by Al Venter
Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s and 1980s was fraught with uncertainties. Both sides quickly became masters of urban guerrilla warfare and deployed snipers from most vantage points. (Author’s collection)
I quote further:
When wars and massacres loom on the horizon, they see what’s happening. They have the ability to tell the world; and they do, for the most part, in measured, reasonable terms. And then – nothing. The deluge comes. It is worse even than they expected; more brutal than they could dream, so that afterward their reasoned moderation feels like cowardice, and ‘professionalism’ and ‘balance’ seem like euphemisms for self-serving ambivalence. Most become cynics. Some are drunks. And when they do go home, making excuses to themselves, some of them write fiction.
Dickey, always the master of the understatement, encapsulates it well.
There were other times when circumstances would remind me of Elspeth Huxley’s incisive comment about the continent. She famously miswrote that ‘Africa is a cruel country; it takes your heart and grinds it into powdered stone—and no one minds.’
I suppose it was to be expected that I should eventually turn to television reportage. From 1980 on, I made almost 100 documentaries on more than 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as well as South and Central America. It was good while it lasted, but I moved on when the politics linked to the film industry started to get to me. As I was to discover, making television documentaries is one of the toughest regimens around.
One notable experience was filming in Rio’s slums, or as they are known in Brazil, favelas. The Brazilians with whom I came into contact said that either I or Alwyn Kumst, my cameraman for that venture, would be killed. We’d be ‘iced’ by what they referred to as ‘some of the most brutal criminals on God’s earth’. It never happened, even though we went in every day for weeks: the wretched people with whom we dealt were among the most helpful I’d encountered anywhere and, let’s face it, they didn’t need to help us: we didn’t even speak their language.
Since then, I watched that remarkable movie Cidade de Deus (City of God), and our detractors may have been right. But those favela folk, pathetically distressed, destitute and still living today in some of the worst ghettos on any continent, knew exactly what we were doing. They actually helped us with our movie, aware, that by our actions we were for the underdog.
It was Brazil’s state security apparatus that eventually came down on us and we had to up sticks and get out fast. However, I had my film, shot by Alwyn Kumst on miniscule 100ft rolls of 16mm film using a hand-held Arri. He has since gone on to make a name for himself in Canada’s film industry.
That documentary was followed by Aids: The African Connection, which made the shortlist in the documentary section for the Pink Magnolia Awards at one of Shanghai’s film festivals. Then came the documentary that I produced on the Afghan War: the one that commemorated the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion.
My final documentary film, sponsored in part by Washington’s Howard University and flighted on PBS in the United States, covered the fall of Idi Amin and the last days of the Ugandan Civil War. It was called Africa’s Killing Fields and what a tragedy that debacle eventually turned into: the absurd brutality of a maniac, all those lives lost… I deal with that period as well within these covers.
After all the adventure, there came a time when I needed to break free from an existence – for that was what it really was – that allowed precious little time for my family. I was always on the road, or in the air. My lovely wife Madelon, in all those years, was all but a single parent and my children grew up without me. As it was, I hardly ever spent quality time with the two younger ones.
What finally forced change was my last visit to Gulu in Northern Uganda. Even now that part of Central Africa is being primed for rebellion from Southern Sudan. I went in there with a television crew from Antenne Deux after my own cameraman refused to leave his hotel room in Kampala. He and his girlfriend – who was doing sound – said the north of the country was too dangerous, though that’s why I hired them as a team, dammit!
They were right, of course. We had to leave Gulu in a hurry because filming had been forbidden by the local military commander, but we went ahead anyway, rather pointedly and dangerously ignoring his order. Clearly, if we hadn’t left as soon as the camera stopped rolling, we’d have been arrested and who knows what would have happened? One of the sequences captured during that assignment was of the Gulu town jail: there was blood dripping down the wall from between the bars.
Just as we were leaving Gulu, word arrived of a rebel force approaching from the south. We could hear the firing and were left with only two options: hit the trail or get ourselves arrested by the Ugandan Army.
