Trevor Mostyn: Middle East specialist


	Beirut on the brink Trevor Mostyn Published in Prospect, December 2005 THE ARMOURED CARS OF LEBANON'S fragile army stood at the corners of Beirut’s now super-chic Downtown area on October 28th as the city braced itself for explosions and worse. The Lebanese stayed at home to await the details of UN Chief Investigator Detlev Mehlis’ report on the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the controversial architect of this new, Disney-esque city centre, and to some the hero of Lebanon’s rebirth. The three pro-Syrian former commanders of Lebanon’s feared security agencies are now in jail in connection with the killing. “You see how empty the area is. No one is going out. Everyone expects more horrors,” said the lady architect who had worked with Hariri’s real estate company, Solidère. We were drinking café lattes in fashionable Lina’s, the centre of the complex of swank cafes in rebuilt belle époque buildings where the cigar-smoking, mega-rich Lebanese and Gulf Arabs gossip and do business. Nearby are the shop-windows of Gucci and similar boutiques, Bang and Olfsen and Beirut’s version of Paris’s legendary Buddha Bar. All are lit up like a fairyland at night. But last week no-one was taking any chances, for the country’s sectarian fragmentation is not immediately apparent in peacetime and Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war is on everybody’s minds again. Some believe that with Iraq heading for meltdown and a desperate situation in the West Bank, the Americans will do anything to preserve Lebanon as a shop window of democracy, stability and glamour, just as France, Britain and Russia had each defended its client sect for a century before. But others are doubtful, fearing that America is interested only in securing its oil supply from the region and that a collapse of Bashar al-Asad’s Ba’thist regime in neighbouring Damascus will pull the lynchpin from Lebanon’s fragile confessional structure. The demographic pretence that Christians make up fifty per cent of Lebanon’s population continues, the derided Palestinians are allowed no civil status lest they as Muslims upset this balance and the arrangement prevails that the President must be a Maronite Christian and the Prime Minster a Sunni Muslim. The Shi’i Hezbollah (Party of God), supported by Iran and lionised for their role in Israel’s withdrawal from the South in 2000, control the southern suburbs of Beirut which remains effectively out of bounds to the Lebanese army. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are accused of receiving arms from the Damascus-based Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command. Lebanon’s President Lahoud, sitting in the lavish presidential palace in Beirut’s Baabda suburb, is Syria’s man and a reading of the Mehlis report suggested he had links with Hariri’s killers. A suspect, Mahmoud Adbel Al, had made a call to Lahoud’s mobile telephone minutes before the blast which killed Hariri. In August last year President Asad forced Hariri to drop his opposition to an unconstitutional extension of Lahoud’s term as president. “President Lahoud is me. Whatever I tell him, he follows suit. This extension is to happen or else I will break Lebanon over your head and Walid Jumblatt’s [the Druze political leader’s]”, Saad Hariri quotes his father as telling him. An early draft of the Mehlis report said that Asad’s brother Maher, together with Hassan Khalil and Rustum Ghazaleh - chiefs of Lebanese intelligence groups - plus the Lebanese head of security Jamil Sayyid, planned the assassination over several months, meeting in the house of Asad’s brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat. A witness said that Shawkat held a gun to a man's head and forced him to make a videotape claiming he was the suicide bomber to make it appear that an extremist group was behind the killing. Mehlis removed these names from the report, saying they were meant for the Security Council only. The report suggests that Hariri’s assassination was decided upon two weeks after the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1559 which ordered the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon and called for the disarmament of all militias. The Hezbollah wants to keep its arms while the Lebanese army may not and dare not enter the armed Palestinian camps, giving rise to Lebanese fears that Syria might use Palestinian factions to destabilise the country. Many Lebanese want the state to extend its control over the whole country now that the Syrians have left but a Hezbollah - PFLF-CG alliance formed on the basis of resistance to Israel would scotch any such hopes. For twenty years, since the start of the civil