The View From the Inner Edge of the Sideline... (written 7 August 2006)
by Bojan Preradovic
I’m lying in bed and flicking through my phone, which has been rendered useless just yesterday by the destruction of various repeaters and reception towers across Lebanon, courtesy of Israeli jets. The objects of my diligent examination are sound clips, recorded over the last three or four months. I listen to them with a colossal lump in my chest, pausing after each one to scrutinize the date they were recorded. One is a brief segment of me goofing around with a friend, while the commentary of the recent Italy vs. Germany World Cup football game echoes in the background. It’s dated 4 July 2006. Just eight days before that day. Another is one of my musical reminder clips – a song idea that I hastily put down on my phone so I don’t forget – dated 26 June 2006. It was a simpler time – I think to myself – a time when what Lebanon is presently enduring did not even occur to anyone here as vaguely imaginable. It simply did not occur to anyone at all.
And how could it have? Lebanon was in the throes of a summer season, hosting a record number of tourists in the first half of 2006, some 631,000 people – I read some days ago in the local English-language Daily Star – and finally recovering from the traumatic events of last year’s political assassinations and the ensuing turmoil. The previous year was also a time when the Lebanese took to the streets and shouted, at the top of their lungs: “Syria Out!”, while the Western demagogues voiced their unconditional support for what George W. Bush termed “Lebanon’s fledgling democracy”.
Fast forward to 24 July 2006. The State of Israel has been pounding Lebanon for the last thirteen days, virtually annihilating the country’s infrastructure, reducing roads, bridges, power plants, lighthouses, entire residential neighbourhoods - even milk and packaging factories - to rubble. Lebanon has also been under air and sea blockade since the beginning of this terrible campaign. The foreigners have been air and sea lifted out of the country, while the insinuators, here in Lebanon, and Western advocates of the fabulous “Cedar Revolution”, respectively, have either fled the country like the cowards that they are, along with what Robert Fisk accurately and sarcastically termed “our precious foreigners” in his Farewell to Beirut piece two days ago; or stand firmly with Israel, refusing to call for a ceasefire just yet. Those remaining are locals who have nowhere else to go, or foreigners such as myself, who likewise, have nowhere better to go, since the road to Syria owes its extremely perilous nature to the constant risk of Israeli missile fire.
Fast forward once again to 7 August. I had deserted the notion of writing this piece for a period of two weeks, I suppose simply because I was crippled by fear. I was also reluctant to continue writing this because my original intention to deride the Lebanese masses and their idiotic political elite had withered away. I was going to hold the latter responsible for the fact that they manipulated people’s emotions and pitched the bait, while the former bit like a hungry imbecile. Granted, the Lebanese had had enough of the 29-year corrupt and derelict Syrian presence in their country. But one thing was undeniably true: if one kept clear of politics and minded their own business, they could live in peace and security.
I remember a time when you could walk down Hamra in the central district of Ras Beirut in the middle of the night, without ever facing the prospect of either being mugged, or facing any physical danger to your person. But the Lebanese have not learnt their lesson – even after all the pain and suffering that they had endured during the 17-year civil war – that this place is too weak and fragmented, in every sense, and cannot exist without a foreign hand meddling in its affairs. Israel, unlike Syria, has no regard for subtleties. The Jewish state is ruthless and uncompromising in its obliteration of Lebanon and mass murder of its civilians, and makes no secret of its intention to provoke yet another civil war, so that Lebanese society can fight Israel’s archenemy Hezbollah instead of the Israelis themselves. At the same time, confessional groups such as Lebanon’s Christians, traditionally considered Israel’s aficionados, have been quick to fall into this trap: at best, they stand idly by claiming that this conflict is not theirs, as the Lebanese government in its entirety has done so until very recently; or worse yet, they cynically bark out lines like “This is good… Israel will finally get rid of Hezbollah.” Ultimately, the primary victims of this incongruous war have been Lebanon’s poor – the Shi’a Muslims – a group which has been at the bottom of the economic and social ladder for decades, of which the exploitation by the rest of Lebanese society and resulting poverty serve as central reasons for their support of Hezbollah.
A lot of things have happened since 24 July. Israel has devastated Lebanon and destroyed virtually its entire civilian infrastructure. The loss of life in Lebanon has been staggering: the recent massacre of about 37 children in Qana is evidence of the fact – while the total death toll is now bordering on 1000 people, most of them civilians. The closest that I have come to this war however was last Friday, 4 August. The Israelis had, in an early-morning air raid, bombed the Ghazir bridge, which is only a five-minute drive away from my house, apparently out of frustration rather than any tactical objective. They had also at the same time bombed another bridge further north, just before the town of Jbeil, and another one on the way to the northern city of Tripoli. The significance of this event is that it marked Israel’s first major attack on Lebanon’s Christian heartland in the Mount Lebanon region, whose inhabitants are considered Israel’s traditional allies, since its disastrous 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon and Beirut. This attack was rendered even more senseless by the fact that a sea route runs parallel to the highway and the bridges that were bombed, while the sea route itself was not bombed. The only thing that it managed to accomplish was to severely impair the ability of humanitarian convoys to supply the refugees of this war with sorely needed medical and other supplies. Needless to say, being awoken at 6:45 a.m. by the sounds of a diving jet and an explosion which shook buildings in a ten-kilometre radius and shattered glass, covered in sweat with your heart pounding so hard you can feel it in your throat, is a somewhat life-altering experience.
