Beirut, Beirut

by Sonallah Ibrahim

  The average Lebanese citizen assumed the character of a middleman. All he needed was to wear – even if it was borrowed – the most splendid clothes and latest fashions, and use the latest gadgets, in order to succeed in selling the goods he had imported from the West and sought to re-export to Arabs. Members of parliament came to pride themselves on the foreign embassy that backed them. It was common knowledge that anyone who wasn’t being paid by some source was a failure, and unworthy of respect.

  As for the Arab forces of reaction and the colonial powers, they began to promote the idea of “prosperity, economic freedom and democracy” as successful Lebanese products. But the glittering façade of Hamra Street could not conceal the country’s different reality. Along with the luxury buildings that went up in downtown Beirut and in the aristocratic neighborhoods was a belt of tin-sheet shacks around the city. And in Akkar, Jabal Amil and the Bekaa (regions where the majority of the inhabitants were Shiites) peasants lived in a disgraceful condition of servitude. Anyone who dared to rebel against the landowning nobility was forbidden from being appointed to the police, and his children were prevented from attending government schools. If he was a tobacco farmer, he was not allowed seeds, and for his harvest, he only received the lowest prices. The state recruited for government service from a group of longstanding Maronite, Sunni and Shiite families that held a monopoly on the country’s affairs and wealth.

  In the meantime, the number of Muslims steadily grew, until they came to form the majority of inhabitants. The Maronites – as the British magazine The Economist acknowledged – no longer made up more than 20 percent of all Lebanese. This increase in the number of Muslims was due to none other than the Shiites, who now – according to the same magazine – represented a quarter of the population. The end of the 1960s witnessed the beginning of their ascent under the strong leadership of the ambitious Imam Musa al-Sadr, who succeeded in uniting the Shiite masses around him in the Movement of the Dispossessed, before his disappearance in Libya in 1978.

  But the 1960s also ended with the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the powerful champion of the Arab nationalist street in Lebanon, and the bulwark to whom Muslim leaders turned for protection as they demanded a redistribution of power. Everyone looked around, searching for a new champion, and they soon found one in the Palestinian resistance.

  The link between the situations in Palestine and Lebanon dates back to the beginning of the British incursion into the region. The same year that the British occupied Egypt (1882), Jewish settlers were building their first settlements on the heights overlooking the Litani River. Later, British communications with Arab leaders would always insist on the “special circumstances” of both the Jews in Palestine and the Maronites in Lebanon.

  It was an irony of fate that Lebanon owed its flourishing growth to the Palestinian problem. The vast wealth that the ruling families accumulated arose thanks to the Arab–Israeli struggle, and the defeats and victories equally that befell the Arabs over the course of it.

  As a result of the defeat of the Arab armies and the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the center of economic activity moved from Palestine to Lebanon, and especially the role as broker which Palestine had previously held in the fields of business, transportation and tourism. Palestinian refugees took part in the development of the service industry, and the “economic miracle” was supported by the Arab boycott of Israel and the Arab consensus to remove Lebanon from the group of states maintaining an armed struggle with Israel which consequently exempted it from armaments expenditures. On the other hand, the Arab victory in October 1973 led to a doubling of oil profits and an influx of capital into Lebanon. The exchange value of the Lebanese lira against the dollar increased to 2.3 from 3.25 at the beginning of 1970.

  As far as Israel was concerned, it didn’t hide its ambitions in Lebanon for a moment. In February 1954, Ben Gurion wrote to Moshe Sharett, saying, “It is clear that Lebanon is the weakest link in the Arab Union. Other minorities in Arab countries are all Muslim, with the exception of Egypt’s Copts. But Egypt is the most harmonious and cohesive of all the Arab countries . . . The creation of a Christian state in Lebanon can be considered a natural course of action with historical roots . . . Achieving something like that in normal times is next to impossible . . . but in times of confusion or revolution or civil war, things can take a different turn.’’

