Paradise Lost: elegy for Beirut

[Humsafar]

Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's elegy for Beirut

Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet again, Robert Fisk, a resident for 30 years, asks: how much more punishment can it take?

Published: 19 July 2006

In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.

That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive. Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine' the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.

An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads..."

How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.

I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.

I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.

The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.

At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the faade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.

Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"

And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rub-ble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man' and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics' and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or..." And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."

I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

As for the huddled masses southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.

Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.

And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.

The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:

My people died of hunger, and he who

Did not perish from starvation was

Butchered with the sword'

They perished from hunger

In a land rich with milk and honey.

They died because the vipers and

Sons of vipers spat out poison into

The space where the Holy Cedars and

The roses and the jasmine breathe

Their fragrance.

And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft - perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.

I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.

And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.

And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.

Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.

I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".

Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.

Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.

I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.

Then, on my balcony - a glance to checkthe location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city. "Beyrouth" was the dateline. "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."

On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to sea.

Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:

To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart

And kisses - to the sea and clouds,

To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.

From the soul of her people she makes wine,

From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.

So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?

'Disgracefully, we evacuate our precious foreigners and just leave the Lebanese to their fate'

[anajmi]

Very nice article. It brings tears to my eyes to see how the terrorist nations of Israel and America are destroying weak and defenseless nations while the rest of the world watches.

Listen to some of the neo-con bastards and you will feel like hitting a hammer on your head.

Fortunately, history and God are on the side of the oppressed. But, this is just the beginning, a lot more is yet to come.

[seeker110]

It challenges my manhood,not to be able to help those innocent children.What a shame for all the able bodied muslims.

Sure I love Allah,But not at the moment.I wish I wasnt around to witness all this.

[Average Bohra]

Frankly this is not about shame of able bodied muslims but for the rest of humanity; able bodied Muslims are guilty of the same crimes. Such simplistic thinking trivializes the suffering of the Lebanese people.

I feel helpless watching this destruction of Lebanon and my anger is directed toward Israel, Syria and Iran and all those that are silent including the US. The first three are guilty of using Lebanon as a staging ground for their own self-interest. As I watched Kofi Annan make his speech to the Security Council it reaffirmed the fact that the UN is an irrelevant, impotent and corrupt bureaucracy.

It is my sincere hope that Lebanon is able to secure its borders and not allow the Hizbollah or other foreign elements once and for all once this over. The people and their land deserve to live in peace.

[accountability]

It is not syria and iran, who are invading lebanon. It is israel, who is bombing lebanese infrastructure, who is killing civilian. Please read this bbc article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5200628.stm

How israel is targetting only muslim villages and towns, leaving christian ones in tact.

OK syria and iran are main culprits, why is not israel bombing them.

this is in response to two kidnapped soldiers, how many people have israel kidnapped in past.

[anajmi]

accountability,

The neo-con bastards are just doing the ground work which is going to lead to an eventual bombing of Syria and Iran. The kidnapping of the Israeli soldier was a false flag operation just like 9-11.

People deserve to live in their land with peace and Israel needs to be kicked out of the land that it has occupied and America needs to be kicked out of the land that it has occupied. Both, the criminal and it's biggest accomplice need to be punished for their crimes against humanity.

[anajmi]

The UN will remain an incompetent organization as long as the most powerful nations in the UN are also the most tyrannical nations on earth.

[Average Bohra]

How israel is targetting only muslim villages and towns, leaving christian ones in tact.

Christians do not want the Syrian and Iranian fighters there; the Muslims do. Not that this justifies the atrocity comitted by Israel but this simplistic thinking aggravates the plight of the Lebanese; both Christian & Muslim.

[anajmi]

If Israel hadn't been committing these crimes against the muslims they wouldn't have wanted the Syrian and Iranian fighters!! By the way, the Syrian and Iranian fighters bull shit is nothing but neo-con propaganda. The neo-con bastards have been claiming that Syrians have been fighting in Iraq for years without a single Syrian passport to show for it!!

