One of the things I’d most looked forward to in the Middle East was the prospect of Christmas in Bethlehem.

To explain this, a trip down Memory Lane. First stop: Desolation Row. Yes, the old blog, which I ran with Kieran Nelson. One of his first posts was titled: “The War on Christmas.” Some excerpts:

“Tis the season to be ranting about my favorite love-hate holiday of the year: Christmas…

It’s the season of cheap Tim Allen movies, crappy weather, mass-manufactured lawn art, crowded grocery stores with empty shelves, and christmas wish lists being eagerly scribed by soon-to-be-disappointed young children. It means garish decorations in overcrowded shopping malls with filled parking lots. It means countless ads for video games and annoying plastic race-car tracks. It means bratty offspring act like angels for two weeks so they can reap hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of gifts on Christmas morning. It means infomercial ads for poor quality tool sets, specifically designed to lure wives into buying them for their husbands.

And the songs. The constant music; the recurrent bubble-gummy, cat-strangling renditions of festive English Christmas songs. Not to mention the most irritating and unlistenable song of all: Jingle Bell Rock...

, …we have to withstand an onslaught of unappealing culture that a lot of people accept without really paying attention to its commercial undertones, or its cheap, fake, manufactured glow.

… I for one am not going to spend my Christmas listening to awful jingles, joining queues to enter stores in bustling malls, watching reruns of Charlie Brown in between endless annoying ads, maxing out my Visa, or putting effigies of Santa on the lawn… Perhaps with effort, I can take from Christmas this year only the aspects I like, and entirely ignore the ugly and superficial culture that surrounds it.

Happy Holidays from Desolation Row.”

Yeah, it’s cynical. But if you think that’s all it is, you’re missing the point. Kieran’s saying that North American Christmas is cheapened by the runaway "Deck The Malls" commercialization of everything great about the holiday season: family, friends, food, fireplaces, and fun.

And I agreed. I wanted a meaningful Christmas. I wanted to celebrate Christmas as a holiday, not consume it as a product. And I figured the best way to do that was to put the “Christ” back in Christmas.

Now, I don’t subscribe to the mythology of a mad Jewish rabbi, who, supposedly born to a virgin in Roman Palestine two thousand years ago, later performed the metaphysically-astounding feat of removing all the sins of Mankind by being nailed to a pair of two-by-fours. Not anymore, anyway.

But I was raised Catholic (back in the Dark Ages), and some old feelings die hard. Why not go back to my roots? A solemn, sacred, pilgrim’s Christmas, free of the trappings of Santa and Sinatra and the strip mall, in the pressing aura of the cradle of Christianity.

And so it was.

There were no jingles on the radio. No heaps of red and green bunting strung from streetlamps. No lights hung from the balconies of apartments or from the rafters of the malls. No twenty-foot plastic trees, strung with a hundred yards of tinsel and a thousand multicolored balls, crowned with a sequined star, towering above public squares and inside building lobbies. No Santa Clauses. No frantic, last-minute shopping expeditions. No 20-lbs turkeys, sitting pimply pink and naked, at the supermarket’s meat section.

Just the regular hustle-bustle of life. This was Israel and Palestine. Jews and Muslims. They didn’t celebrate Christmas, and certainly not our model of it.


Instead, it was religious. In Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, lines of pilgrims mumbled the Rosary in the shadow of the rocks of Golgotha, where Christ was crucified. They wept and prostrated themselves over the slab of rose-tinted rock where his body was laid out for burial. They stood silently in line to enter the rickety wooden shack that marked the cave where he was buried for three days. In Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, they kissed the silver star embedded in the marble floor, where a solemn Greek priest told the crowd the manger had once been.


Catholic nuns in their plain habits. Greek Orthodox priests in their black robes. Decadent, sumptuous iconography- dim-flaring lamps, heavy crucifixes and carvings of the Virgin Mother and Child, dripping with gold and silver. Intricate, multi-hued mosaics. Towering church arches and candle-lit prayer cellars. Choirs. Processions. Prayers. Homilies. Mass after mass after mass. The sweet musk of incense and the dull murmur of prayer. Our Father, who art in Heaven. Hail Mary, full of grace.


Amidst the holiness was an oddly touching sense of community. In this land of Jews and Muslims, people had come from the four corners of the earth, just once every year, to be Christians. There was an unspoken tribal solidarity in those churches. In a dozen languages, tips, favors, and good wishes were traded.


There was also a tired routine to the experience- something very rinsed-and-repeated about the way the faceless masses herded past the same holy sites, posed for pictures (some would stand, lips pressed against some old rock or painting for half a minute, while their wife or brother-in-law fumbled with the camera), mumbled rushed prayers, and were chased on by priests anxious to avoid a clog-up: “Okay, there are a lot of people waiting, yes? Pray quickly, yes? Move along. Next!”

I imagined that every morning of the holiday season, all the priests of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Church of the Nativity would gather for a pep-talk:

“Okay, lads. Take a knee. Whew. Okay. Lotta gringos comin’ in today. Lotta tourists. We gotta get them through quickly. Don’t let ‘em pray for more than thirty seconds. And don’t let them kiss the Burial Slab for too long. Some of ‘em practically make out with the damned thing, and the saliva’s a bitch to mop up. You, Brother Gregorios, you big lunk. Don’t let ‘em take pictures inside the Tomb of Christ. The flash ruins the paint. Any questions? Okay, hands in, hands in. One! Two! Three! AMEN!”


I won’t lie. Everyone’s a Christian-for-the-holidays in the Holy Land. I said the Lord’s Prayer for the first time in a decade. I didn’t even flinch when a fat old woman from Spain crushed my bones with a hug, wept on my shoulder, and blubbered: “Lord Jesus bless you, child. I love you!” (I think I responded: “Peace be with you too, ma’am.”) I visited every icon and shrine. (And actually kissed one. It was slimy.) I read the Bible. I went to mass, mumbled the appropriate lines, and even crossed myself a few times. Spectacles, testicles…

And I didn’t feel a thing.

No sense of belonging. No resonance. I didn’t feel touched by the hand of God. The whole experience was as alien to me as an Iroquois rain dance. If anything, there was that bemused, analytical detachment I get whenever I read economic theory or visit a mosque. Hell, I had more of an emotional connection to…

… secret Santas?

What the fuck?


The last time my friends and I organized Secret Santas had been two years ago, before we had all graduated. We stayed up till God-awful in the morning, listening to those bubble-gummy jingles and watching cheesy Christmas cartoons, drinking egg nog and munching on some tasty pastry the girls had concocted. I had bought Nick a Canucks T-shirt (Nick could never have too many clean shirts), and Mike had bought me a rice-cooker… cheeky bastard.

I stood there in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and a flood of memories rushed back. Laughing at the try-hards in my old neighborhood who strung up their Christmas lights in November… and then putting up our own a week later. Looking for Boxing Week sales with Gavin or my old man at Richmond Mall, with its Chinese Santa Claus who spoke Cantonese and was probably repeating his last name three times: “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Groaning at- and then singing along to- the diarrhea stream of carbon copy tunes on everyone’s iTunes. (Nick’s mix was titled “S-antastic Cl-awesome”.) The bursting catalogues of video games, hardware and other big boys’ toys released specially for the holidays, that I could max out my visa on. And yes, those goddamned fake, twenty-foot plastic trees that don’t even have that good ol’ earthy pine scent.


I realized I missed North American Christmas. Yes, even with “its commercial undertones, and its cheap, fake, manufactured glow.” This model of Christmas, with all its familiar flaws, was all that I knew and loved. It’s MY culture and heritage. I realized that the spiritual experience I’d hoped for couldn’t be gotten from intoned rituals and these supposed holy places of “mystique” and “sanctity”. It comes from community, from being with friends and family, and all that is familiar and that resonates with your past. It’s being where you know you are “home”.


It took many years for a million niggling hints to form up into this one conclusion. Christmas in Israel just pushed it over the edge. Hey, I know I'll never stop wandering and wondering. I’ve seen the sun rise on many a foreign shore, and watched the stars wheel over many a strange skyline. Ultramodern Singapore and quaint Halifax. Marble-sheathed Rome and smog-shrouded Bangkok. Schizoid, tribal Beirut. And Jerusalem, of bronze and light and gold.

But I’ll never again pretend that Vancity- that cosmopolitan, image-driven Ikea showcase of a town- isn’t home.