  On the eve of the Israeli attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967, Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime minister, declared to the correspondent of the French newspaper Le Monde that “a thirsty Israel cannot stand by with its hands tied while watching the waters of the Litani flow uselessly into the sea”.

  Faced with that, Lebanese governments took on the role of Israel’s enforcer within Lebanon. Following Israel’s founding, 100,000 Palestinians migrated to Lebanon. The Lebanese government granted citizenship to 40,000 Christians among them, and imposed on the rest a life fit for dogs in refugee camps ruled by security officers.

  A new Palestinian influx occurred following Israel’s seizure of the West Bank up to the Jordan River, as well as the Gaza strip in 1967. Several thousands more settled into the refugee camps in southern Lebanon and in the areas around Beirut.

  Lebanese authorities imposed a blockade on the Palestinian camps, and prevented Palestinians from moving from one camp to another, or to the city, except by prior permission. They forbade them from establishing political organizations or communicating with them. They pursued and killed all who tried to slip back into Israel. Similarly, they forbade Palestinian workers from enjoying government benefits. The latter found themselves forced to take onerous, marginal jobs, and at wages lower than what their Lebanese peers earned. As one writer put it, misery, poverty and displacement were smoldering embers in the alleyways of the camps and within the tin-sheet houses.

  But the defeat of nationalist Arab leaders in 1967 made it possible for the Palestinians to organize themselves in armed federations. In 1969, when Lebanese authorities attempted to curtail fedayeen operations in southern Lebanon during an Israeli attack on Beirut’s airport, in the course of which thirteen Lebanese civilian planes were destroyed with no interference from the army, the first major clash between the two sides occurred. It ended with the involvement of Gamal Abdel Nasser as mediator and the signing of the secret Cairo Agreement in November of the same year. This gave Palestinians the right to work, live and move freely in Lebanon, to have supervision over the refugee camps, and to establish stationhouses for the armed struggle (the military police) within them.

  With this agreement, the clash between the Palestinian resistance and the forces opposed to them was delayed for a time. But it began to escalate again after King Hussein began liquidating Palestinian resistance forces in Jordan in 1970. As a consequence, thousands more Palestinians were displaced to Lebanon, which also became the primary point of access to the occupied territories.

  Meanwhile, the Muslim and Arab nationalist street found a strong ally in the Palestinian resistance, while the Palestinian organizations belonged to this same street by virtue of their makeup and aims. They had to protect their existence in Lebanon by making the widest possible array of alliances.

  Israel played its role by elevating the tension in coordination with the Maronites, and with the Phalangist Party specifically. It launched a military attack on the Bared and Badawi camps in 1973, throwing in for good measure a commando raid in the heart of Beirut, in which it killed three PLO leaders and a number of civilians, without the Lebanese Army lifting a finger.

  The situation exploded in a way it never had before: demonstrations and strikes were called by Arab nationalist forces, criticizing the government’s failure to protect the country. Right-wing forces, for their part, demanded that the Palestinian camps be moved away from the outskirts of Beirut. It was no secret that the monasteries that owned a large part of the territory on which the camps were located were making an effort to get it back, after its value had gone up in the previous few years. Th
e president of the republic, Suleiman Frangieh, took it upon himself to carry out this task.

  The life of Suleiman Frangieh would make a suitable subject for a thrilling gangster movie; at the same time, it offers an accurate picture of the nature of politics in Lebanon’s celebrated democracy. He began his professional life in the 1940s, under the wing of his older brother, Hamid Frangieh, who was leader of the Maronite community in the town of Zgharta, and its representative in parliament and the government. In addition to electoral advertising for his brother, Suleiman’s assignments included organizing the murder of a Muslim from the city of Tripoli each month, as a kind of repeated warning to the inhabitants of the neighboring Sunni-majority city.

