Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

by Megan K. Stack

  I thought a lot about that garbage the first time I visited Beirut. It was back in 2003, and I came to write about the city’s architectural rebirth. Hariri had razed the shell-chewed skeletons and put in a Tower Records and sidewalk bistros and Häagen-Dazs. New limestone was quarried down out of the mountains and all the destroyed buildings were put back together, pane by pane, stone by stone. The apple smoke of water pipes hung in the streets; Gucci and Rolex opened boutiques where gold watches and alligator shoes never went on sale because the Saudis and Kuwaitis poured in with their bottomless purses. Few honest Lebanese could afford to shop or eat there, it was true, but the tourists came flocking back and, anyway, there were enough dishonest Lebanese to make up the difference.

  The downtown was perfect except that it was a lie, a shiny facade slapped over a war that had evaporated but never ended, questions that nobody asked, a history too contentious to be taught in school. A new generation was coming of age in a segregated country, in neighborhoods cleansed by their parents’ religious slaughters. The warlords, militia leaders, engineers of kidnappings and torture—those men still ran the country. The armies of Shiites, Christians, and Druze had tucked away their guns and shrunk themselves down to political parties. None of the reasons for fighting had been discussed or resolved or excised. Lebanon had decided to live as if it were all a bad dream, a false thing that could never happen again, as if they had not torn themselves into a thousand pieces, as if they had not spent fifteen years slaughtering one another. Syria had sent in soldiers and intelligence agents after the war, passed out power among the different communities, and squelched dissent. The blank architecture was the face of collective amnesia. Lebanese moved through that city and the war breathed on their necks but nobody talked about it.

  I’d ask: Aren’t you afraid you will have more violence? Because it doesn’t seem like anything is resolved.

  They all said no. Oh no, never! The Lebanese have learned their lesson. The war was not really our war, not of us. It was America and Israel and Syria and Iran, meddling from outside. Wars take money, and we can’t afford another war. We are too tired to fight. This new generation will be better. War is impossible.

  Those were the stories they told themselves in the city built on garbage.

  Hariri’s death spun the city like a top, through days that melted into night and then day again, dizzy and sleepless with fever. Rich housewives and students cutting classes and old hardened fighters marched down into the streets by the thousands, the tens of thousands, and on big demonstration days, the hundreds of thousands. They hid away their militia flags and bought Lebanese flags instead. Suddenly patriotism was fashionable and party politics were gauche—or so the party leaders quietly instructed their flocks.

  They took over Martyrs’ Square, the one downtown spot left battle scarred, where bullet holes still showed on the central statue of triumphant gods and fallen fighters. Around the statue stretched vacant lots where large, unanswered questions lurked. It was into that awkward, gaping space that demonstrators surged. The shrine to the civil war would be the rallying ground for a new Lebanon. They pitched tents, threw up a stage and a booming sound system, and announced that they would stay until the Syrians were out of the country.

  Syria out

  We hate you

  Fuck Syria

  The crowd melted, the crowd morphed. It was a picnic, a rave, a campfire, a rock concert, a party of Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Druze that rolled through days and nights. A man dressed as a grim reaper carried a coffin through the crowd. Turn around and you saw college girls with the Lebanese flag painted on their faces. The old snipers and guerrillas who had become taxi drivers and shop owners stood quietly with hands in their pockets and unknowable expressions on their faces, roaming the encampments with guns in their pants. The darkness came down from the hills and skimmed over the sea to the sky, and footlights shone from the grass. The girls wore skin-tight jeans and knee-high boots. Babies crawled at their feet. Somebody blew a harmonica. Music throbbed from the speakers, big and sweeping, as if some bygone army were marching off to war. The flag wavers worked in shifts. There was a joke that floated around Lebanon that year, as winter made its long descent into spring. It started as a cartoon, I think: A Filipina maid stands alongside the diamond-draped housewife who imported her as slave labor. The housemaid carries a sign: “Madame says, ‘Syria out!’”

