Mirror of the Arab World by Sandra Mackey

Author:Sandra Mackey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

AS AN UNEASY peace settled over Lebanon, revenge stalked the streets. Sunni politicians hid acts of vengeance under their urban façade. The Druze extracted retribution from a range of old and new enemies. Shia militiamen from Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” roamed the Christian areas, abducting Christians to exchange for Shia Muslims held by the defeated Aoun. On October 21, a purely political vendetta was delivered on Dany Chamoun, the son of Camille. Gunmen posing as army soldiers burst into Chamoun’s fifth-floor Beirut apartment at 7:10 a.m. to riddle him with bullets. Replaying the vengeance once wreaked on Tony Franjieh, the son of another Maronite chieftain, the unknown assailants also turned their silencer-equipped machine guns on Chamoun’s wife and their two sons—Tarek, five, and Jerome, seven. Only eleven-month-old Tamara survived. The question that remained was, Did Dany Chamoun die at the hands of Syria because he had stood with Michel Aoun? Or was he just another victim of the Lebanese’ own tribal vendettas? Prime Minister Selim Hoss, surveying the carnage, issued his own verdict: “[This is] a brutal crime committed by an enemy with evil intentions against the march of reconciliation and legitimacy.”*

Despite the lingering aftershocks of war, battle-scarred Lebanon began to resurrect. Bulldozers clattered into central Beirut’s streets, where ghostly superstructures of once-elegant apartment houses gave silent testimony to the violence. Blackened signs over deserted storefronts marked long-gone coffee shops, flower venders, and booksellers. Martyrs’ Square, once the proud symbol of Lebanon, was piled high with debris from a hundred battles. At its center, the statue of the martyrs, whose flaming torch had beckoned those from the sea into the harbor of Beirut, was riddled with bullets. It was in the shadow of these ruins that bulldozers, grinding out noise and belching black smoke, began to push away the barricades that divided east and west Beirut. The bulwarks between the Lebanese people would not be so easily removed.

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