It had long been my ambition to be a Middle East correspondent, both because I was fascinated by the history of the region and because I very much wanted to spend some time in Jerusalem, a city as historic and as beautiful as Rome. If in one lifetime I could live in both cities, I would have no cause for complaint. Ruth was less keen on the idea, but she agreed to make the move on the condition that it was the only foreign posting I would go for. We already had one young child, and as soon as we arrived in Jerusalem, we discovered that another one was on the way. Raising two small children away from home was not going to be easy, especially as we both knew that I would spend a lot of my time travelling around the region.
The two main stories in the Middle East in the mid-1980s were the civil war in Lebanon, which had begun in 1975 and showed no sign of stopping, and the war between Iran and Iraq, which had begun in 1980 when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. Israel and the Palestinian territories, by comparison, were relatively quiet: this was before the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada; the PLO was a banned organisation and Yasser Arafat was safely out of harm’s way in Tunis, having been expelled from Lebanon after the Israeli invasion in 1982.
Israelis have a reputation for rudeness, so it was good to have my prejudices shattered within days of my arrival. I was searching for an address on the outskirts of Jerusalem and had stopped off at a local shop to ask for directions. After a lively discussion among the shop’s customers over which would be the best route for me to take (no one has ever accused Israelis of not having a well-developed talent for arguing), one man put a stop to all the talking. ‘Follow me. I’ll jump in my car and take you there.’ I met plenty of rude Israelis during my time in the region, but I also met plenty of friendly ones as well.
No one can spend more than a few days in Israel without having to confront the legacy of the Holocaust. Without the Holocaust, there would probably be no Israel, and even though most Israelis do not come from families that have had a direct experience of the Nazis – either because they came from Arab nations like Morocco, Yemen and Iraq, or because they are non-Jewish Arab Palestinians, who make up 20 per cent of the country’s population – the Holocaust is an inescapable element in the national psyche. Less than a month after I moved to Jerusalem, I met the 49-year-old twins Yitzhak and Idit Bleier, originally from Hungary, who had been among more than a thousand twins used as experiments in Auschwitz by the SS doctor Josef Mengele.
The children were kept in special barracks, boys in one, girls in another … ‘I saw what they were doing there,’ said Yitzhak softly. ‘I saw the crematoria, I saw everything that happened: the bodies lying on the ground like wooden logs, the people electrified on the fences, the long lines of people being taken to the gas chambers.73
A few days later, I reported from a special public hearing into Mengele’s crimes that was being held at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
My own abiding memory will be of Zerak Taub, a square-jawed Hungarian who was only 11 when he and his twin brother arrived at Auschwitz. Taub demonstrated how Mengele carried out his famous ‘selections’, deciding in a fraction of a second which of the new arrivals would live – at least for now – and which would go direct to the gas chamber.
Taub put his right hand in front of his chest, clenched in a fist with the thumb pointing across his body. Then, with a hardly discernible movement, he flicked his wrist and the thumb was pointing the other way. This way, life. That way, death.74
But it was Lebanon that made most of the headlines in the mid-’80s. A tiny country about one-twentieth the land mass of the UK (or three-quarters the size of the US state of Connecticut), it was carved out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War when France was mandated by the League of Nations to take responsibility for both Lebanon and Syria. Its population is a religious hotch-potch: mainly Muslim (both Sunni and Shia), Christian (both Maronite and Greek Orthodox) and Druze. No one knows for sure how many there are of each religious denomination because there has been no official census since 1932. At that time, the population was 53 per cent Christian, but more recent unofficial estimates suggest that the country is now divided into roughly 60 per cent Muslims and 40 per cent Christians. (There are thought to be no more than a hundred Jews left in Lebanon, from a community that used to number several thousand.)
The numbers are important, because the Lebanese National Pact drawn up in 1943, when the country became independent, provides for the top offices of state to be divided between the main religious dominations: the President must always be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister must be Sunni, the parliamentary speaker must be Shia, the Deputy Speaker and Deputy Prime Minister must both be Greek Orthodox, and the army chief of staff must be a Druze. After the fifteen-year civil war (1975–90), no one wants to risk upsetting the apple cart by holding a new census that could well show that changing demographics should dictate a recalibration of the pact.
In 1985, when I first set foot in Lebanon, Israel was beginning to withdraw some of its troops from the south of the country, which it had occupied since it invaded in 1982. I flew to Beirut via Cyprus (the border between Israel and Lebanon has been closed ever since the establishment of Israel in 1948) and met up with The Observer’s Beirut-based stringer, Aernout van Lynden, a handsome half-Dutch aristocrat who had served in the Dutch special forces and later became a distinguished war correspondent for Sky News. I was relieved to be able to latch on to someone who knew something about guns, because in the days before the invention of hostile environment courses, the sum total of my battlefield knowledge was which end of a gun the bullets come out of.
We teamed up with a Swedish radio correspondent, Agneta Ramberg, and headed south towards the Israeli front line in a battered Mercedes taxi. As we threaded our way through the chaotic Beirut traffic, Agneta pulled a packet of Marlboro cigarettes out of her bag and offered one to me. When I declined, on the grounds that I was trying to give up smoking, she said: ‘If the reason you’re trying to give up is that you’re worried about your health, you probably shouldn’t be in Lebanon.’ I took the cigarette and we have been close friends ever since.