  The young people were giddy with it all. The mingling of Christians and Muslims gave them the idea that their generation would lift the country away from the bloodstained claws of their parents. I met a string of earnest young activists like Marwan Hayed, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer I came across one night among the tents.

  “I was born before the war,” he said. “I never got the chance to meet the other Lebanese. I was a Christian and I never knew the Muslims.

  “For thirty years they have been lying about the war in Lebanon,” he told me grandly. “They said it was a war among the Lebanese people. That was a lie. That’s what you’re discovering right now, what all Lebanese are discovering now. That we love each other. That we know each other better than ever.”

  “Now we have a new face. We are looking to our children and we don’t want them to suffer like we suffered. Both sides paid too much blood. During the war, we were the same age as the people you see here.” That was Sami Abu Gaodi, a Christian militiaman who struck up a conversation one night. His eyes moved fondly over the crowd. “The young generation, they are making us change.”

  Those interviews made me nervous, like listening to drunk people gush. It felt wobbly and dangerous, too slick and too easy. The protestors talked all day and all night about how Lebanon was finally united. Sectarianism is dead, they hollered. We are all one.

  But—the Shiites weren’t there. And nobody wanted to talk about it.

  There were a lot of reasons for their absence, and the first was Hezbollah, the popular Shiite party and militia that held sway over most of Lebanon’s largest sect. Hezbollah depended upon Syria for weapon-smuggling routes and political cover, so the prospect of a Syrian withdrawal scratched nerves. And there was a vaguer, deeper truth: the Shiites, historically shunted aside, impoverished, pushed out into the provinces, were wary of Lebanon without Syria. They had gained prestige and political clout under the tutelage of Damascus, and they were leery of being left alone with the Christians, Sunnis, and Druze. At first they closed their mouths and faded into the background. Hariri’s blood was fresh and there was nothing they could say. Incredibly, nobody paid much attention to their conspicuous absence. Not the politicians, not the journalists, and certainly not the Lebanese themselves. It was treated as an irrelevant aside. But at least a third—as much as half—of the country was Shiite. In the end their distrust—of Israel, of America, of the Christians and Sunnis—was the most devastating corrosion of all.

  One morning during those early protests, I visited a Shiite cabinet minister in his office. Syria had kept Lebanon stable for years, he argued over coffee. “The opposition is assuming they have the upper ground and they represent the majority, and this is dangerous. You have to have a dialogue with the majority party in Lebanon.” He meant Hezbollah and the Shiites. “To liberate Lebanon, you don’t want to destroy it.”

  In the streets, you could feel the danger, not in spoken words, but in silences. The anti-Syria crowds either pretended the Shiites didn’t exist, or denied their absence. “There are Shiites here!” they said defensively.

  “Where?”

  “Here among us. I have met many Shiites. The Lebanese are all united.”

  “But where?”

  “They are here!”

  Two weeks of protests passed before Omar Karami, the Syria-backed prime minister, announced that he wouldn’t rule against the wishes of the people. He resigned. The government fell.

  The tent city dug in deeper. It wasn’t enough. Faces were fixed toward one slogan: Syria out. Those words had been burning a hole in their tongues for fi
fteen years of silence, and now they screamed them. They protested and struck and marched. What did it mean, what came after, was it enough—nobody knew and, for the moment, nobody cared.

  Washington was there all the while. Faces and neckties glowed on big screens spread behind the crowds, speeches boomed over the vacant lots. President Bush climbed behind podiums and said enormous things about Lebanon. No longer was this a small, forgotten place, a hopeless nest of killers passed off to Syria in desperation. Now, Bush proclaimed, Lebanon was the soul of the war on terror:

  “All the world is witnessing your great movement of conscience. Lebanon’s future belongs in your hands and, by your courage, Lebanon’s future will be in your hands. The American people are on your side. Millions across the earth are on your side. The momentum of freedom is on your side, and freedom will prevail in Lebanon.”