Next year, no matter where I am in November, I know where I’ll be in December. I’m going home for the holidays. Vancouver, between the mountains and the sea. No place like it.

Yes, even with Jingle Bell Rock and Boxing Day line-ups.

Hell. Especially with Jingle Bell Rock and Boxing Day line-ups.

I'm Going to Disneyland!

This is what I've been up to in the last fortnight. Briefly.

After the Hotel Talal crew dispersed to the four corners of the earth, Nickie, Kristen, and Kieran flew into Beirut. We had work to do.

Kieran's my long-time partner-in-revolution, a large, bearish character with the grace of a drunk Viking, the mind of a Greek philosopher, and the ambition of a Roman emperor. Kristen's his opinionated little sister, all cheeky grins, contagious chuckles, and offhand comments that are as insightful as they are belligerent. Nickie's another old friend and kindred spirit, who's worked as a borderline-escort in the Japanese corporate underworld, almost died making a documentary about Malay jihadists in southern Thailand, and is launching a revolutionary social media website for the environment.

Nickie's done a lot of freelance film work, and using her contacts to several distributors- including Al-Jazeera- she scored agreements for these distributors to purchase a series of short films that we would make about the region during a month of travel.

So far, we've:

1) Filmed a Climate Change Walkathon in Beirut in association with the Global Awareness Day on Climate Change and the global conference held this year in Bali. Such a march, which involved over a thousand people, had never been held in the Arab world before. It was the first time I'd ever held a videocamera, or held interviews news-style: run in, shove your mike in a guy's face, ask him five questions, then rinse and repeat. Nickie and I nabbed a choice interview from Wael Hmaidan, the organizer of the event, who had a million optimistic comments about the possibility for putting climate change on the agenda of the next Arab League Summit, the repercussions of erosion, rising coastlines, and water scarcity in the Arab world, and the economic opportunities available in an Arab "green" economy. The war-torn, petrodollar-fueled Arab world, of course, doesn't give two shits about the environment... but hey. A Walkathon begins with a single step. Right? Sigh.

2) Filmed a community of human rights dissidents from Syria. These included a number of ordinary rankers- journalists, writers, activists- a Kurdish family that fled after one of the daughters was falsely accused of insulting President Bashar Assad, and a pair of reasonably high-profile politicians, one of whom was interviewed in exile, and the other secretly in Damascus. The latter was arrested the day after we interviewed him. I almost puked upon hearing the news, and fervently prayed that our interview had not been the trigger for his arrest. Sometime, I will write up the story of my buddy Ahed, who had a tale and a half to tell, and who was almost solely responsible for putting together this film short.

A number of potential film shorts fell through, including one on Sunni street politics, which I wrote up in my previous post in lieu of making a pod. Too much blue tape- the powers-that-be in Tareek Al-Jadidah didn't want us filming or probing their security arrangements. Whoops. Hope Sam can keep a secret. By the way, that isn't his real name.

We then blew through Damascus, stopping only for our clandestine (or was it?) interview and a few intense sessions at the local sheesha parlor. My head still hurts. We had been fed a lot of paranoid warnings about the unseen hands and eyes of the Syrian Security Services, known as the mukhabarat, by my exiled buddy Ahed- and we were wary of even speaking about him or the regime in public... as, it seems, was the entire country. We went from Lebanon, a country that lived and breathed politics, to a country where it was the one forbidden, untouchable issue.

Portraits of Bashar Assad- the figurehead for an Alawite regime puppeteered by Bashar's stronger little brother Maher and old associates of the dead founder of the regime, Hafez Assad, were everywhere. There could be four framed pictures of the guy in a single shop. His face was on bridges, buildings, taxi windows, shopfronts... and it all had one message: leave the politics to us. Big Brother.

Tongue-in-cheek, we called Bashar Assad "You Know Who", or "He Who Must not be Named." Alternately, we used Lord of the Rings lingo: Bashar was "The Dark Lord", or "Sauron". The mukhabarat were "Dark Riders", or "Nazgul". The army were "orcs".


We raced into Jordan, to find that the currency was pegged a third again higher than the US dollar, and everything was insanely overpriced as a result. Our wallets hemorrhaged, and this caused much bitterness. There isn't a drop of oil in Jordan. How could the currency remain so strong?

I figured that the Americans and Saudis are propping up the Jordanians with aid and petrofunds because of its location and loyalties. Jordan is south of Syria, north of Saudi, west of Iraq, and east of Israel and the Bank. It's one of the last strong allies of the States, and one of only two nations to sign a full peace with Israel. 30% of the people are descended from Bedouin, and are ethnically most similar to Iraqis and Saudis. More importantly, 70% are Palestinians, descendants of refugees from 1948. Jordan must be one of the only countries in the world whose currency boasts a monument from another state: the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

It's an island of stability in a sea of madness, and the West should want to keep it that way. If the monarchy fell and the "Jordanian" identity was lost for those millions of Palestinians-Jordanians, Jordan could become anything from a Syrian vassal state, to a base for Islamist extemists or Iraqi militants and refugees, to a neo-Palestinian state that might serve as a base for West Bank and Gaza nationalists against Israel. And the best way to stave this off is to keep the bellies of the people full.

Anyway, we blew through a day in Petra, the rose-red city carved into a winding canyon by a civilization called the Nabateans, who were contemporaries of Christ.

Now we are in a town called Madaba, an hour from the the King Hussein Bridge, and the land know by Syrian journalists as "Disneyland", or "Dixie", and by the Arab world as "the Zionist Entity": Israel.

All of us have a place in the world that we're dying to see... and most of the time we have no roots there. Nickie's a South East Asia buff, and fulfilled a longtime dream to make the region her stomping ground when she filmed her documentary. Kieran was a Russian in another life, though I can't quite decide if he was a Czarist or a Red revolutionary. My cousin Gavin, who can't speak a word of Mandarin, goes through books on China at an astounding rate. My friend Maddie back home is obsessed with India- and she's British-Canadian. Other friends, white as sheets and Canadian as maple syrup- are obsessed with Latin America, East Africa, Central Asia.

For my part, I've waited for what seems like my entire life to see Israel and Jerusalem. And now that I'm a couple of hours from its gates, I can't sleep.

There's work and play to be had. Films to make, sights to see. Interviews to craft and trips to plan. A few days from now, Christmas in Bethlehem, and New Year's in Tel Aviv. But right now, I couldn't care less. I'm going to Jerusalem. The Church, the Mount, the Wall, the Gates. I've no words for it, and probably won't for a long time.

I'm going to Disneyland!

The Sunni Street

“To be Lebanese is to be political.” Sam leaned forward. His manner was grave, as if he were trying to explain Newton’s Second Law, or some other fundamental fact about the universe. “You drink politics with your coffee. You eat it with your food. You breathe it with the air. Everything is sect… sectal? Sectarian? Yeah. Sectarian.”

Anyone remember Sam?

I’d met him a couple of weeks before, walking through the packed slum-burbs of South Beirut with a bunch of Hotel Talal-ers on route to Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp, an animated, personable kid who’d learned English during a year in New Mexico.

“Shatila? That’s the lion’s den.” He volunteered to be our safari guide.

Sam spent the afternoon shepherding us about, translating Arabic pick-up lines into English, and broadsiding us with a shipload of political opinions. Two things became clear.

One. Sam was a Sunni jarhead- a mouthpiece for a million little pro-Sunni jingoisms and beliefs. Two. In a country of tight lips, Sam had a very loose tongue- and no one, it seemed, had told him to bite it in front of strangers.

A couple of weeks later, he offered to give me a rundown of Sunni politics- from the grassroots. Street-level politics, steeped in the daily life of the neighborhood, where hard-eyed men in coffee-shops and back-alleys form the backbones of Lebanon’s tribes.

I jumped at the chance.

It would occur to me much later, in the midst of one of Sam’s motor-mouthed monologues, that a casual backpacker like myself had no business knowing some of the facts that he so casually gave away.

Sam began with the basics. The Law of the Jungle: your tribe is everything. A man is dependent on wasta- or “connections”- for everything from a job, to a scholarship, to political voice. And in Lebanon, wasta is rooted in the tribe: strings of patronage to tribal godfathers and standing in the community.

Every individual life thus becomes tied to the interests of one’s tribe. Nothing is outside politics. Even the color of your clothing betrays your loyalties.