The shooting started at Teir Dibba, just as we were flagged to a halt at the United Nations post a mile across the valley. It was sporadic, short sharp bursts of semi-automatic gunfire.
The Israeli ‘iron fist’ was moving on to its next target … ‘Don’t go too far, be careful,’ said the French soldier at the checkpoint. ‘They still have two tanks at the far end of the village.’75
Crossing the front line into Israeli-held territory proved to be a lot easier than getting out again. At checkpoint after checkpoint as we tried to make our way back to Beirut, we were stopped at gunpoint. One Israeli soldier was particularly suspicious of us in our ancient Lebanese taxi, and he stuck his automatic weapon through the open window to point straight at us. ‘That was seriously scary,’ said Aernout, after we had calmed the soldier down and driven away from the checkpoint. ‘He was very, very frightened, and a frightened soldier with a gun is extremely dangerous.’ If Aernout had been scared, I felt a lot better about having been terrified. And it taught me that being frightened when a gun points at you is a healthy reaction. It’s when you no longer feel frightened that you are in real trouble.
As night fell, we decided to find somewhere we could spend the night, and we drove into the Phoenician port city of Tyre, famed for its magnificent Roman ruins but not exactly overrun with tourists. We banged on the door of a modest hotel that looked as if it had been closed for several months. They had no food or water but they did have beds. In town, looking for food, we encountered an Englishman who was horrified when we told him where we intended to sleep. ‘You will do no such thing. That place was bombed last week and could collapse at any moment. You can sleep at my place.’ He said he was an engineer, although what a British engineer was doing behind the front lines in southern Lebanon none of us asked. But we accepted his offer of hospitality, and the following day we fo
und a way back across the Israeli lines and headed north to Beirut.
It was on that same coast road, with its fabulous views out over the Mediterranean, that two years later the American journalist Charles Glass was kidnapped. He and I, with another American correspondent, Mary Curtius, then of the Christian Science Monitor, had had dinner together the previous evening in an excellent Japanese restaurant – Beirut was nothing if not surreal, even in the midst of a civil war – and none of us had any reason to doubt that, with 7,000 Syrian troops now very visibly deployed in Lebanon, we no longer faced the daily threat of kidnap that all Westerners had grown used to living with. Glass knew Lebanon a lot better than most of us, having reported from the country for the best part of a decade, but even his experience and depth of knowledge were no protection against being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a piece I wrote for The Spectator, to which he frequently contributed, I said:
To have been in West Beirut at all was, as we now know, a sad error of judgement … A Lebanese friend told me: ‘You should never believe in appearances. After twelve years of war, we Lebanese know better than that. The Syrians may be in the streets, but they do not control them.’76
Mary and I left Beirut as soon as we could after Glass was kidnapped, taking the ferry to Cyprus from Jounieh on the Christian side of the city. It seemed a sensible precaution, in the circumstances, and, to my lasting regret, I have never been back.
I would never describe myself as being addicted to fear, yet I loved spending time in Beirut, even though it could justifiably claim for much of the 1980s to be the most dangerous city in the world. Each visit would be preceded by anguished late-night conversations with fellow correspondents in the bar of a hotel in Larnaca, Cyprus: ‘Is it safer this time than last time? Who’s been there most recently? What are the Syrians up to?’
Then the hair-raising drive into town from the airport – always with a known, trusted driver – and the black comedy check-in formalities at the Commodore Hotel. Always the same, coded question: would Mr Lustig prefer a room on the mortar shell side of the hotel, or the car bomb side?
For those of us who were based in Jerusalem, there were added dangers. If we were to have the misfortune of falling into the hands of a band of kidnappers, it would be essential to ensure that they did not have any reason to suspect that we had any connections to the ‘Zionist entity’ to the south. So we developed a ritual before leaving Cyprus, meticulously going through all our pockets, purses and wallets to remove any old cinema tickets or credit card receipts that were written in Hebrew, and checking that not a single item of clothing had an Israeli laundry or dry cleaners’ tag still attached. We knew that failure to de-Israelify ourselves could easily have been tantamount to a death sentence, because, not without reason, Lebanese militia groups were paranoid about Israeli spies in their midst, and they were not the kind of people to give careless journalists the benefit of the doubt.
Even in the midst of civil war, Lebanon was a stunningly beautiful country. The lush orange groves and fruit orchards, the glistening Mediterranean, the majestic Chouf mountains, all won the country a reputation as the Arab world’s favourite holiday destination, before it slid into chaos. I used to have a huge framed poster hanging on the wall of my office, featuring an aerial photograph of an idyllic-looking Beirut beneath a bright blue sky. The caption read: ‘Beyrouth: mille fois mort, mille fois revécu.’ (‘Beirut: died a thousand times, reborn a thousand times.’)