[Humsafar]

http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/

[Humsafar]

The UN may be corrupt but irrelevant and impotent it is not. It is the permamnent members of the security council with their immoral veto powers - especially the US, who has vetoed almost every resolution against Israel - that make it irrelevant and incompetent.

An why should Lebanon not allow the Hizbollah to exist? Remember that it was spawned by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, just as Hamas was owing to Israeli intransignece. (All extremist groups - from Hizbollah to Hamas to Islamic Jihad to Taliban to Al Qaida, etc. - have directly or indirectly come into being as a result of US/Israeli aggression and obstinate refusal to negotiate.)

Hizbollah is a legitimate part of the Lebanese society and politics, and it has every right to exist. Yes, Iran and Syria support Hizbollah, but so does US Israel - with money and arms worth billions of dollars. Why no finger is pointed at the US culpability. The US support to Israel is legitimate but Iran/Syria support to Hizbollah is not. Can anyone detect a double standard here?

If foreign elements are to be removed from Lebanon then let's have them removed from Israel as well, then we shall see how the Jewish state survives for a single day.

[humane]

Anajmi,

What about the innocent people killed in Bombay bomb blasts by hardcore people like you.

[seeker110]

I thought they knew within minutes of the blast who did it.Couldnt it be Tamils and a lot of disgruntled minorities.Arent there many of those.Or its easy to point fingers,so they dont have to solve the crime.

Lets wait and see what the investigation produces,before reaching for conclusions.It might lead to places you dont want to visit.

[anajmi]

Humsafar,

The UN is incometent, irrelevant and corrupt. As you rightly said

It is the permamnent members of the security council with their immoral veto powers - especially the US, who has vetoed almost every resolution against Israel - that make it irrelevant and incompetent.

If the UN had been a profit making organization, the top management would've been fired after the third veto. But here we have an organization that introduces resolution after resolution and has been doing so for the last 50 years, knowing that the result is not going to be any different than the previous. It is time for a change.

[Average Bohra]

Originally posted by Humsafar:
The UN may be corrupt but irrelevant and impotent it is not. .

Originally posted by Humsafar: that make it irrelevant and incompetent. .

Isn’t that what I just said ?

Originally posted by Humsafar:
All extremist groups - from Hizbollah to Hamas to Islamic Jihad to Taliban to Al Qaida, etc. - have directly or indirectly come into being as a result of US/Israeli aggression and obstinate refusal to negotiate.

It is naivete on your part to think that these organizations will simply fade into obscurity if the Palestinian problem is ever solved or any US/Israeli aggression . The situation will simply get worse as Islam may finally have to deal with the very problems that these organizations were created for; discord within Islam.

Don't fool yourself for a minute thinking that that the Muslim on Muslim violence in Pakistan, bombings in India, Kashmir, the tribal warfare in Sudan et al will simply go away. The Taliban after all was formed when the US was helping them fight the Russians, what happened next ? The brunt of the Al Qaida attacks in Iraq are directed toward the Shiah and vice versa.

[Humsafar]

Please stop nitpicking. What I said is clear: that the UN is hamstrung by the veto powers. Of and by itself, it is neither irrelevant nor incompetent.

As to your other point, "these organisations will not fade into obscurity" - well, who said that they will. And is that the issue here? Even if it were, what do you propose is to be done with them, smash them and the people who support them into oblivion - just what Israel is now doing in Lebanon? (First invade a country and a create a resistance group, then invade it again to eliminate that group which may create another resistance group, and so on ad infinitum… you see the logic here.)

These organisations may not disappear after the Palestinian problem is solved, but they would certainly lose their legitimacy and popular support. But let's not worry about that now, let's solve the Palestinian problem first then speculate about the future of the organisations hatched by the US/Israeli aggression and obstinacy. Again, by the same token, Israel (and Pakistan) - the illegitimate creations of colonial politics - will not disappear on their own. What do you propose to do about them?