“Blue for Hariri and the Sunnis, orange for Aoun and his Maronites. Yellow for Hezbollah and the Shi’ites,” Sam ticked his fingers off one by one. “Red, green… even the rainbow is taken by the Druze. The only color I can wear that hasn’t been claimed is black.”

He paused. “Yet.”

Later, he took us on a tour of his neighborhood, Tareek Al-Jadidah.

A fiercely Sunni enclave in South Beirut loyal to the Hariri clan, it’s a dense network of ragged complexes decorated with huge murals and banners of Sunni godfathers and Islamic scholars. Many buildings sport curtains and awnings in bright Hariri blue. Flags imprinted with the logo of Hariri’s Future Movement hang from balconies and food stands. Walls of blue graffiti declare the neighborhood’s loyalties in jingoistic Arabic: “With our blood and souls, we sacrifice for you!”

“We are the base of the pyramid.” Sam explained, with his usual cheery bluster, gesturing at the noisy afternoon scene. Around us, crowds of men and women swirled and bustled about their business. Nothing is outside politics. To live in this neighborhood was in itself a political act- an oath of allegiance to the Sunnis, and to vote for their godfathers with the ballot or with the bullet.

Sam stopped by a mosque on one main street, stained glass windows ornately emblazoned with the names of Islam’s first four caliphs- Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali- the first three of whom are regarded as illegitimate by the Shi’a, whose name translates into something like: “Followers of Ali”. It was decorated with colored bunting for the upcoming haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Green, red, white.

“There’s one color missing.” Sam had one of those inside-joke smirks. “It should be there, but… we… don’t like that color.”

I didn’t answer or ask. Yellow. Hezbollah.

The Sunnis of Tareek Al-Jadidah had chosen to flaunt their old hatreds on the walls of their mosque, their schools, their streets, and their flags. All this heraldry- the banners, the graffiti, and the colors- was meant to send only one message: This is Sunni land.

Tareek Al-Jadidah is a square block, about two kilometers on each side, and framed on every side but the south by a major road or a bridge. To the west and north are neighborhoods of mixed population, a short drive from the climbing, half-reconstructed skyline of the Corniche and the downtown commercial strips. To the east is a flat, open area- sparsely populated, rolling slowly up into the outskirting highlands.

The south is where Sunni eyes turn with wary distrust. The southern border of Tareek Al-Jadidah is Shatila, that ugly Palestinian refugee camp abandoned by Fatah, the Lebanese government, and Allah- everyone, apparently, but Hezbollah and the Shi’ites. According to Sam, Shatila is a vassal state of Hezbollah, which gives them funding in exchange for a tenuous allegiance.

Fair enough. But funding for what? Health services? Education? Utilities? Or weaponry? I found myself weighing the pros and cons of having an Islamist militia, untouchable by the government in Beirut, buying the loyalties of downtrodden Palestinians- even if they were probably bought with medicines and schoolbooks.

Shatila is, in any case, the least of Tareek’s worries. Just beyond those hovels are the neighborhoods of Dahiyeh- a huge swath of Shi’ite land that one writer rather colorfully labeled “The Belt of Misery”. Dahiyeh covers a territory several times the size of Tareek Al-Jadidah, stretching across the south and up onto its eastern border. More importantly, it’s a stronghold of Hezbollah, much of which was bombed flat by Israel during the 2006 war.

“Dahiyeh used to be Sunni land.” Sam explained. “Then the Shi’ites came. They moved into apartment after apartment, first as individual families, then in huge groups. They took over the leases and drove the Sunnis out. That’s how we lost Dahiyeh. That’s how we’ll lose Tareek Al-Jadidah, and Beirut itself, if we don’t fight against it.”

Was this a war over lebensraum? Were the Shi’ites breeding out the Sunnis? I thought about the swarms of Chinese settlers in Tibetan and Uighur lands, sent by Beijing to crowd out the natives. The Sunnis were facing death by demographics, and they knew it. The Shi’ites could cry all they wanted about wanting roofs for their childrens’ heads- to Tareek Al-Jadidah, this was genocide disguised as housing rights.

We ended up at a bright blue building, multistoried, festooned with cedar flags. The sign on the front announced: Secure Plus. “This is our neighborhood watch headquarters. Don’t take any pictures.”

Sam made us wait while he conferred with one of the watchmen leaders. I peeked inside the building; it was spare, with darkly lit concrete walls, like the inside of an East Bronx boxing gym. Grim young men stalked about in groups. A small circle of youths, stubble-chinned and pleather-jacketed, formed around Sam as he argued with a tall, greasy-haired watchman. Hostile stares. I thought of my first day in high school.

Suddenly, I was spun about by an insistent tug and a harsh whisper. It was a girl from Hotel Talal- she was eastern European but spoke Arabic well. “What are you doing here?”

What?

“Are you in trouble? What are you doing here? Please, I can talk to someone for you. You shouldn’t be here.”

What the hell? I assured the girl that I wasn’t in trouble, and that I was here by invitation. She walked away skeptically. It suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t a neighborhood watch any more than Hezbollah was. This wasn’t a group of middle aged-men keeping an eye on drunk teenagers. This was the headquarters of Tareek Al-Jadidah’s militia.

Sam reappeared. He looked relieved. “Okay, we can keep going with the tour. No pictures, though.”

So who were those guys?

“Secure Plus.” Sam drew out the organizational structure of his neighborhood watch, but he was very careful never to say the taboo word “militia”.

Secure Plus is a Sunni security firm, a legitimate, professional business that provides bodyguards and surveillance for Sunni communities and figures. It also doubles as a secret training ground for two smaller watch-groups, the Panthers and the Eagles. These two groups are organized gangs of non-professionals, crewed by youths in their teens and twenties. They aren’t necessarily thugs and toughs- Sam certainly wasn’t- but I wouldn’t be surprised it there were a few hardheads.

After having proved a certain degree of loyalty and competence in the Panthers or the Eagles, youths are chosen to undergo combat training with Secure Plus. Some remain; most return to the ranks of the two watch groups. This is how Tareek Al-Jadidah screens and trains its foot soldiers.

“We use electrical prods,” said Sam. “Tasers.” And guns? “No!” A vehement negative. “We don’t use guns.”

Against who?

“Thieves. And people who are unwelcome.”

Like Shi’ites and Palestinians from the south?

“Well, yeah. Who else?”

The neighborhood is divided into several watch zones amongst the Panthers and Eagles, with a highly organized chain of command. The section leaders, mostly middle-aged men, have noms du guerre that seem to have been stolen right out of a B-movie. Abu Dam- Father of Blood. Father of Suffocation. Father of Troubles. And one figure known, almost comically, as The King.

“We have day-time and night-time patrols. Some are mobile- we have men on scooters and in cars. On street corners and the entrances to important buildings, we have watchmen in plainclothes. They look like everyone else; you would have no idea who they are. If you look suspicious, they stop you and question you.”

What questions?

“Oh, you know. What your last name is. What village your father came from.” In other words, what sect you’re from. And if you’re not Sunni?

Sam didn’t answer. I assumed he didn’t hear the question, and I did not repeat it.

“We let Shi’ites and Palestinians in to visit,” he went on. “The Shi’ites won’t even do that. If you’re Sunni and you’re in a Shi’ite area, you have to pretend to be Shi’ite- use all their greetings and phrases- or they’ll heckle you out. We welcome Shi’ites and Palestinian visitors, but not to live here. We do not let the Shi’ites buy land, lease land, or rent apartments in groups. That’s how they took Dahiyeh.”

Later, Sam spread out a tourist map of Beirut on a table- complete with descriptions of the National Museum and other attractions. Dead serious, he pointed out the borders of his hood and possible avenues of attack by Shi’ites or Palestinians. “What’s in the north?”

Downtown. The Corniche. the Parliament, the tent city, the malls…

“Yes, yes.” Sam was impatient. “But who’s there? Who could protect the Sunnis?”

That was easy. It was election crunch-time. There were APCs on every street corner and troopers on every sidewalk- crewed by Sunnis, commanded by their Maronite allies. The Lebanese army.

“Yep. If the Shi’ites come from the north or the west, the army will crush them.”

Okay. What about the east, and this flat, open green space before it?

“Yep.” A grim tone, dead serious. “There’ll be snipers in those buildings.” He pointed at the long street that formed Tareek’s easternmost boundary. “We’ll have men up there watching the open ground. They can’t attack us from an open area; it’s suicide.”

And the south?