  On the eve of the presidential election in 1958, Hamid Frangieh emerged as a likely candidate. Camille Chamoun was eager to retain his position as president of the republic, and he pulled off a cunning maneuver to remove his Maronite opponent, by stirring up trouble between the Frangieh and Duwaihi families. As Chamoun guessed, the discord escalated to a confrontation between the two families at a mass in a church in the village of Miziara, when Suleiman Frangieh opened fire on his rivals, killing twenty of them. Chamoun immediately issued an order to arrest the killer who fled to Syria and stayed as a guest of the Syrian government at a hotel in Latakia, where he made the acquaintance of the military officers Hafez al-Assad and Rifaat Assad, who partnered with the Frangieh family in a number of profitable black-market deals – both business and political.

  Less than a year and a half later, he was granted amnesty. Meanwhile, his brother had been paralyzed by a stroke, and Suleiman returned to enter parliament in his place. He became a respected leader of his family and clan, thanks to his high body count (with the passage of years, the total number of his murders climbed to 700).

  When new presidential elections were held in 1970, complex local consultations took place among the ruling families – Eddé, Gemayel, Chamoun, Jumblatt, Salam, Solh, Hammada, Karami, etc. – to look for a candidate that would satisfy everyone. In the office of Ghassan Tuini, on the ninth floor of the Al-Nahar newspaper building, which he owned, an agreement was made to nominate Suleiman Frangieh.

  On August 17, 5,000 armed men belonging to Frangieh descended from Zgharta onto Beirut and surrounded the parliament building to ensure the election of their leader. The third round of voting ended with fifty votes for him against forty-nine for his opponent Elias Sarkis. When Sabry Hammada, the speaker of parliament, announced that it was necessary to hold a fourth round, Frangieh’s allies outside fired shots in the air to declare their man had won. Drawing his gun, Frangieh rushed over to Hammada, shouting, while his sons came to blows with the Duwaihi patriarch (who subsequently became one of Frangieh’s allies). Hammada’s bodyguards advanced to protect him, raising their machineguns, while Frangieh’s men, who had succeeded in making their way into the building ahead of the voting, took out their weapons.

  Hammada retreated to his office, and called the president, Charles Helou, to ask for advice. Helou told him, “From what I’ve heard, I can tell you that if you resist, no one in the parliament building will survive.”

  Three years later, in May 1973, Suleiman Frangieh used the slogan “Whatever is necessary to prevent the destruction of the country” to justify the command he issued to the head of the army to attack the camps surrounding Beirut in order to put an end to the control the Palestinian resistance had over them. An American diplomat described this attack, which involved the use of airpower, thus: “It was the first time I saw the Lebanese Army move effectively.”

  But the Lebanese Army failed in its mission, and the Maronite parties began to strengthen their armed militias so they could carry out what the army had proven incapable of doing. The “Kaslik” society – a group of Maronite monks and educated people – took upon themselves the greatest burden, in collecting donations towards this goal; it was able to collect 56 million lira (worth 21 million dollars in 1973–4). Also for this purpose Pierre Gemayel visited Saudi Arabia on April 1, 1974, in a private Saudi plane. Plans were made to train the Phalangist militia in West Germany, Israel and Jordan. Iskandar Ghanem left his post as head of the army in order to assume leadership of the militia.

  In his book The Arms Bazaar, which was published in the middle of 1977, Anthony Sampson mentioned that the Maronite front purchased a quantity of weapons at a price varying between 200 and 600 million dollars, which came – according to him – from banks that the Maronite militias had plundered in Lebanon, and from the CIA, Israel, West Germany, the Vatican, the Shah of Iran and conservative Muslim Arab countries.

  Naturally, the other side – starting with the Palestinian resistance, and continuing to the local religious communities hostile to the Maronites, to the advocates of “progressive” social and economic programs – would not stand by in the face of this enormous campaign of armament. Its leaders found an endless supply available to them in Baghdad, Libya and Saudi Arabia as well. Kamal Jumblatt armed his Druze, and the Imam al-Sadr formed a military apparatus for the Shiite Movement of the Dispossessed. Young Sunnis assembled in the armed Nasserist organization, the Mourabitoun, and the Communists and Baathists formed their own armed militias.

  War was now inevitable.

  Chapter 8

  A number of aspects remained hazy in my view. But time was tight. From experience, I knew that things would become clear during the work itself.