  His enthusiasm was understandable. It was a hard winter, and getting harder. Close to 1,500 U.S. soldiers were dead in Iraq; insurgents beheaded their hostages on television and the United States had recently acknowledged losing track of almost $9 billion intended for the Iraqi government. There was no hope of peace talks in Jerusalem. The Taliban was rearing back to life in Afghanistan.

  And then came sleepy little Lebanon, like manna from some neoconservative heaven. There were beautiful Muslims and Christians who lived in cosmopolitan seaside towns and spoke plausible English, so committed to their independence, to democracy, that they slept out under the stars. Here was the villain: Syria, irascible outlaw among a field of compliant Arab dictators. The American ambassador in Damascus went stomping back to Washington in protest the day after Hariri died. Democracy was on the march.

  “Any who doubt the appeal of freedom in the Middle East can look to Lebanon, where the Lebanese people are demanding a free and independent nation,” Bush said. “Democracy is knocking at the door of this country and, if it’s successful in Lebanon, it is going to ring the doors of every Arab regime.”

  Lebanese basked eagerly in the attention. “All the world is now worried about Lebanon,” marveled a middle-aged Christian lawyer. “President Bush, every day he talks about us.”

  One night in early March, the other shoe came clattering to earth, dropped from on high by the Party of God. Hezbollah chief Sayed Hassan Nasrallah stared from television screens and ordered his followers into the streets. These anti-Syria demonstrators were the handiwork of Israel and America, he said. All the talk of international law was a thin disguise; they’d come to meddle in Lebanese affairs, to disarm Hezbollah on behalf of the Zionists. When Nasrallah talks on television, bustling Beirut streets freeze—hotel lobbies, cafés, and electronics shops fall silent as people clump together and watch. When Nasrallah issued his order, the Shiites obeyed.

  The day of Hezbollah’s rally dawned gritty and gray. The Mediterranean stretched like steel, breathing a stinging wind over town. Hiking down the hill from the Hamra district, I turned a corner and stood staring at a livid, teeming human blanket. I thought the other crowds had been tremendously big. I thought I’d never see so many people packed into the streets and plazas of Beirut. But Hezbollah’s crowd dwarfed all that had come before, smothering gardens, overpasses, and tunnels. The other Lebanon had arrived, ready to declare itself to the world in a show of loyalty to Syria. The original demonstrators, the ones who hollered for Syria to get out, stood just down the hill, holding their ground at Martyrs’ Square. Lines of Lebanese soldiers kept the groups separated. Once again, the city was split in two.

  The Hezbollah demonstrators were mostly farmers and workers from the south and the Bekaa Valley, people who’d suffered the Israeli occupation. They came in rattletrap buses, with dirt under their fingernails, and walked the streets with the weary patience of people accustomed to waiting at the back of the line: men in work clothes and sensible boots; women swathed in head scarves, moving silently along behind their husbands. They didn’t have Hummers and Pierre Cardin and Sri Lankan housemaids. They didn’t jump around or snap photos of themselves or sway to patriotic music. They stood grimly, carrying posters that said, “Bush, we hate you,” “All our disasters come from America,” and “America is the source of all our terrorism.”

  A passing woman grabbed my arm. “Are you a journalist?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well.” She squared her thin shoulders and poked her chin forward. “I am a Shiite.”

  “Okay.”

  “All the Shiites are not poor,” she pressed on indignantly. “All the Shiites are not from the south. Look at me. I am a Shiite, too.”

  She was a small, lithe woman in her thirties. She looked quintessentially Lebanese, meaning she looked beautiful in a contrived and doll-like way—a beauty concocted from hair dyes and foundation creams and expensive clothes. She wore spike heels, tight jeans, and a sequined Daisy Duck T-shirt under a stylishly distressed leather jacket. A diamond pendant dangled from her neck; her fingers tapered into manicure; glossy hair swished to her shoulders. She was roaming with three shiny-haired, perfumed girlfriends carting signs that said “No to foreign intervention.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked her.