“Yeah, the south. That’s where the trouble is. That where most of our strength is concentrated.”

I listened to this little briefing intently. But part of me was incredulous. Was this a genuine tactical assessment, learned in the war-rooms of the community leaders, or was this an overzealous teenager playing general in front of a foreigner?

And snipers in buildings to the east? Sam’s loose lips had just given away a rather ugly secret: Tareek Al-Jadidah had guns in its arsenal. I didn’t call him on it.

More importantly, I was struck dumb by the tone and character of his words. Sam might as well have said of Dahiyeh: “Here be Mordor.” Here be the Forces of Evil, arrayed against the silver-armored defenders of Tareek Al-Jadidah. Here be the orcish Shi’ite hordes, playing the Persia to Tareek’s Spartans. These were the words and the beliefs of a people who knew themselves to be under siege. And their politics reflected this. The politics of Tareek Al-Jadidah were all, in one way or another, preparing for or responding to the perceived threat of Lebanon’s other tribes.

Was Sam just a jarhead? On some level, of course he knew better. He knew as well as any Lebanese that if the tribes didn’t find a way to break free of the old hatreds, Lebanon would be doomed to civil war- or cold peace- until the Day of Judgment. And he knew that the youth would have to spearhead this change. They would have to replace the beliefs of their elders- before they became them.

“I’m in a group called Future Youth,” he explained. Isn’t that the name of Hariri’s party? You know, a Sunni-only club? “No, that’s the Future Movement. It’s the actual political party. Future Youth was founded by Sunnis, yeah, but it’s for young people only, and its non-political. Shi’ites can join, and Christians too. ‘Future’ for me doesn’t mean what it does for Hariri, for the Future Movement. ‘Future’ isn’t just a name; it’s a necessity. We have to see past our differences.”

The tragedy is this kind of end-of-the-road vision-of-a-vision is drowned by the everyday reality of tribal rivalry. Dirty, day-by-day competition for jobs, for lebensraum, for political power. And with several hundred thousand frustrated, bombed-out Shi’ites clamoring on the doorstep of Tareek Al-Jadidah, well-meaning musings about olive branches and tribal unity drift away like ashes. Over the years, the moral climate of South Beirut’s single Sunni bastion have forced Sam to absorb- and live out- the skewed perspectives of his tribe.

Just like the Shi’ites of Dahiyeh, or the Palestinians of Shatila.

No, I don’t begrudge Sam his beliefs or his taser.

As he walked away for that last time, grinning cheekily and promising to Facebook me, I thought fleetingly about the movie The Departed, and its take on Good and Evil:

When you’re staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, does it really matter?

The Rovers

“There was Barney McGee from the banks of the Lee
There was Hogan from County Tyrone
There was Johnny McGurk, who was scared stiff of work
And a man from West Meath named Malone
There was Slugger O’Toole who was drunk as a rule
And fighting Bill Tracy from Dover
And your man Mick McCann from the banks of the Bann
Was the skipper of the Irish Rover.”

Hotel Talal, sitting square on the Green Line that divided Christian East Beirut from Sunni West Beirut during the Civil War, has been a breeding ground for some quirky personalities.

Lebanon’s a political circus at the best of times, but for a couple of weeks, the situation descended firmly into the “gong show” category. President Lahoud vacated the Grand Serail, the mammoth, Versailles-style presidential chateau, to little fanfare and much apathy. The godfathers bandied crooked words, and the Lebanese Army choked off Beirut’s arteries with armor and barbwire. Hezbollah made calculated threats from their southern lairs. The West and Syria/Iran used Lebanon as their personal chessboard, moving tribal militias, parties, and religious authorities about like so many pawns and bishops. Strife was on the horizon. Blood was in the air.

And like bees to honey- or like crows to corpses- the adventurers, humanitarians, and reporters of the West bought tickets to the show.

Hotel Talal filled up. Small-time journalists hoping for the scoop that would break them into the big-time. Middle-East academics taking the opportunity to do some frontline research. Aimless vagabonds and sunburnt backpackers looking for a little tourism in the headlines- hoping to bring back photos of burning tires, memories of martial law, and a Hezbollah T-shirt or two back home as souvenirs. Party-goers who came to check out the “Paris of the Middle East”- only to find a bizarre mix of Paris 2008 and Paris 1919.

There was Darcy, the baby-faced, hard-drinking son of an infamous Aussie activist, who wanted to promote a one-world government vision he called “pan-Terranism”- through pornography. Patrick, a Polish photographer who “researched” natural hallucinogens in his spare time- everything from mushrooms, to hashish, to opium, to qat. Didier, the Quebecois math student who was arrested by an unknown militia group and slept blindfolded in a dank jail for a night.

Zoltan, a warble-voiced, nerdy Hungarian freelancer with a crushing handshake and a fluent command of Arabic. Leo, a tattooed Brazilian researching Palestinian refugee society in a squallid Bekaa Valley camp. Alan, a grungy, white-haired “freelance humanitarian” who had spent his life jetting between the hellholes of the Third World lending a helping hand.

Steve, a portly, balding blowhard who overcompensated for his cartoonish appearance and a writing career that didn’t quite match up to his own overexpectations by fancying- and worse, by advertising- himself as the James Bond of journalism. Pompous and secretive, paranoid and gullible, Steve was the laughingstock of the hostel. He eavesdropped on every conversation in a half-mile radius, talked in whispers, and boasted emptily of his sexual prowess and two-bit accomplishments.

The hostel crowd, in retaliation, delighted in pranking him. Yesterday, Steve turned green with jealousy when we convinced him that we had interviewed Amin Gemayal, the most well-known of the Maronite godfathers- an elitist prick who wouldn’t give anyone in Hotel Talal the time of day.

There was a small crew of people I hung out with in particular… a little mismatched group that- like the best travel crews- were mashed together by the Providence of Hotel Talal’s dorm-room-distribution, and would never have been friends off the backpack trail.

Jeremy, who rode his motorbike in from Turkey three weeks ago on his way to Iran- a lanky, low-key daredevil who’s rappelled out of helicopters for a forest fire rapid-reaction force, ice-climbed a score of frozen waterfalls, was bitten by a poisonous snake when he chased it to impress a girl, and wrote a book about riding his bike from Alberta to Panama to recover from a broken heart. “It’s called ‘Motorcycle Therapy’,” he’d quip, to good-natured eye rolling at the dinner table. “In stores now. Also available on amazon.com.”

Drew, a hulking, easy-going Californian who spent most of the last year hiking around east Africa, working for a typically obscure NGO in Kenya, and who once escaped being stalked by a pride of lionesses. Justin, who ditched Seattle’s yuppie scene to entertain the world’s backpackers with an astounding repertoire of hip-hop moves, pick-up lines, and insights about American foreign policy.

Tiny, waif-like Miriam, daughter of a former “interrogation expert” for the US army, who studies at a Turkish university and danced as if she were on the set of Grease: The Musical. Sam and Ola, an Aussie and a Brit who used their Muslim backgrounds to score nursing jobs in Saudi Arabia, and who entertained me with tales of the repressed sexuality and tribal-based incest of Saudi Arabia’s medieval culture over a few nights of losing ourselves in Beirut’s space-age nightlife.

And _______, an irreverent, one-man comedy show with verbal diarrhea. Combining a blunt, vulgar sense of humor with a less-than-perfect command of the English language, he provided a sound-bite for every occasion, regaling us with outrageous, barely believable tales of his sexual exploits and past pranks, and leading the tormenting of Steve with malicious glee.

His jovial, rakish demeanor was also completely at odds with a shady past as a political dissident in a nearby Arab state, from which he fled into exile some time ago. With impossible casualness, he’s told me an incredible tale about suffering the consequences of being a rank-and-file member of the underground, and taken me to meet a number of his fellow exiles.

I will relate this to you all after I leave the country from which he fled, for if I become linked to him while there, I will likely face… er… “questioning”.

So what’s happened since?


Simply put, things calmed down. Impossibly, the godfathers realized that perhaps civil war wasn’t in their best interests. Consensus slowly formed around General Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces (which, in case you were wondering, isn’t a militia, but actually is the legitimate army of the state). Despite the obligatory heming, hawing, and tire-burning, the tribes are falling into line. About a week ago, it became apparent that Suleiman was going to be President, and that the rest is just details. Now, all that’s left is for the godfathers to divide up the political pie: what tribe gets what ministry and what jurisdiction in a new government.