war, Beirut’s Downtown had been blackened ruins filled with refugees. I remember driving through the area in 1976 shortly after the ceasefire which Lebanese thought had ended the war. Chunks of blackened masonry dangled above us and rats scuttled through the black and empty streets. The first sign of life, where the electricity began on the edge, were the prostitutes revealing their bodies in the dim lights. Until a decade ago some of the streets still had mines and were no-go areas. Now this film-set groups of streets is pedestrianised, floodlit at night and heavily guarded by police who allow no vendors or vagrants. In February Hariri was blown up with 20 others in a massive bomb explosion beside the elegant sea-front St George Hotel and opposite Beirut’s favourite hotel, the Intercontinental Phoenicia. The building he was passing is still a tangled ruin, reminding one of a few of the civil war buildings such as the shell-riddled Holiday Inn on the old Green Line nearby which has remained as a reminder of what did happen and what many fear may happen again. The wealth-poverty gap has hugely widened, the weak central government includes former warlords and many of the elements that led to Lebanon’s self-destruction are active. Syria’s withdrawal has left a fragile Lebanese army in control of a country discreetly balkanised by sect. Hariri’s master-plan has left Lebanon with a national debt of $40,000 million. The new buildings are mostly window-dressing. Shops offer huge discounts and trade is very weak. Hariri’s death provoked massive, multi-ethnic street demonstrations and seas of Cedar of Lebanon flags in the Downtown open space that was once the Place des Martyrs with bustling souqs. But this atmosphere of solidarity was to be short-lived. Many hoped that the demonstrations would lead to a velvet revolution a la Ukraine, bringing reform, and solutions to severe social problems. They did, indeed, see the final pullout of the now hated Syrian army after a twenty-year occupation, but otherwise these hopes have now been dashed. Three months after Hariri’s death a prominent anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir was assassinated when his car blew up in the Christian neighbourhood of Ashrafieh. In his last editorial Kassir wrote, "The Baathist regime in Syria is behaving the way it behaved in Lebanon, making blunder after blunder ... under the Syrian leadership with (President) Bashar al-Asad at their head." On September 12th the Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Elias Murr was wounded in Naccashe. Later in the month May Chidiac, a beautiful and prominent Lebanese journalist who hosted a political talk show on the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation lost an arm and a leg when her Range Rover exploded near the Christian port city of Jounieh. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said that the bomb, like other recent explosions, was related to the investigation into Hariri’s death. Earlier in the day, Chidiac had hosted a morning political show in which she questioned her guest on the possible involvement of Syria in Hariri's assassination and discussed moves to isolate Syria and a possible regime change in Damascus. There have been many other bombings in Beirut all of which the Lebanese blame on Syria. The tomb of Hariri, a shrine inside a tent near Beirut’s Virgin Megastore, is surrounded by huge photographs of him alone, with his family and with his aged father in a red fez, big marble Qur’ans and panoramic photographs of the February demonstrations which filled the Place des Martyr area. A rawi chants suras from the Qur’an as the crowds come and go in silence. If Hariri was barely popular when alive – his company Solidère is accused of milking the country, destroying far more of classical Beirut than it rebuilt, leaving most property owners bereft, fobbing them off with meagre shares if they were lucky – few criticise him today. For most he is now a martyr and a symbol of a superficially vibrant, new-born nation and whose death saw the ousting of the Syrian army, which is why Syria so strongly protests its innocence. “How could his killing possibly benefit Syria ?”, Lebanon’s pleasant Syrian ambassador to London told a meeting at London’s Royal Institute for International Affairs. He noted that nobody blames America for 9/11, an argument that carries some weight in Lebanon where there are so many different interest groups manipulated by outside powers. The Syrians insist that the Mehlis report can merely assign ‘moral blame’ to Syria on the grounds that it controlled Lebanon at the time of the murder. But when asked what the US would do if Syria did not change its policies, President Bush said: "We're going