  “I’m a Shia. I go to the beaches in my swimsuit. I studied with the nuns. I went to the American University of Beirut. My kids don’t know whether they are Christian or Muslim. Last time somebody asked my son, ‘Are you Christian or Muslim?’ he didn’t know.”

  “So,” I said, “do you feel like these demonstrations are creating sectarian trouble?”

  “We are with the people over there,” she replied, pointing down the hill to the anti-Syria camp. “But some of them are racist, they’ve been dealing with Israel. They want to divide the country. I have four kids, and sometimes at night I can’t sleep because I’m so worried that my kids will live what I lived during the war.”

  “You really think it will come to that?”

  “I don’t know. I am very, very worried.”

  She was gone, swallowed by the crowd.

  The announcer bellowed surprise news: Sayed Hassan Nasrallah is here.

  That name! It stirred the bodies and lit the faces. Nasrallah, hunted by Israel, a famous ghost who flitted through underground chambers and hidden offices in the warrens of the southern suburbs, would show his face in the heart of Beirut for the first time in years. “Thank you to Syria,” the announcer cried, heating up the crowd. “Thank you to President Assad.” The men leapt up and down, fists pumping. The women’s faces tipped skyward, saintly and pale, eyes swelling to take him in.

  And there he stood, impossible as a hallucination, on a balcony over the Buddha Bar and the Casa del Habano cigar shop. Silence grabbed the crowd by the tongue. But Nasrallah wasn’t talking to them; they were merely his context. Nasrallah was talking to the world.

  “If you really want to defend freedom in Lebanon and democracy in Lebanon, then you must look with your two eyes,” he said. “Are we not the people of the Lebanon you love? We tell you we want to maintain and protect our historic ties with Syria and we believe in the resistance.

  “Now let me turn to America,” he said.

  Fists drove to heaven. “Death to America!”

  “You’ve made a mistake with your calculations. Lebanon will not change its name or its history or its politics,” Nasrallah informed America. “Do you think the Lebanese are afraid of American fools? Don’t interfere with our internal affairs. Get your fingers off our country.”

  As darkness settled over the streets, there was grogginess in the air; the alarm had shrilled and the dream was gone. This was real. This was the danger that nobody wanted to write or talk about: The “popular revolution” existed only in one half of the country. The dancing in the streets, the fast push for toppled governments and new days, was tearing the country in two. In the tent city on Martyrs’ Square, the activists shivered and stood their ground.

  “Those weren’t Lebanese,” they said irritably. “They bused in Syrians. They bused in Palestinians.”
r />   “Maybe,” I said. “But there were Lebanese, too. A lot of Lebanese.”

  “Those people are not Lebanese.”

  That’s the essence of it, I thought. They see only their sectarian mythology, the stories they tell themselves. They are wrapped in dreams, believing only the narratives of their own creation.

  “If they represent half, then we’re the other half,” a student spat out. His tone was almost desperate.

  “We can’t get rid of them,” said another student, “and they can’t get rid of us.”

  The clash wasn’t country against city; poor versus rich; Shiites squaring off against the rest. It was all of that, a little bit, and none of that. It was deeper and darker, harder to say, and impossible to fix. Lebanon was pushing blindly toward change, and it had to decide what kind of country it was going to be: a protectorate of Syria, tied to Iran through Hezbollah, verging on pariah status, battling endlessly with Israel, or this new country that Hariri and the others were trying to forge—free from Syrian influence, oriented toward France and America, liberal and warless, luring tourists and making nice with the neighbors. Each side saw its own extinction in the alternate vision. They weren’t living in the same country anymore; they had become divided until they couldn’t even recognize one another. I was haunted most of all by the Christians who looked at the Shiites and said simply, “Those people are not Lebanese.” Because they believed it.