Every Sunday morning, no later than eight and not earlier than
seven, when the cars are taking a breather and Beirut is mute, I take an
energetic sprint through the streets of my neighborhood. Depending on the route
I choose for that day, I either start or end the walk by passing under the
Fouad Chehab Bridge, otherwise famous as one of the civil war’s favorite sniper
haunts. It could be the unusual silence of Sunday, but every time I walk that
20-meter stretch, it’s as if I am mingling with the dead.
It’s a peculiar feeling for a Lebanese who did not live the war
and whose family was spared the worst of it. I can count a couple of distant
relatives among the 150,000 lives lost. I can count a male friend as a
casualty—beaten to a pulp by a militiaman at one of the city’s many roadblocks;
a female friend who was “encouraged” at another checkpoint to give a lift to a Syrian
man, Kalashnikov in hand, only to hysterically (and hilariously) plead her way
out of a detour that was sure to end with a sexual assault.
For far too many Lebanese, this is kids stuff. And, frankly, as
forbidding as my Sunday thoughts are, they are without roots. They drop in like
casual visitors and soon enough drift away with the lazy tick tocks of the day.
Ask those who survived our 17-year sectarian strife about the remnant scars and
they begin to hurt afresh with the incessant pain of the deepest wounds. Watch
them when a new round of violence is about to erupt: ire, blunt and furious,
locks their faces in a permanent scowl.
You wouldn’t think that Lebanese have
grown tired of internecine conflict, judging by the dangerous antics of the
likes of Sidonese Sunni Sheikh Ahmad Assir, or the chest pounding of Hassan
Nassrallah, or the shrill tone of March 8 and 14 (not a single Cicero, I am
afraid, on these shores). And you certainly wouldn’t think that, judging by the
latest car explosions in Sunni Tripoli
and Shiite Southern Suburbs.
After all, that’s how the bloodletting started in 1975.
And yet, 37 years on, it is clear to most of us that the war
and the shape of the peace that ended it have pretty much pocketed their main goals, turning Lebanon into a
rent-a-cause kiosk, a minor theater of a sort where the big boys get to vent
every once in a while or register a point against the opposite side; and yes,
why not, since this is Lebanon, a staging post for all manner of illicit transactions and trades. Ours has become too
much of a zaroub (back alley) to be home to an event as grand as that of a civil war.
However amnesiac the Lebanese may seem about their tragedies,
this is an exhausted people. Perhaps one of the more intriguing outcomes of two decades of combat is a collective mood that can
tolerate turbulence only if it comes in fits and starts, or, if you like, a
chronic instability that releases itself every other year with a few hard
slaps. Degradation of life continues apace, of course, people here and there
die, each sect crawls deeper into its trench, but wholesale collapse is averted
precisely because nothing remains, in fact, intact. Lebanon is a nation
dismembered, a polity in shards.
On the face of it, you might argue, this actually bodes trouble
of the very loud, serious and prolonged kind. But ever since the official end
of the fratricide in 1990, Lebanon has been lurching onward, from one blow to
the other, with a chorus of observers warning of impending disaster, only for
this slice of the Levant to lurch some more
under a barrage of new blows. Count them! Israel’s assault
in 1996; the assassination
of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005 and the targeted killings that ensued;
the 2006 war
between Hezbollah and Israel; the offensive against
the Nahr al Bared Palestinian camp up north in 2007; the descent on West
Beirut by Hezbollah et al in 2008…
The backdrop, it goes without saying, is the nonlethal
confrontations that bespeak of an utterly broken political system: March 8‘s resignation
from Fouad Saniora’s cabinet and the tent cities of Hezbollah and Michel Oun’s
Tayyar downtown that followed in 2006-2007; the parliament that for months
would not convene and the president that for months could not be elected; the
joke that is the parliamentary elections,
sullied by fraud and a flood of money to achieve nothing more than a balance of
bad intentions; the Hariri Tribunal’s pursuit of Hezbollah as the
party that pulled the trigger; the clandestine spy wars between the Shiite
behemoth and Israel, the mounting public debt and the mismanagement of the
economic file… And now the close to one million Syrian refugees, the
Sunni-Shiite collisions along some of Lebanon’s demarcation lines, the
ineffectual March 8 government…
By any measure, these should be signs of a people on the brink of another suicidal trajectory.
But then, as I wrote above and countless times before, we are not a people and
this is not a country. The tragicomedy is that which
has killed us bit by bit saves us from all out bloodshed.