No more civil war. Crisis averted. The Lebanese heaved a sigh of relief, and Hotel Talal buzzed with mixed feelings. From Steve: “Did I want something to happen? Fuck yeah!” From Jeremy: “I was hoping that nothing would happen. But if something had, I would’ve been glad to see it.” He related to me a story about his girlfriend, studying for a medical degree: “She would tell me, that as a doctor, you want to cure sickness, to ease suffering. But you also always want to see the most vile, fucked-up diseases in action… because… it’s… cool.”

When I find a better way to describe those twin desires, indescribable and paradoxical, I’ll let you know.

So one by one, the crew left. The bees buzzed off; the crows flew away. To Damascus, to Istanbul, to Paris, to Jerusalem. On the road again. Today, besides that noxious oaf Steve, I’m the last.

So now, I find myself filing away a heap of good memories with good people- of an experience as schizoid as Lebanon itself. Politics and partying. Barbed wire, bombs, bimbos, and beers. Protests and tension by day; debauchery by night. Wandering the ruins of Baalbek and the ruins of Maroun Al Ras. In Beirut, on the intersection between Middle-East and West, between war and peace, between slum-like poverty and ultra-modernity, between the hospitality demanded by Arab customs and the paranoia fueled by countless years of rivalry and war.

I knew half of them about half as well as I should’ve liked, and the other half about half as well as they deserved.

Good luck to you all. See you on the road.

In Deep Shi'ite

A few days ago, four of us rented a car, filled its tank with dirt-cheap Arab oil, wrangled a travel permit from scowling bureaucrats, and racked up 400 km on the backroads of southern Lebanon- the heartland of Hezbollah, where Shi’ites roam and the Lonely Planet fears to tread.

From here, during the Civil War, Arafat’s guerillas launched the needling raids that finally, in 1982, brought the wrath of Ariel Sharon down upon Lebanon. Israel set the Shi’ite homelands afire in bloody, ill-considered retaliation for Palestinian terrorism. In doing so, they earned an eternal enemy in the Lebanese Shi’ites, yet another Middle Eastern tribe known for their long suffering and long memories.

In 2006, after years of ceaseless, self-perpetuating war, Hezbollah crossed the border and snagged two Israeli soldiers. Israel invaded, determined to bury Hezbollah with that oldest of tactics: punishing the peasants for the actions of Robin Hood. For 33 days, the whistle of falling bombs and the thunder of tank threads were heard once again in Lebanon, while Hezbollah showered northern Israel with homemade rockets.

After a month, Israel retreated red-faced, unable to uproot Hezbollah or turn the Shi’ites against it. The south had been flattened. Hezbollah declared a “divine victory”, and the UN rushed in 14,000 blue helmets to anchor a tenuous peace.



* * *



The view from Beaufort castle was breathtaking.

A hulking wreck of decaying battlements, crowned by a rusting watchtower, Beaufort straddles a strategic height that overlooks most of southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, and a large swath of northern Israel- or as the huge sign at the entrance will inform you, “Occupied Northern Palestine”.

Originally built by Romans, the fort passed over the centuries through the hands of the Levant’s various conquerors: Crusaders, Ottomans, French. Palestinian guerillas used it as a base during the Civil War, but after Israeli troopers scoured the area in 1982, it became, as the entrance sign once again proclaims, the “Zionist Outpost of Beaufort”. From Beaufort, the Israelis kept an ironfisted watch over the south and defended their convoy lines.

We climbed up rusted ladders and sauntered across the overgrown paths criss-crossing the castle top. A few lonely remnants indicated that the battlements had once stood much higher, and that a roof had perhaps once sheltered the ground where we now stood in open sunlight. But I didn’t know- and never found out- if this had been caused by the slow decay of time or a rain of Israeli bombs.

Down below, the towns of the south took shape: square-blocked low-rises sprinkled across the ridges of the arid hills, clinging to the heights and then spilling haphazardly over into the valleys. Tiny vehicles raced along snaking roads. Pointing to the south and west, we squinted at the Golan and the Galilee.

From that height, I couldn’t tell where the Golan ended and the Galilee began, or within what areas Shi’ites or Jews raised their children. Where were the borders drawn up in our newspapers and textbooks? It was all one land that shared the same clouds, trees, and soil… claimed by three tribes, and divided with invisible lines by wasteful hatreds and the twisted workings of history.



Above us, an Israeli recon plane left long jet-streams in its wake as it made a pass to the south, then turned back towards home. From Beaufort’s silent watchtower, a ragged Hezbollah flag fluttered in the breeze.

* * *



In another nameless town, we sighted a group of blue vested soldiers sipping coffee in a little hole-in-the-wall. A large van parked outside flew the UN colors, with a placard announcing: “United Nations Observer Group in Lebanon”. We strolled in under the pretense of getting snacks, and badgered a friendly Argentinean officer into a conversation.

Frederico, a burly man with eyes as bright as his sky-blue vest, explained that the UN contingent in Lebanon is divided into two: the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), and the UN Observer Group, of which he was a part. UNIFIL is the military arm. Comprising 14,000 troops, it’s charged with overseeing the 2006 ceasefire and patrolling the border. The Observers are a smaller, unarmed contingent, which reports violations of the peace to UNIFIL and the Lebanese and Israeli governments.

It’s an open secret that UNIFIL’s a paper tiger. Peace in the south hinges not on UNIFIL’s ability to enforce it, but on Hezbollah’s desire to accept it. If civil war broke out and Hezbollah went on the warpath, UNIFIL wouldn’t be protecting the south; it would need protection from the south. In 1982, Reagan pulled American peacekeepers out after 241 marines were suicide-bombed in their barracks. Today, it would take far less for UNIFIL’s donor states to do the same.

I kept this to myself, and listened attentively as Frederico explained the mechanics of cluster-bombing: a missile containing dozens of smaller bombs breaks apart in mid-air, showering an area with deadly little explosions. When we asked him which southern towns had been bombed by Israel, he seemed surprised at our ignorance. “All of them!” Israel, he explained, had bombed every town south of the Litani that didn’t have a Christian majority.

As we drove out of the town we passed a mine-clearing vehicle in a distant field. Beside it, a small group of men were gathered in a circle, crouched over the ground. Days later, I would read that Israel had yet to turn over to Lebanon its maps of southern mine fields and cluster bomb targets.

One of the guys mentioned that he’d heard in passing that Israel painted its cluster bombs a playful pink so that unexploded ordnance could be more easily found. We debated whether this was so that they could be disposed off, or so that they could maim curious children.

* * *



A tall, chain-linked fence topped with lines of barbed wire marked Lebanon’s border with Israel.

It ran parallel to a 400m stretch of road. UNIFIL convoys trundled past regularly- trucks filled with Italian blue-helmets, and armored jeeps painted glaring white and marked boldly with UN insignia. A UN helicopter buzzed over us, keeping well to the Lebanese side of the border.

On the Israeli side, a kilometer in the distance, about fifty white-walled houses with sloping, red-tiled roofs neatly ringed a small hill topped by a radio tower. In the car, we whooped and hollered in glee. We were sure it was a settlement- and it was surreal to actually see one in the flesh.

We paused for pictures on a high ridge. It was like staring at two worlds.

On the Lebanese side of the barbed wire stretched a half-wrecked township of abandoned houses, shelled ruins, and half-reconstructed dwellings. The land was dry, arid; largely unfarmed. But on the Israeli side, the settlement clustered prettily on a hilltop framed with tall green trees- harmless, picturesque, unviolated. Pleasantville in a warzone. The land bloomed with green orchards and furrowed farmland. Some, dangerously close to the border, were guarded by camouflaged bunkers and unseen Israeli soldiers.



Standing there, it was not hard to imagine the ease with which either side could shell each other with million-dollar or homemade weaponry. How many Katyusha rockets had Hezbollah militants fired at those distant Israeli roofs over the years? How many potshots had bored Israeli soldiers taken at Shi’ite villagers across that wire fence? During the war, did Israel shell that wrecked town with artillery from miles away, or did it fly American-made F-15s dropping American-made bombs down on it? Why had Hezbollah not rained rockets down on that settlement- a stone’s throw from the border- in retaliation?

I’m going to find that same settlement from the other side, and see the barbwire border from Israeli eyes.

* * *



The Shi’ites have, over the years, done their share of damage to the Israeli army. Road mines planted in dirt roads pack enough punch to overturn state-of-the-art Merkava tanks. RPGs supplied by Iran turned Israeli APCs and tanks into flaming wrecks.