to use our military. It is the last, very last option. No commander in chief likes to commit the military, and I don't. But on the other hand, you know, I have worked hard for diplomacy and I will continue to work the diplomatic angle on this issue." When I lived in the hills above Beirut in 1968 it was the Paris of the Middle East, out of reach of my student budget. When I returned as a publisher in 1976 its heart was destroyed but it was quiet. The Lebanese were touched that I had bothered to come – no other European publisher had, as far as I knew - and showered me with hospitality. Three years later I stayed with friends near the Damascus Road green line when our building was shaken by a bomb which killed Arafat’s favourite, Abu Hasan, who was married to Georgina Rizq, Lebanon’s Miss World. A fierce battle raged around us all night. To reach Ashrafiyeh’s still elegant restaurants the next day we had to drive over the famous ‘Death-Ring’ flyover, accelerating as we came out of the tunnel to avoid snipers’ bullets. On my return in the 90s the war was over and Lebanon’s problems seemed to be over, too. Nobody would even consider the horrors of another civil war but today, suddenly, everybody is very nervous again. An amnesty has meant that the most violent killers in the civil war are anonymous and free to walk the streets. The Phalange leader Samir Geagea, freed after 11 years in jail for the assassination of Rashid Karami, the Sunni leader in Tripoli, moved to Paris and has now returned to Lebanon where he has his eye on the presidency. Even those who hate him see no point in prosecuting him. “If you charge Geagea, you have to charge everyone in government”, I was told again and again. The day before the Mehlis report was published I dined in a bohemian apartment in Hamra owned by a young woman who commutes between Kensington and Beirut, designing luxurious interiors. “Don’t walk in the streets at night. It’s dangerous. You could be kidnapped.” I had walked everywhere by day and by night in apparent safety for days, from the miserable Palestinian Chatila refugee camp to the Ghobeiry suburbs controlled by Hezbollah. “Foreigners have not been kidnapped since the 1980’s”, I said. “No”, she replied, “but that may soon change”. In 1984 the CIA chief William Buckley was kidnapped and died under torture. In the following year Associated Press’s Terry Anderson was kidnapped. Two years later the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy Terry Waite disappeared while seeking the release of US hostages. John McCarthy of Worldwide Television was kidnapped on the road to Beirut airport in 1986 after President Reagan bombed Libya, killing Qadhafi’s adopted daughter. She discouraged me from taking the ‘service’ (mixed) taxi to Damascus in the wake of the ‘suicide’ of Syria’s interior minister and former Syrian eminence grise in Lebanon, Ghazi Kan’an, an event which most Lebanese link with Hariri’s murder. I took the service and spent three delightful days in Damascus, astonished to find nobody in either city challenging me for my country’s role in the war in Iraq, but she was not the only one to raise these fears. Everyone I met in Beirut hints at the danger of civil chaos in both Lebanon and Syria after Kan’an’s death which most blame on an internal power struggle in Damascus. Few believe that it was suicide. The post-war amnesty means that the man who sells you bread in Beirut may have been responsible for atrocities during the war. Unlike in South Africa, there has never even been a truth and reconciliation system to catharsise memories. Beirut is a curiously small city and almost every street reflects a different sect and a different group. From the five-star Gefinor Rotana Hotel in Hamra in central Beirut you only have to walk down to the Corniche to see posters and fluttering green banners of a smiling Shi’i Imam al Sadr who was killed in Libya in 1978, probably by Qadhafi. In Hamra Street you can buy Hezbollah mobile telephone cords from haberdasheries. In the Shi’i suburbs of Ghoberi, which the army does not dare enter, there are monster cardboard cut-outs of Khomeini. On the other side of town a twenty-minute walk across the Downtown area brings you past the Keta'ib (Phalangist) headquarters through the popular Bohemian area of Gemayza and up the beautiful Mar St Nicholas steps into Ashrafieh, the heartland of the Phalangists. Pictures of President Bashir Gemayel who was assassinated and whose Phalange militia were later responsible under Israeli supervision for the Sabra and Chatila massacre in 1982, are everywhere. I remembered, too, that in 1977 Gemayel’s men had ritually slaughtered fellow-Maronite Catholic Tony Franjieh with extraordinary cruelty, killing