Lebanon by Sandra Mackey

Author:Sandra Mackey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Syrian Troops Occupy Beirut

Wall Street Journal

November 16, 1976

Pax Hebraica in Lebanon?

World Press Review

August 1982

U.S. Marines Digging in for a Long Stay?

U.S. News and World Report

October 11, 1982

EIGHT

THE FOREIGN POWERS

The warm sun of April 1977 once more radiates the blue of the Mediterranean and casts its brilliance on the pine-studded bluff of Ras Beirut. Water-skiers again skim across one another’s wakes in the placid waters off St. Georges Bay. All is seductively quiet as Lebanon approaches the second anniversary of the bloody Sunday in 1975 at Ain al Rummaneh. Along the Rue Hamra, the ever-effervescent Nabil stands in the doorway of his coffee bean and nut shop shouting to the passersby, “Come, my friend, I give you a good price!” Money changers are back on street corners turning dollars, francs, riyals, and dinars into Lebanese pounds with rapid-fire motion. The only clue to Lebanon’s recent past is the small “No Parking” sign riddled with the perfect circles created when automatic-rifle fire pierces thin metal. Just as Ras Beirut was once a facade of illusion masking Lebanon’s fractured society, so is it now a facade of normalcy that hides a scarred and violated Beirut.

The traffic jams are gone and there is little activity on the streets beyond an occasional proprietor picking glass shards from a broken office window. The durable old Normandy Hotel is but a ruin. Up the hill from the waterfront, an abandoned tank lists on a pile of rubble under the canopy of the drive-in registration facility at the Holiday Inn. And the bare salutatory flagpoles stand silhouetted against the charred walls of a hotel caught in war.

Across the street a dirty, faded poster of the late Gamal Abdel Nasser, waving to a massive crowd and smiling his magnetic smile, clings to a crumbling wall. Around every corner is some stark symbol of Lebanon’s destructive will. None is more telling than the shell of the Gothic-style Anglican church. Two walls gone, its roof open to the sky, the ruin emits a pathos that extends beyond damage or destruction—it speaks of desertion.

Yet daily life moves on. Throughout Lebanon the singular sign of the compulsion to survive is freshly washed laundry drying in the Levantine sun. In Damour, a family’s wash hangs in the open on what two years earlier was the second story of their house, now reduced to a mound of cement and twisted reinforcing rods. In Sidon, four multicolored garments wave through the broken door frame of a roofless house smeared with political slogans. Near Beirut Airport, outside the hovel of a Shiite refugee from the south, a gaunt woman beats the dust from a thin mattress hung over a makeshift fence. The Lebanese have survived the first phase of the war, but at a terrible cost. Out of a population of three million, ten thousand people are dead and another half-million are homeless. The massive physical destruction amounts to an estimated $1 billion. Other damage cannot be quantified. The conditions of war have left Lebanon stripped of its cultural life, and the violence has defiled its humanity.

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