These mangled but intact hulks have been turned into monuments, perched proudly on stone platforms on prominent street corners in many a southern town. Carven plaques proclaim the heroism of Hezbollah’s martyrs and warn Israelis who will never read them of the folly of invading Shi’ite land. Most have Hezbollah posters stuck upright with steel posts into the tank turrets.

I thought of an old Latin phrase: “Nemo me impune lacessit”. No one harms me with impunity. Crush my farmlands with your tanks, and I’ll take seven or eight as souvenirs. Wreck my towns with your million-dollar bombs, and I’ll drop a patchwork rocket into your front yard. Put your dick in my mouth, and I will bite it off.

My favorite “tank” moment came at an army checkpoint. An old-model Merkava sat on a roadside embankment, mounted with a massive cutout of Ayatollah Khomeini.

As we snapped pictures of the tank, one soldier, a blue-eyed Maronite, gestured at the Ayatollah, with his stern, hawk-like face and flowing beard.

“Papa Noel!” he shouted at us, grinning. “Papa Noel!”

* * *



Maroun Al-Ras is a small hilltop town to which Hezbollah fighters retreated during the 2006 war. In response, Israel bombed it flat.

Rebuilding has begun in earnest. When we got there, a dozen concrete low-rises were taking shape, and the largest pieces of rubble had been carted away from bomb sites. Bright, busy posters memorializing fallen militants punctuated the streets. Murals with Islamic slogans covered the few walls left intact. Signboards announced that funding provided by the European Commission, the UNDP, various aid organizations, and Hezbollah itself was being used to resurrect the town.



But there might as well have been a sixteen-foot neon sign that read: “ISRAEL WAS HERE.” We climbed over large swaths of rubble stretched over whole blocks, cameras clicking. Concrete slabs riddled with twisted rebar- the remains of walls, and ceilings, and floors- lay in thick grey piles. One ground zero was reduced to nothing more than the concrete archway of what had been the main entrance. I thought of the marble arches of Roman ruins. Some townsfolk had planted a Hezbollah flag on top of the lonely structure.



The people of Maroun Al-Ras had come back to rebuild their homes and lives- but not all of them. The streets echoed with the honking of passing cars, the shouts of neighbors, the clank of machinery, the squawk of livestock. But still, there were far too few. I wondered where the others had gone. Absorbed into the slums of south Beirut? Other towns? Had they fled to Syria?

Those who returned had set up their shops and homes in the remaining functional buildings. If it hadn’t collapsed, it was inhabited by a business or a family- sometimes both. I saw an autoshop whose walls were riddled with large shrapnel holes. Families clustered in still-upright apartment complexes hung their clothing out to dry in the gaping spaces of what had once been a living room, or a bedroom.

Lying abandoned in fields or on roadsides were the rusting remains of blown-up cars and minibuses. Roads were pockmarked with cluster-bomb pits- holes six to eight inches in diameter that had been filled in with sand.



I recalled a joke by my buddy Justin from a few days before, standing amidst the crumbling Roman temples of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon.

“It’s all ruined,” he’d scoffed, tongue-in-cheek. “It’s like someone came in here and trashed the place.”

The remains of the town made me think of those Israeli tanks. Earlier, one of the guys had pointed that three or four Israeli boys had probably burned to death inside of each tank so we could take those pictures and act like goofy tourists.

The remains of war are often so sterile, so bloodless. You can’t truly understand the carnage of trench warfare by visiting the Somme, or the methodical madness of the Holocaust while strolling the walkways of Auschwitz. It’s been cleaned up. The blood’s been scrubbed off, and the screams have died away.

No amount of wreckage, no memorial, no words, could ever make real to me the visceral, slow-motion horror of war’s ground zero moments.

We stopped by an old man by a collection of blackened houses and asked him for directions out of Maroun Al-Ras. Not understanding our query, he responded with a toothless grin. “Ahlan!” He said. “Ahlan wa sahlan!”

Welcome. My house is your house.

* * *



As the sun faded into twilight, we passed a huge, white armored jeep. A black soldier in a blue helmet peered curiously at us from his machine-gun perch. On the other side of the road, a small group of black troopers in UN colors sat, guns propped up on chairs and walls, in the shelter of a concrete garage that had seen better days.

They were from Ghana. Products of British colonialism, they spoke perfect English. One man, short and animated, grabbed my hand and pumped it. “You’re a long way from home!” I told him. “Yes, yes.” he returned. Almost conspiratorially, he then leaned in and whispered: “I miss my home, you know. You know why?”

I blinked at him, thinking he was going to say something about a pregnant wife, or the threat of civil war, or having to risk dying for a cause that didn’t in the least concern him so he could collect his monthly paycheck.

He stared dolefully at me. “Because here, it is very cold!” And he rubbed his arms and shivered in an exaggerated pantomime, then burst into a booming laugh.

His commander, a far grimmer man with a bristly mustache, gave us permission to take a picture of the jeep. “But not with Israel!” he cautioned. We could not take a photograph with the Israeli countryside in the background. Espionage. Well, guess what, Israel. It’s a world of google maps and GPS-equipped cell phones. Take a hint.

All of us nabbed lovely shots of the UN battlewagon, posed stoically against the red sunset, with its Ghanaian gunner, far from home, staring off into the distance.

* * *



Hezbollah territory wasn’t in the least bit dangerous. I’d been expecting an interrogation or two, demands for my passport, pointed questions about my political opinions. I’d been expecting men in slovenly clothing and keffiyehs to be patrolling the towns with AKs. I’d expected reams of red tape at every army checkpoint from brusque officers intent in keeping curious tourists out of the south.

Nothing of the sort. We were waved through every checkpoint. I never saw a gun, and never heard an insult. Maybe the merry men of Hezbollah were always just hidden around the corner, out of sight- but all I saw were the peasants. The commoners. The people who take care of Hezbollah, because Hezbollah takes care of them.

The south isn’t quite what the Maronites and Israelis make it out to be. It isn’t a den of thieves and murderers. It’s just the asshole of Lebanon- the part that always gets fucked. The south has a weary population- and as a result, extreme politics. The Shi’ites would negotiate with words with they could, but they’ve been talking to deaf ears for decades. So now, they negotiate with guns… and somehow ended up on the wrong side of the post-9/11 fence between Good and Evil.

Postponed. Again.

The election has been delayed for the fifth time. The dealine is moved to next Friday.

So in about four hours, at the stroke of midnight, Lebanon will have no president.

There's a bunch of us watching a broadcast in Arabic of politicians from all the factions, as well as the deputy speaker of the House, give meaningless speeches about Lebanese unity and holding to the constitutional process. The army has been charged with maintaining the peace. Veiled, insinuous comments are made about rival parties and godfathers.

Obviously, the dons can't just admit: "Hey, we've got no president becase we're corrupt warlords who won't compromise on our tribal agendas for the security of our country!"... even if this has the virtue of being the truth.

So now, we've got another week of suspense, deserted streets, checkpoints, and surly soldiers.

Some hostel-mates and I might take the delay to head south to Shi'ite-held areas that the Lonely Planet is silent about. See some real Hezbollah country.

Lockdown

The presidential vote will take place at 1pm today. A couple of hours away.

Downtown Beirut is in lockdown.

On the way to this net café, I passed two APCs, mounted with double-barreled machine guns and flanked by soldiers. One grinned apologetically as he searched me. What’s this? Laptop? You journalist? No? Okay.

Trucks ferrying squads of soldiers trundle down largely deserted streets. Business has slowed to a crawl. Bars and clubs in the fashionable districts of Hamra and Gemmayzeh have reported up to 70% drops in clientele. Checkpoints and armed troopers choke off the downtown strip malls- with their cobblestone avenues and kitschy neo-French Mandate architecture- turning them into surreal, Disneyland-like ghost towns.

Further west, a building housing the international press has been walled in with armored barricades. A nearby tent city housing protestors from Hezbollah is loosely ringed by the army. Shi’ites sit in circles, sipping their morning coffee. Ten meters away, two troopers in green, tapping the triggers of their M16s, watch warily. One Shi’ite tells me that the tent city houses a thousand men. I look around the deserted area, the rows of ragged tents and tattered banners giving it an apocalyptic, carnivalesque feel. There aren’t more than a hundred Hezbollah men there. A week ago, one of them had invited me over the fence for a breakfast of cheese and naan. I don’t see him today. His compatriots look surly, tense.