first his baby before his and his wife’s eyes, then killing his wife before his eyes, and then killing him. Tony’s crime? Oh, his father Suleiman had refused to accept the growing Phalangist relationship with Israel. I had not been to the wretched Palestinian refugee camp of Chatila, just half an hour’s walk from Beirut’s smartest buildings, for ten years. I toured the utterly bleak camp with a Lebanese woman who works with the Palestinian NGO Najda and an Iranian woman journalist who was attending a conference on music censorship in Beirut. The streets were filthy. “When it rains this becomes an open sewer”, she said. Even the children in the kindergarten were unable to smile. Posters of a beautiful girl suicide bomber with a bandana across her forehead plastered the walls of the street. There were also pictures in the camp of former Syrian President Hafez al-Asad, ubiquitous in Lebanon until the Syrian army withdrew, but now nowhere else to be seen. The only picture you do see now in Beirut is that of Hariri. Tangled electricity wires hang overhead, pirated because the government provides the camp with no facilities, treating the inmates as outcastes. Myriad water pipes crawled down the buildings, also pirated, giving each family limited access to water on certain days of the week. This is where hundreds were raped and slaughtered by Maronite Catholic Phalange militiamen with Israeli backup in 1982. “Nothing has changed”, she said, “they have no hope and they are terrified that it will happen again”. They carry refugee documents. Most jobs are forbidden to them in Lebanon, they have no right to facilities, and there is no legal telephone in the camp. They still call ‘Home’ Palestine, mostly Galilee in northern Israel from where their families fled during the 1948 war, but they know that they will never be able to return. "Where are you from?" I asked a child. “Acre”, she replied. Others said Haifa or Nazareth. On the wall was written in baby letters, ‘I want to be a detective in Palestine when I grown up’. Later in the day I was told that a notorious Christian militia called the Guardians of the Cedar had distributed a leaflet calling on Christians to kill Palestinians. Some hours later I was back in East Beirut’s Christian quarter of Ashrafieh in a huge Florentine palazzo. The elegant Syrian Orthodox lady who owned it showed me Renaissance paintings and guided me through drawing-rooms divided by a series of fifteen-foot high arches. The floors and stair case were all made of white Carrara marble. “You see, the Palestinians don’t belong here”, she said. “They are different. They are not Lebanese. They should go away”. “But where can they go ?” I asked. “They are peasants from towns in Israel. They shouldn’t be here. They are the source of all our troubles; they are entirely responsible for our civil war. I don’t know where they should go, but they should go”. Her voice reflected the view of many in Lebanon. Despite the appalling sectarian violence of the civil war, she would not criticise the Hezbollah or any other faction or sect because they are Lebanese and nobody wants to shake the fragile balance which prevails, but everyone is deeply suspicious. “The war was better was for us”, said one academic, “because you knew who your enemy was while he was shooting at you. Today you have no idea who hates you.” Old enemies freely walk the streets. Geagea even hopes to make a come-back as president. In 1985 Geagea had launched disastrous military campaigns against the Druze in the Chouf Mountains and against Muslims and Palestinians near Sidon, ironically leading to the expulsion of Christians from the region. “Where Samir Geagea sets foot”, said the pathetic Christian refugees, “no Christian remains.” It was Geagea who had led the Phalange militiamen who slaughtered Franjeih and his family in the mountain summer village of Ehden in 1978. But even those who hate Geagea say that to convict him would mean convicting many in power who have so much blood on their hands. A bleak film called Massacre made by the Shi’i filmmaker Lukman Slim and his German wife Monica was recently shown during a “Civil War and War Memories” symposium in Hamra. Sixty hours of footage has been reduced to ninety minutes showing six men in shadows, sweating in darkened rooms, with windows closed in the summer heat, as they tell the camera how they disembowelled women and crushed children to death. Many people left the theatre after a few minutes. “It’s terrible”, said the girl in Chatila. “Oh, it’s a good film but I don't want to see it again.” The men show no remorse. We watched the film in the Slim’s elegant house in Ghobeiri, Beirut’s Hezbollah stronghold. To many Beirutis the flagrant wealth of new Beirut