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.
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