  I called Antoinette, and made an appointment to meet with her. As soon as I put down the receiver, it rang. I lifted it to my ear again.

  It was a soft female voice: “Hello . . . ?”

  “Who is speaking?” I asked, imitating the Lebanese dialect.

  “Please – do speak in Egyptian.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied, laughing.

  “I’m Lamia – Lamia Sabbagh.”

  “Oh, hello. I tried calling you several times.”

  “I know. But I was at the country house, and then I was busy repairing the damage.”

  “Ah yes . . . Terrible.”

  “No matter. Those kinds of things have become normal here. My husband spoke with me today from Paris.”

  “Will he be coming to Beirut?”

  “I don’t think he will now . . . The important thing is: something stupid happened. He told me that your manuscript got lost before he’d had a chance to read it.”

  I stayed silent, not saying a word.

  “Hello . . .” she said, with some hesitation. “I wonder if you happen to have another copy of it?”

  “I have one with me.”

  “Would you be so kind as to bring it to me?”

  “So you can send it to him?”

  “Of course.”

  “I was hoping to get this resolved quickly.”

  “How long will you be staying in Beirut?”

  “Another week, perhaps.”

  “Alright, then we’ll see. When will I see you?”

  “Whenever is good for you . . . tomorrow morning, for example. At ten?’’

  “Okay,” she said in English. “I will be waiting for you. Do you know where the publishing house is?”

  “Wasn’t it destroyed?” I asked, confused.

  She laughed. “The explosion was on the ground floor,” she explained, “where the warehouse was. The offices themselves didn’t get much damage. We’ve repaired them and they are back to what they were.”

  “That quickly? I will find out how to get there.”

  “At ten o’clock, then,” she added.

  I put back the receiver and lit a cigarette. It was still early in the day, but I felt like I needed a little drink, so I poured myself a glass of gin. I sat down and flipped through a large volume about the Lebanese Civil War.

  Around noon Wadia called me to say that he would be dining with one of his friends. He told me to help myself to the contents of the refrigerator to make my own lunch.

  I fried an egg and ate it with some olives and salad, as I scanned an ad in yesterday�
�s paper inviting Arab citizens to join armed groups in Libya, “the revolutionary core of the united Arab nation”, in order to confront “the vicious assault the Arab nation faces from imperialism, Zionism and Arab reactionary forces”. Next to the ad, I discovered a small news item about the widening scope of Libyan involvement in Chad on the side of Chad’s head of state, Oueddei, against his rival, Habré, who was supported by the United States. There was also an allusion to an editorial in the Cairo-based al-Ahram newspaper, demanding that America “regain its prestige and standing, and shoulder its responsibilities to preserve peace, confront aggression, and stop the escalation of conflict, the rejection of authority, and the terrorization of populations through incursions and outside interference”.

  After eating, I felt a desire to rest a little. But I roused myself, got dressed, and left the house.

  A taxi took me to Antoinette’s building. An armed man walked me to her office. I found her with a stocky man around fifty years old. He occupied a chair next to her desk.

  She brought me over to him, saying, “Abu Nadir. The head of the PLO film office. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”

  I shook hands with him warmly, saying, “Who hasn’t heard of him?”

  The guerilla operation he had led in downtown Tel Aviv was legendary. The Israelis had arrested him afterward and condemned him to death. He had been critically wounded, which kept him immobile for a long time, but afterwards was able to escape.

  I sat down opposite him as he continued his conversation with Antoinette. “Movement in the playing field is limited now. Tomorrow’s events will prove to you I’m right. You know how my predictions come true. It’s something like a hunch. Did I tell you about the Tel Aviv operation?”

  She bowed her head, but he went on talking, turning toward me: “There was an Israeli soldier in front of us carrying a machinegun. His finger was on the trigger, preparing to open fire at any second. But I got the feeling he wouldn’t do it, and I confidently headed toward him, until the mouth of his gun touched my chest. Then I put out my hand and took the gun.’’