I had made my weekly trip to Hamra in central Beirut today. It is an area which lies only about three kilometres away from the devastated southern Beirut suburbs of Haret Hreik and Dahye, and houses the lovely campus of the American University of Beirut, where I am working on my Master’s degree in Political Studies. These trips are becoming increasingly few and far in between, because of the severe fuel shortages. In fact, if the crisis is not resolved by the end of this week, the smallest semblance of normal life retained by areas of Lebanon which have not yet been bombed into the Stone Age by Israel, will cease to exist, and as the Israelis have said, “Lebanon will have its lights turned out”, quite literally.
Instead of walking straight to university to pass by AUB’s Department of Political Studies and Public Administration, which I serve as research assistant to two professors, I decide to walk up from Bliss Street up the road into the heart of Hamra, and towards the palace of Lebanon’s assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. On the way up, I stop by a bookshop which was having a hasty and, according to the utter deficit of customers in the shop, unsuccessful clearout sale; and treat myself to a Calvin and Hobbes comic book. Satisfied with my purchase, I head up the road to Hamra Street. The most prominent features of the neighbourhood on this beautiful sunny morning are the massive lines in front of each one of Hamra’s petrol stations, most of the time occupying the entire street and creating an enormous gridlock. As I stroll up a narrow street, I come within reach of a crossroad where cars are almost glued to each other in the traffic jam. As I approach a small gap between two cars and head into it to cross the street, an older veiled woman decides to walk through the same gap and stops when she sees me heading for it. I smile and politely move back to make space for her to pass. As she moves past me, I see her smiling back – her face is bright and kind; her eyes are lively and full of grace.
And that’s when I realise that I indeed truly and deeply love these people and this country. I love their passionate nature and their almost literal genetically imbued intransigence, and their hedonistic adoration of life’s offerings. They are resilient, intelligent and well-educated. I resume my walk with a deeply romantic notion of the country and its people.
As I walk back to Bliss Street, I come across a young man sitting in a plastic chair on a curb, adjacent to the expensive and trendy apartment building which houses the residence of Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora which is usually heavily guarded by the Internal Security Forces. He stares emptily at the tarmac, smoking a cigarette. Still fixated on my amorous conception of Lebanon, I disregard the disarray with which this young man surveys the street in front of him. I finally stop by AUB. There, I run into one of the professors that I work for as research assistant. He is an American, a brilliant, extremely funny and deeply cynical Harvard alumnus, who has decided not to evacuate because, like my family and I, he reckons that it is safer to sit in the relative safety of your home than travel a long and uncomfortable journey with, as he says, “panicking nutcases”. He tells me of a foreign national who attended a demonstration in Downtown Beirut, and wore a T-shirt with a caption in the front which read “Yes, I am still here,” and “No, I am not leaving!” on the back, a reference to the persistent, surprised and somewhat accusatory manner in which the Lebanese currently pose the question “You are still here?” to foreigners who have not fled. We joke and talk about the current situation, the potential hopelessness of it all, and the corruption and ineffectiveness of the Lebanese government and its local proxies. Half way into our discussion however, he informs me that whatever happens in the future, he will leave the country as soon as he can – the Lebanese never learn, he says, they don’t change their ways, and frankly, he does not see concrete hope for them. My dreamy idea of Lebanon and the Lebanese is not shattered at this point, but the face of the young man in front of Premier Siniora’s residence is flashing before my eyes. Perhaps he sees what I see – he knows just how exceptional his people are, but he also knows how naïve, reckless and ill-advised their actions and thoughts can be on occasion. Perhaps it is this reality which paralyses him, and produces the barren stare with which he hugs the concrete face of his homeland. These questions haunt me during the drive back to my Mount Lebanon hideout, or ‘Maronistan’, as we lovingly refer to the Maronite Christian stronghold that was absurdly pounded by Israel just days ago, like the rest of this tragic country.
All wars must come to an end, as this war surely will, sooner or later. Beside the fact that it will take Lebanon another 20 years or so to get back on its feet once again, I fearfully anticipate the aftershocks of this horrifying conflict. This is an extremely complex place, and after all my years in this country, I feel that I am in a better position than most to accurately interpret the inner, and to a significant extent, outer mechanisms that shape it. But watching Prime Minister Siniora break down and weep in front of the Arab League delegates today in Beirut, while later in the day the most positive news in weeks have emerged, informing of the Lebanese government’s offer to deploy 15,000 national army soldiers in southern Lebanon in concurrence with Hezbollah representatives within the cabinet, I can only offer vague guesses as to where this monumentally ill-fated state will go next.
