But look closer, and the graceful arches and elegant walls of pale stone are too smooth and clean, unmarked by years of tramping feet, by the caress of wind and rain, or by the sparks of children throwing handfuls of Chinese firecrackers. Or, let’s be frank, by bullet holes, which elsewhere in Beyrouth are so ubiquitous that at the end of a day of tramping about you can no longer tell the difference between rust damage to a garage door and the trail of sniper fire or RPG. The cobbles are unnaturally even and regular. Downtown, the dream rings hollow.
For this picture of the good life was not always so, and has been carefully if recklessly constructed, like the stories which shape the lives led around the walls. Before the civil war (or, rather, wars), this area was a mixture of Ottoman architecture, of unremarked Roman remains, of new and old – unkempt perhaps, but also a thriving, variegated residential borough, undeserving of the violent battering and gutting it received. The Green Line that ran North-East from Martyr’s Square between East and West Beyrouth – today Avenue Damas, the road to Damascus – was so named because of the extravagant weeds and eventually trees that sprouted up from the cracks in the road that no-one dared cross or tend to. Downtown (like much elsewhere) was left in ruins, and plenty has been written of the tragicomic swings and roundabouts of power, of the multiplicitous militias, of the bodies stacked in alleyways, of blood and rape and betrayal and despair.La ghalib, la maghlub. No victor, no vanquished. This is how many Lebanese and their various leaders have chosen to characterise the fifteen years of the ‘wars of others’ and their exhausted, uncertain conclusion. A clean slate, amnesty for all (unless you got on the wrong side of Syria), no need to commemorate, to mourn, to seek answers or to ask for justice. Thousands of missing and abducted declared dead with a sweep of the presidential pen. What happened during the wars – the ‘events’ – and what came before barely feature in the national discourse, and the reconstruction of Downtown is a perfect expression of this attitude. Shi’ite construction entrepreneur turned fabulously rich and powerful politician Rafiq al-Hariri’s vision did not stretch to the preservation or restoration of history. You would never guess that there had been a war here, or that people once strung washing from the balconies now adorned with unnaturally uniform wooden shutters. He saw a business opportunity and, through his company Solidere, residents and owners of property throughout the area were forced to accept shares in lieu of payment for their homes, which were then bulldozed, regardless of their state of collapse or otherwise. The Roman remains – those that were left by the time the extravagant looting and illegal antiquities trade that sustained many during the war years had finished with them – suffered similar fates, ineffectual archaeologists and historians wringing their hands from the wrong side of the Solidere barriers.
And so Downtown was rebuilt in the Hariri image, the image of the new Lebanon. Clean lines and smooth edges where guns once roared and snapped, and where raw sewage once ran down the streets. Cafés and banks and a park, and a towering, expansive sky-blue and golden mosque dominating Martyr’s Square, dwarfing and obscuring the Orthodox cathedral next door. Hariri’s political alliance, the aptly named Future Movement, had no time for the humiliating and depressing war years. And so Lebanon, hedonistic Lebanon, plays out its role in the Disneyland light of Hariri’s dream. No questions asked.
People had barely bothered to ask for answers about the civil war and its massacres. The Israeli Kahan investigation into Sabra and Chatila was derisory – according to Noam Chomsky, “not intended to be taken seriously by any sensible person”. Other camp massacres and checkpoint murders not directly attributable to Israel have not even been granted this attention. Their names go largely un-commemorated, except in the history books – Black Saturday, Karantina, Damour, Tel al-Zaatar. Their perpetrators are largely still in government or other positions of power – questions are too risky. The Palestinian camps grind on, still denied citizenship after more than fifty years, living out their nakba on the same ground as before the war. A nightclub called BO18 is on the site of one massacre, with chairs shaped like coffins.
And yet, in the lofty corridors of The Hague, there now exists something called the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Its legality, usefulness, remit and prospects are all disputed, yet still it exists, with the sole purpose of identifying and punishing the perpetrators of one political assassination among hundreds of others, of one death among hundreds of thousands. Downtown, the mosque, the voluminous tent covering the beflowered tomb at its flank – these also stand as memorials to Hariri, as does the historic withdrawal of Syria, only fifteen years after the UN and the Arab League initially ordered it to go.
One borough over, into Achrafiyeh in still mainly Christian East Beyrouth, bullet holes are thickly scattered across the walls and metal door of a nursing hospital which lies in ruins, opposite glossily reconstructed Parisian-style apartment blocks whose balconies groan with luscious plant life, and whose guarded lobbies are gilded and glass-smooth. Every building’s wall bears the neatly spray-painted Phalangist cross, at the height of a head or a heart. The message is unambiguous: stay away, get out, this is ours. Fifteen years of fighting, an enormous death toll in a tiny country, and the city still constantly marks out its territory – it has not learned to live with itself. No one explains, no one apologises. No one has ever said, “We are sorry”, from one people to another or from a country to its citizens. No one has managed to extract a single narrative of the wars from the hundreds that trail carelessly across books and lives and local legends.
Perhaps instead you build a shiny new Centre Ville and mourn a man who put the country into forty billion dollars of debt.
Does it matter? The forgetting – perhaps not in and of itself. Every family in Lebanon lost someone in the civil war. There is no need to remind people of what war cost them personally. Candlelit vigils or the laying of wreaths or a national day of mourning will not make the photographs carried by mothers, by wives and by children, come back to life. But they never have, and have never been supposed to. A nation mourns – well, for many reasons. But chief among them because it is able to, because a chapter has closed, because the tears can flow without setting another torrent of violence in motion. Years after, when the tears have long dried, a nation reminds itself of its past – yes, sometimes to justify new violence, but also sometimes to prevent it. Lebanon is many things, but it is not at peace with itself and its past, which is also its everyday present. The different peoples of its many different areas cannot gather together to forgive and forget.
Far from the headlines, these are the tiny echoes of tension that creep in to the day-to-day. Without yet setting foot in West Beyrouth or a Palestinian camp (though with every intention of doing so), the picture of an edgy, enclaved society is subtly, incrementally crystallising. The triggers are there, unremembered, unremarked, unresolved. Tread carefully.
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