[feelgud]

Who bombed the Lebanese? After all, it was you and me

http://www.reason.com/links/links072506.shtml

[tahir]

Another yiddish spin. The author displays the same unsophisticated thinking he is blaming the 'common' people for. He conveniently dug into the root of Israel's aggression but didn't care to delve into the bedrock of all problems - the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

[Humsafar]

Smoke signals from the battle .... a warning to Israel

[Final Destination]

Its true that the world is silent and quite helpless. But remember God is watching all this. I think its a lesson to learn from this that Islam truly is the best religion only and only if its followed whole heartedly. Then in that case even angels will come to protect everyone.
Someone has to pay for the sins in this world. No one can get away.
The Muslim and Arab World should realise this and unite. Inspite that everyone knows they are helpless only because they have themselves invited troubles. And ofcourse the Jews are the biggest butchers!!
As far as I know for them to kill anyone within Jews is a Sin but to kill anyone outside Jew is good deed.
We can only sit and type!! We have to change ourselves. We have to spread humanitarian. Institutions should focus on brotherhood. The world should promote the meaning of the world Tolerance.
Giving aid only is no solution.

[professor]

Let's go back to 1400 years old Medina. At that time Islam was powerful and jews were helpless and therefore they were also slaughtred. Prophet was wrongly advised to do that. While they could have easily been allowed to migrate. Some were allowed while some were butchered.

Now jews are powerful and muslims are helpless. And so they are butchered.

That's what I believe , those who are at the helm of the affairs must, to the best of their ability, restrain from using violence.

This is a chain which goes on. Tomorrow muslims will be powerful and then they will take revenge for what jews are doing now.

Leaders should never resort to violence, they gain for time being and others, who have nothing to do with what happened in the past, have to pay the price.

Lamhon ki khata, Sadion ki sazaa.

[anajmi]

professor,

The jews that were slaughtered were the ones that betrayed the prophet because of which the prophet had to suffer heavy losses. They made a covenant with the prophet and then broke it. The punishment meted out to the jews was the one that their own law at that time recommended for betrayal. Get your facts straight.

That is the quality of the jews that educated muslims like you have so come to admire.

Muslims are in trouble because of "muslims" like you. Today these "muslims" have deserted the people of lebanon and palestine during their most testing times.

[professor]

I didn't at all mention that the jews didn't betray. They did . They should have been punished. But there cuold have been many other options where killing should have been the last.

And who should have been killed?
Those who were leaders and not the innocent people. That is what I personally believe. And that is what we are clamouring in Lebanon for. Why should the innocent suffer?

[anajmi]

professor,

Are you suggesting that you have a better understanding of how the prophet should've dealt with the jews than the prophet himself? Which would mean that you actually have a better understanding than Allah himself as the prophet did only that which was commanded to him by Allah. Or you don't believe that?

[professor]

As I often say - I personally believe. And hence what I say is my own opinion.

For I believe it's entirely a political issue as far as wars in Islam are concerned. And for that there are always ifs and buts. And many muslim scholars also believe that in worldly matters prophet must have erred. Then why he sought Salman Farsi's advice to dig a trench in Battle of Trench. This shows he sought advices. And though rarely he might have been wrongly adviced.(maazallah)

[anajmi]

It is unfortunate that you were not there to advise the prophet at that time, otherwise Muslims would've been in a much better situation now, don't you think?

[anajmi]

I am wondering why Hazrat Ali wasn't giving him the right advise at that time?

[professor]

I always say that Moula Ali was not a politician. In wars, he just obeyed the prophet.
Had he been the politician like Umar or Muawia, he would have surely been the first caliph. A strong believer of Islam like Moula Ali can't be a cunning, machiavelian politician like your masters. They were after the wealth of the jews and they suggested to cull the jews to gain their wealth. Because they didn't believe in Islam.

We have digressed from the main topic.
I am sorry, friends. You give your opinion on the main topic.

[anajmi]

professor,

Stop kidding yourself. Now you are inventing stories to support your erroneous point of view.

If we believe you, we have a prophet making mistakes and Hazrat Ali nothing but a blind mute following him!!

[anajmi]

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