I think of the patchworks of Sunni, Shi’ite, and Palestinian slums in South Beirut, a half-hour’s walk from the shimmering high-rises of the Corniche. I think of Sam- engineering student at Beirut Arab University by day, watchman of the Sunni Tareek Al-Jadidah by night. I think of his words at the Shatila Palestinian camp: “The Palestinians here are caught in the middle. There are Sunnis to the north, and Shi’ites to the south. What will they do? Who will they fight?”

It ain’t just the Palestinians. All the tribes are “caught in the middle.” Shi’ite neighborhoods are sandwiched between Sunni and Palestinian, and Sunni between Shi’ite and Palestinian, in densely-packed, locked-in cantons of rival tribes. If the time comes, what will they do? Who will they fight?

The political analysts profiled in the morning papers are unanimous: no one knows what will happen. “There are two many factors.” In a few hours, there may be a consensus candidate, a new Lebanese President, and a tenuous peace. Or there could be a split in the government, with the country dividing into tribal areas. If it does, the Shi’ite elements of the Lebanese Army may jump ship; in any case, the army doesn’t have the firepower to oppose Hezbollah, which could defend its southern strongholds with ease.

The travelers at my hostel debate the possibility of civil unrest. “Is it safe to go downtown?” one Pakistani girl asks. Our Druze hostel owners listen silently and with amused distaste written on their faces. Idiot, arrogant foreigners. What do they know? What have they lost? How can they understand?

The country’s on the verge of a meltdown, but it’s just an adventure to us, we strangers from strange lands. We aren’t invested in these tribal wars. Our families are safe in faraway suburbs. We fly in, drink in the tension, sample a little suffering, snap some pictures, and discuss the election with the light-hearted zeal of those who have nothing to lose from the consequences. Tourism in the headlines. If shit hits the fan, we head for the airport. Home before Christmas.

It’s also difficult to get a read on the situation from the locals. No one has a balanced take; everyone falls into the old tribal loyalties and will tell you something appropriately biased. Last night, the Druze brothers who own our hostel shook their heads at a broadcast of Emile Lahoud, the outgoing pro-Syrian president. “Get out now,” one of them muttered. I looked sideways at him. Sam would have agreed. But what about the Shi’ites I met in Baalbak and Tyre?

Moreover, the locals are equally divided on what’s going to happen- divided, or tight-lipped. Most understand the unpredictability of Lebanon’s Byzantine politics. There’s a small sense of “que sera, sera” fatalism in the air. Whatever will be, will be. Tweedle Dum today, Tweedle Dee tomorrow. It’s just another pissing contest between godfathers anyway. The tensions and divisions of Lebanon are too deep-seated for any one president to overturn, and whatever comes is just another storm to be weathered, just like all the ones that have come before. In the meantime, life goes on.

Others are more animated, and argue that the choice of president matters. For tribal interests, for economic interests, for foreign policy. Some say there will be consensus. “Lebanon is strong,” one woman with family in Canada said. “We Lebanese are united, we don’t want war.” Another disagreed. “There will be no president, and fighting. The Americans are trying to create a split between Sunnis and Shi’ites, so that they can get Arab oil. We Lebanese are victims.” Shi’ites rag on March 14th candidates as corrupt puppets of the West, Maronites denounce Hezbollah as warmongers. The simplest, and likely most prevalent opinion, came from a typically pretty Lebanese girl who I shared a cab with. “We are sick of war,” she said tiredly.

Most people are surprised to see us Westerners out and about. In the slums, they stare at us with thinly-veiled hostility. What the fuck are these foreigners doing here at a time like this? Even the university kids and downtown shopkeeps, who speak English and French fluently and are used to the Western set, are surprised. “Do you know that there’s an election? Don’t you know there are… er… troubles coming?” One man enthusiastically explained to me that Lebanon has Sunnis, Shi’ites, Maronites, and an evil empire in the south called “Hezbollah” who wanted to kill us all. I listened politely and nodded.

Last night, a German guy showed up at the hostel. “So many soldiers downtown!” he exclaimed irritably. Well, didn’t you hear about the election, bud? “No!” he replied, slinging his duffel bag on his bed. “If I’d known, I would not have come!”

Election’s one hour away now.

We’re planning to get drunk if they can’t find a president today. Witlessly hammered. We’re going to clean the hostel fridge out of Almaza beers, and pass out at whatever half-filled neo-industrially decorated club will accept us. Justin, my dorm-mate, joked that if he’s going to have to wake up to the sound of machine-gun fire, he’s damn sure going to do so hungover.

Waiting for the war. Anyone have a magic 8-ball?

Living In The Headlines

It’s the little details- the everyday, humdrum routine of life played out in Lebanon- that make the present situation so addictive. It’s doing everything that you’d do back home on a sunny (or rainy) Saturday- while living out of a backpack in a four-person dorm, in a tiny country on the verge of a political meltdown.

It’s about living what you read about in the morning paper.

Whenever I read the paper back home, I always felt divorced from the “Vancouver” described by the headlines. Tax cuts, policy debates, car accidents, and sports games. Well, so what? It wasn’t real to me. I could never see or feel the consequences of those stories- meaningfully and viscerally. Sure, they were taking place in my backyard. And maybe, in some roundabout, systemic way, they were changing my life. But they rarely, if ever, changed my day.

In Lebanon, the tensions and troubles boldly spelt out in the morning headlines act themselves out in your daily life in a thousand tiny ways- each as real and personal as a slap in the face. You live in the frontlines of the headlines.

* * *


I was at the Beirut Marathon on Sunday. Tens of thousands of people jogged, marched, and jostled their way down winding, narrow urban neighborhoods into the cobbled paths of the commercial malls, and then onto the wide boulevards of the waterfront- a colorful, shouting procession of merrymakers taking a welcome break from talk of politics and worry over war.



Of course, politics couldn’t stay away. It never can. Amid the crowd were whole groups representing the various factions, wearing party colors and carrying party banners. There were protest groups from the Khalass (Enough!) Movement and the Lebanese Red Cross. And alongside every street, stationed prominently amongst the performing troupes of blues bands, folk dancers, harlequins, and whirling dervishes, were squads of grim, glowering army troopers with M16s. Huge APCs with machine guns sat ponderously on every street corner.





The marathon wound its way along the oceanfront promenade, where Beirutis slung sixteen-foot-long fishing rods out into the shining waters and tossed writhing fish into wicker baskets. Behind them soared Beirut’s downtown skyline, a schizophrenic mix of the war-torn and the ultramodern. One building had been partially caved in by a bomb, another was a collapsed mass of concrete and girders. Mere meters away, a series of rebuilt glass-paned hotels scraped the sky, with several more under construction.

I snapped a picture of the sparkling, rebuilt Phoenicia International. During the Civil War, this hotel had been the starting point of the “Battle of the Hotels”, in which tribal militias had moved their turf war into Beirut’s tourist district. Hysterical Westerners were driven from their luxury suites into the basements and evacuated shortly after, collapsing the tourist industry once and for all. A security guard came sprinting out, waving his hands. He was afraid that I was gathering intelligence for car-bombers, who would ram vehicles packed with explosives into the front lobbies of buildings during the war.



The next morning, the morning paper disclosed from an anonymous military source that the government had used the marathon as a cover to move more APCs and troops into the streets of Beirut ahead of the upcoming election. Last night, one of my hostel-mates saw truckloads of camouflaged troopers hauling ass downtown. An APC has also parked itself opposite our hostel.

* * *
The army does not like to be photographed.

I was in Tyre last week, a Shi’ite city in the south where support for Hezbollah runs deep. On the other hand, the army, who holds a strong presence in Tyre, is crewed by Maronite Christian officers and Sunni rank-and-filers, and is largely loyal to the government. It’s a tense situation. Posters of Nasrallah and the yellow flags of Hezbollah compete with the checkpoints and gun emplacements of the army, decorated with the cedar flag of Lebanon.

I took a picture of a sandbagged machine-gun emplacement on a street corner. Immediately after, I was accosted by a skinny, bearded man in a black shirt. He grabbed my arm rudely and shouted in my face that I could not take pictures of the army, and that I must stay with him until an army officer could take me back to the local base.