is a sham but others say the country will be rescued by the investments of millions of émigrés in the US and South America. There are said to be eleven million in Brazil alone. The result of the prevailing fear is that everyone lives frenetically for the present as Ramsay Short’s Hedonist’s Guide to Beirut demonstrates. Heavy Metal, Rap and Hip-Hop music roar from clubs like Nova although there was a recent scandal when the daughter of a general died of an overdose and the musicians were accused, absurdly, of ritual Satanism. An act of very bad taste, the legendary BO18 club, designed by the avant-garde architect Bernard Khoury, is built on the site of the 1976 massacre by Christians of the Palestinians in the Karantina refugee camp. Tables are shaped like tombs. The music is hard techno and tribal house and the girls wear little more than heels and miniskirts. The mirrored roof opens up to reveal a star-spangled sky. With warnings reflecting the new paranoia of possible kidnappings I was astonished that nobody berated me for being British. Even in Damascus I was treated with extreme curtsey. If I tried to discuss Kan’an’s death people clamped up, for Syria remains a police state in which the mukhabarat listen to every word. However, in the immense and beautiful old town of arcades and overhanging, pole-beamed houses people offered me tamar hindi (a fig drink good for the stomach) and baklava and other sweets as the Ramadan fasting day ended. I was invited in the narrow alleys of Bab Tuma to a beautiful courtyard house of eight families to share their Iftar dinner. The children brought me their English homework and kissed me three times on the cheek, the traditional greeting. Suddenly, my host, who earned a living etching Qur’anic suras in stone, said, “I know the answer to Kan’an’s death. He is not dead. He is still alive in his villa. How could they kill the interior minister? He is the strongest man in the country. It’s all been done to save face.” Like Beirut conspiracy theories abound in Damascus. Damascus lives sadly in an impoverished and lonely time-warp. Even in downtown Salhieh Street, brightly lit in a feeble attempt to copy Beirut, the clothing is all in the style of the 1940’s. Pictures of the Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah with Asad are ubiquitous as are Hezbollah key-rings and other trinkets. Lebanon believes that breakdown in Syria will devastate Lebanon and the Lebanese do not want to antagonise their neighbour, with whom they share many things, including family ties. “It is dangerous to provoke a wounded tiger”, said my architect friend. “The Syrians never forget a humiliation”. Most surprising of all is the absence of comment on the war in Iraq. Indeed the absence of chastisement for my country’s active role in this beastly war. A liberal Shi’i film-maker said, “Don’t be fooled into thinking that everyone hates the Americans for trying to impose democracy and good governance on this region. The Americans may be selfish and clumsy but what we really detest is our own corrupt and cruel regimes. We want to move forward.” In a letter written to Congresswoman Sue Kelly on October 5th Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to the US, outlined Syria’s unreciprocated attempts to please America, in particular by stemming the movement of insurgents across the Syrian-Iraqi border, America’s main concern. He claimed that Syrian border troops have increased from a few hundred to 10,000 over the past year. In Samir Kassir’s last article in al Nahar newspaper before he was murdered he says that despite the anti-American rhetoric in the streets Syria is prepared to give America anything it wants providing the regime is protected. This was obvious to reporters in Damascus during the days after the publication of the Mehlis report when hand-picked demonstrators shouting ‘Death to America’ suddenly assured the reporters that they actually loved America. Washington and London are seeking to force through a resolution against Syria at the UN Security Council. Patrick Seale, who has written important books on Syria, writes in Beirut’s Daily Star, “The idea has taken root in some circles in Washington that there can be no victory in Iraq until Syria and Iran—seen as providing a ‘rear base’ for the insurgency—are brought to heel. As Washington seems reluctant to launch a military attack against Iran, a hard nut to crack, an alternative course is regime change in Syria. The neocons argue that a pro-American government in Damascus would result in the isolation, encirclement and neutralization of Iran.” Many Lebanese, however, are convinced that this strategy would be disastrous for the entire region. © Trevor Mostyn 2007 - www.trevormostyn.com