But reporting from Lebanon presented more challenges than simply staying alive. As any war correspondent knows, the first question to be answered in any dispatch from the front line is: ‘Who’s fighting whom?’ And it is closely followed by the second question: ‘Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?’ My hero, William Boot, in Scoop, was on the button:
‘Can you tell me who is fighting who in Ishmaelia?’
‘I think it’s the Patriots and the Traitors.’
‘Yes, but which is which?’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that. That’s Policy, you see.’77
Lebanon was not a fictional construct of Evelyn Waugh’s imagination, but I often felt a close affinity with poor Boot when I was there, and it sometimes showed through in my reporting.
It is difficult, in the midst of all this carnage, to see any pattern to what has been happening. Yet there is a pattern of sorts, a massive jigsaw of countless pieces, slowly and painfully being forced together to make a picture which once again can be called Lebanon.
Many of the pieces have to have their edges shot away to make them fit, and some have to be thrown away all together. But at the end of this tortuous process, it is still possible that Lebanon will, against all the odds, be seen to have survived.78
Or, as I might have put it, if I had been more honest: ‘What’s going on? I haven’t a clue.’ I was reporting on what became known as ‘The Battle of the Camps’, when a Lebanese Shia militia group called Amal launched an all-out attack on Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut, killing several hundred people.
At the bottom of the page on which that report was published, there was a fact box labelled ‘Guide to the fighting factions’. Six different Palestinian groups were listed, followed by four Lebanese Shia groups, and five labelled ‘Others’. A total of fifteen armies in a country the size of a postage stamp. No wonder I also quoted the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran: ‘Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment feeling itself a nation.’
We knew terrible things were happening in the camps, but seeing for ourselves was a major challenge. Eventually, a small group of us persuaded local relief workers to allow us to accompany their convoy as they tried to provide medical aid to the besieged Palestinians. It seemed a good idea at the time, but as we approached one of the camps, we immediately found ourselves caught up in the middle of a fierce gun battle between Amal militiamen and armed Palestinian defenders.
We took cover behind a low stone wall, but after a few minutes I was joined by an Amal gunman, who crouched down beside me and started to let off long bursts of automatic fire over the top of the wall. Until that moment, I had had no idea how deafeningly loud submachine gun fire is if it is directly next to your ear, and I remember turning to the gunman and saying to him, absurdly, and in English: ‘I do wish you’d stop doing that.’
He simply smiled back and offered me his gun.
Did I want to try?
I did not.
A few weeks later, when the fighting had died down, I ventured into Sabra camp, where, in 1982, hundreds of Palestinians had been killed by Lebanese Christian fighters allied to Israel.
As we pick our way gingerly through the rubble of a dynamited house, the young Palestinian in front of us suddenly draws his revolver and flicks off the safety catch. ‘It is still dangerous for us here,’ he says. ‘Amal is outside and we are exposed here.’ None of the young men has yet dared to leave the camp for fear of the Shia militiamen still lounging by the entrances.
On our way out of Sabra camp, we understand why. The bulky Amal fighters by the devastated mosque are all wearing identical T-shirts. ‘Kill ’em all,’ says the inscription across their chests. ‘Let God sort them out.’79
On 14 June 1985, TWA flight 847 was on its way from Athens to Rome, en route to California, when two armed men burst into the cockpit and forced the pilot to divert to Beirut. On board were eighty-five Americans, twenty-four British citizens, and thirty-eight people of other nationalities. After refuelling in Beirut, the plane took off for Algiers, then returned to Beirut, then headed back to Algiers, and back again to Beirut. About a hundred passengers and female crew members were released, but the rest were taken off the plane and spirited away into the southern suburbs of Beirut, close to the airport and under the control of various Shia militia groups.
The TWA hijack became a huge international story. The US television networks flew in their biggest stars for round-the-clock coverage of the crisis and arranged for specially chartered private j
ets to shuttle between Beirut and Cyprus to ship news film for onward transmission to New York. On one occasion, when I was in the airport control tower eavesdropping on conversations with the hijackers still on board the plane, I overheard a wonderfully surreal conversation between the air traffic controller and the pilot of one of the chartered Lear jets as it came in to land.
Pilot: ‘Attention control tower. Wish to advise there are dogs on runway.’
Tower: ‘We can confirm that. Wish to advise there are also hijackers.’
I spent countless hours in that airport control tower and filed thousands of words over the next two weeks, all of them typed out on my battered portable typewriter and then either telexed or dictated over the phone to London.
The man in the Beirut control tower was about the most relaxed participant in the whole drama.
Last Thursday afternoon, Issan Mansour, lounging in front of a dusty panel of dials and switches in his eyrie above the runway, fielded the latest shopping list from the gunmen on board the parked TWA jet. Food, drink, newspapers: even the demands had become routine. That night, by mutual agreement, the control tower was left completely unmanned. Everyone, terrorists included, needed some sleep.80
It took two weeks before the hostages were released, after Israel had agreed, despite earlier denials, to release seven hundred Lebanese Shia prisoners being held in Israeli jails. The news of the deal broke early on a Saturday morning, perfect timing for a Sunday newspaper, but not so perfect for a correspondent who had been up far too late in the Commodore bar.
Is Anything Happening? Page 25