I told him that unless he produced a badge or a uniform, I was going to the nearby Roman ruins, and he could burn in ten hells. The man was unfazed. “I am from the Lebanese Forces,” he shouted pompously. “You leave, I will make trouble for you.”

The Lebanese Forces are not the Lebanese Army. They are a Maronite militia led by Samir Geagea, who is considered a loose cannon with loose screws… even amongst the pantheon of Lebanese godfathers. Yes, the man might have been lying. But what if he wasn’t? I was the only Chinaman in Tyre. If I walked away, sometime later that day, a nondescript car could easily sidle on up, stuff me into the trunk, and take me somewhere to be shot.

So I ended up at the local army base, where the captain pored over my pictures. He asked for my passport; it was stuffed in my pocket. “It’s in the hotel,” I said. I crossed my fingers and prayed that he wouldn’t search my bag, which held a $1500 videocamera. Soldiers in their frayed, mismatched uniforms milled about, trying to dare me into a staring contest. I swore I hadn’t known that I was not allowed to snap photos of the army. Finally, I was released after deleting the offending picture.

This, of course, was a lie. I knew perfectly well that there was a ban on photographing all things military, and I had deliberately been snapping photos of army equipment in the most obvious, touristy way in the hope of getting caught. I had wanted to see what would happen to me.

I learned two things.

One. There are plainsclothed militiamen everywhere in Lebanon. You never know who’s watching. You never know who you’re watching. You don’t know who’s allied with the army and the government. You don’t know who they answer to. It’s anonymous, disconcerting, and intimidating.

Two. The army does not like to be photographed.

* * *


Later that day, I was wandering one of the archaeological sites of Tyre’s ruins. It was a heap of Roman rubble- a field strewn with toppled marble columns and lonely, wrecked archways, ringed by a wire fence. On the other side of the fence stood an equally desolate slum neighborhood. A crowd of boys were playing in the ruins- with rifles. They were taking turns firing a pair of WWI-issue bolt-action rifles at a series of marble column stumps. Another group of younger lads were playing hide-and-seek and catch in a cluster of engraved tombs and half-collapsed walls.

One boy sprinted up alongside me with his friends in tow. “Palestine?” I asked him. I thought they were Palestinian refugees, who have a huge camp, the Al-Bass, smack in the middle of Tyre. “Leh! Lubnaan, Shi’a!” he shouted. No, Lebanese, Shi’ite!

The leading boy then charged me, grinning impudently, and stuck a finger in my face. “You!” He yelled. “You Hezbollah?”

I stared at him. “No,” I heard myself reply. “I’m Canadian.”

* * *


Didier is a dangerously outspoken Quebecois math undergrad who can’t crunch numbers. Last year, completely disillusioned with his degree, he raised his hand in class.

“Sir,” he shouted at his professor. “I suck at Sudoku! Should I quit school?” His prof told him that if he still couldn’t solve Sudoku puzzles within a week, he should think about it. A few months later, Didier had ditched his degree and was halfway around the world with a bike and a backpack.

He was cycling through the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, and stopped at a village for water. A local accosted him rudely, demanding his passport. Didier went Francais on him. “Okay,” he snorted, pointing at a nearby woman. “Go ask that woman if she will show you her breasts. If she does, I’ll show you my passport.”

Didier was arrested.

Over the next twenty hours, he passed through the hands of a bewildering series of militia and government groups. He was first talked to by some men in uniform, then others in civilian clothing. He was then bundled into a car and driven to another town, questioned all the way. At the town, he was handed over to yet another group of men, who interrogated him with questions about the army and Hezbollah.

Didier never found out which militia group “arrested” him. He was never even sure if it was the army itself. He covered this uncertainty by ribaldly insulting every group of men placed in front of him in his rollicking Quebecois manner. At one point, convinced that his questioner was from the Lebanese Army, he burst out: “Hezbollah could kick the shit out of you!”

Finally, Didier was thrown into a brightly lit cell to sleep, and given a piece of green cloth to bind his eyes. He was released the next morning. When I met him, he produced his blindfold, waving it proudly like a towel at a Canucks game. The next day he flew back to Montreal.

“It will be so good to be home, tabarnac!” he said, and I promised to visit him.

* * *
Six of us hostel-mates took a stroll down to the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in South Beirut.

Along the way, we met a young, friendly guy named Sam, who’d studied engineering in New Mexico. He volunteered to take us to Shatila, and show us the surrounding neighborhoods. We were led through slums that were all much of a muchness; the same sand-toned, soot-blackened buildings. Most sported chipped paint, bullet-holes, and makeshift rain-covers draped over holes in the walls to keep out the rain.



The only difference lay in the election posters. In the Shi’ite neighborhoods, the green flags of Amal flew alongside the yellow of Hezbollah. We then crossed a busy street into Sunni territory, and abruptly, posters of Rafiq Hariri, his son Saad, and his allies replaced the Shi’ite militia banners.



Sam is a firm, uncompromising Sunni. He’s the member of a neighborhood watch group (read: paramilitia) called Tareek Al-Jadidah, whose logo, a snarling black panther, is plastered on flags and walls all over his neighborhood. And when I asked him about the electoral situation, he gave me the most heartfelt, pro-Sunni summary I’ve ever heard.

To Sam, Rafiq Hariri was not a corrupt mafia don who embezzled money from construction contracts and headed a Sunni economic elite that marginalized the Shi’ites for decades- he was a benevolent community leader who provided funds for the rebuilding of Beirut and fought for Lebanon’s independence from Syria.

To Sam, the Shi’ites are not Lebanon’s downtrodden second-class caste, but an expanding, extremist population whose heretical beliefs and hate for Sunnis go centuries back to the founding of Islam, when the two branches split over who was to be the Prophet’s successor. Hezbollah is not a legitimate defender of Shi’ite rights and security, but a terrorist organization splitting Lebanese unity and undermining the legitimacy of the March 14th government, whom the Sunnis support.



We passed a poster, on whom were immortalized Rafiq Hariri, Yasser Arafat, and Saddam Hussein. Sam read the stylized Arabic on the poster for us: “The dead who do not die”. But why Saddam? “Because,” Sam explained, “Saddam was a defender of Sunni rights against the Shi’ites. He fought against the Iranian Shi’ites in 1980 to 1988.” He was referring to the savage Iran-Iraq War of the 80’s, the last modern war to involve trench warfare and mustard gas.

We reached the concrete hovels and potholed streets of Shatila, decorated with murals of Arafat, the Dome of the Rock, and Palestinian flags, and slung with low-lying, sparking, electrical cables. Children played in a festering garbage dump, laughing and flinging soiled bits of trash at each other; others gathered around an old Street Fighter game in a run-down arcade. Sam shook his head in dismay. “These people are with the Shi’ites now,” he said. “They betrayed the Sunnis, even though we gave them so much in the war. They chose Hezbollah because they gave them money. And if they side with Hezbollah, we will have to fight them.”

Sam plans to march in any March 14th rallies that might take place if a president can’t be elected and Lebanon descends into civil strife. “We have to fight for what we believe in,” he stated matter-of-factly. I tried to imagine him with a placard or bullhorn in hand. With an electrical prod. With a gun.

The thing that kept me up that night was that Sam’s just a regular human being. He plays football, speaks perfect English with an Albuquerque twang, and we traded pickup lines and stupid college quips with friendly ease. Yes, he has political views that I find dangerously biased- but I’ve known Marxists, anarchists, and Fascists, and liked them all.

In sterile, glossy, consequence-free Vancouver, Sam would be just another friend with eccentric political views who you’d debate with over sushi and beer. But in Lebanon, these views matter more. He’s Sunni. And that means he’s part of a tribe. It means that he has to pick a side, and live and die with the old tribal hatreds- no matter how much he might regret having to, and no matter what he might stand for in another, better world.

* * *
The election is delayed till Friday now, mere hours before Lahoud’s term runs out and a presidential vacuum opens up.

The Maronite Patriarch Boutrous Sfeir has released a list of six presidential candidates for the MPs to choose from, including Michel Aoun and two members of the March 14th Movement. Lebanon’s godfathers are refusing to compromise on a candidate.

Bernard Kouchner, the French PM, is scooting circles around the militia camps, trying to mediate decades-long differences at the last minute. The bitter infighting and Byzantine schemes of the various camps are innocuously captured by the morning paper in phrases like: “Obstacles remain to an acceptable compromise.”

On Friday, there will be one president and peace, or two rival governments and war.

I’ve got my fingers crossed.