They shot at us all right; but we got safely to the cheering mob at the edge of the next town. They’d heard the gunfire and spotted us hurtling down the only road, through the kind of undulating bush that you find throughout much of Northern Uganda. Meanwhile, I was huddled on the floor at the back of the vehicle, as if that would have been protection against RPG rocket fire…
Although the 10 or 12 minutes it took to cross Injun Country seems like aeons, I realized that if any of us had taken a hit that day, it would still have been a six-hour drive to Kampala to get help. After years of misrule, we could hardly count on what was left of medical services in the Ugandan capital, even if we could have found a doctor. In any event, Aids was rampant and we had been warned that the country’s blood supply was contaminated. None of us would have survived a gut wound.
At that point, I decided that Uganda should be my last war. However, since then, because I’ve needed to fill gaps, I’ve covered a few more. The death of Bob MacKenzie in Sierra Leone – my compadre from guerrilla fighting in El Salvador, Vietnam and Rhodesia – took me back there in 1995. I also ended up going into Hizbollah country in South Lebanon after the spate of bombings in Israel in March 1996, and that, too, fringed on the cathartic. And then, for Jane’s Defence Weekly, I spent a while with Hizbollah in Beirut.
War in the Balkans and then Sierra Leone again in 2000, followed. In West Africa, I mingled with a variety of regular and unconventional forces. As well as Neall Ellis and his helicopter gunship team, there were a handful of SAS operatives as well as a squad of Royal Marines and a Parachute Regiment detachment that were active on the outskirts of Freetown. The two British regular units worked the periphery of Lungi International Airport and it wasn’t long before the rebel force was bloodied. British media spoke about a handful of rebels killed in a series of contacts: in fact, the number was in the hundreds.
There were quite a few South Africans within those British ranks, as there are today with the British Army in Afghanistan, and it was nice to make contact so far from home.
When talking about life as a war correspondent, the last word should go to Lord Deedes, Bill to his friends and an erstwhile member of that illustrious and civilized Old School of Journalism that seems to have passed the modern generation by. Bill died in the summer of 2007 and it says much that at the age of 93, he was still writing. He ran his column in the Daily Telegraph to the end. In fact, he was still working a few weeks before he died.
As a reporter for the Morning Post, young William Deedes covered the 1930s Abyssinian campaign that Evelyn Waugh captured so exuberantly in his book Scoop. Those who have read it can’t fail to detect the unmistakable link between Bill and the principal character, but as Waugh subsequently commented, ‘that’s all part of the game’.
‘Journalists do not make good historians,’ the venerable Lord Deedes wrote in the introduction to a book put out some years ago.6 The old warrior went on: ‘They like to deal in bright colors, and much of history is grey’, which is true.
As for me, I don’t profess to write history, but, as people like to say, ‘I was there’. What’s more, it was interesting, it was colourful and it was exciting.
Let those be my reasons.
AL J. VEN
TER
Cape Town, July 2010
With time, the conflicts in Africa became more sophisticated and white mercenaries were brought in to fight the wars of some of the black states. Both Angola and Sierra Leone – states combating years of rebel insurrection – eventually bought Soviet-era Mi-24 helicopter gunships to successfully quell insurgencies. Many of these gunships were flown by South African Air Force veterans of their own border wars. (Author’s collection)
CHAPTER ONE
Getting to a Lebanon at War
The war in Lebanon began in Beirut in 1975 after the forerunner of the Lebanese Force Command – a staunchly Christian group of militants – attacked a Palestinian militia group. A succession of horrors, rather than any kind of organized military campaign, followed and soon enveloped the country in the kind of disaster that the Middle East had never experienced before.
THERE HAS BEEN MUCH BLOODLETTING in the Middle East over the ages, the chronicles tell us. But nothing like this had ever happened before, not on this enormous scale of bloody retribution and bombardment. In Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s the killings were often accomplished with a kind of barbaric intensity that was almost apocalyptic.
First there were the Black Saturday massacres at the eastern end of Beirut’s Ring Road in December 1975. Four Christians were found murdered in a car at the head office of an electricity company. Bashir Gemayel, one of the most popular Christian leaders to emerge in the war – and a brilliant tactician to boot – was as ruthless as he was tough. He ordered his Phalangists to kill 40 Muslims in reprisal.
The first large group of Muslims to arrive at a Christian roadblock – some of them on an afternoon outing with their wives and children – were targeted. The Islamic community retaliated and hundreds more innocent people were killed. Within days, these irregular, sporadic outbreaks resulted in a massive wave of reciprocal killings on both sides. It didn’t take long for Lebanon to be plunged into a civil war. As somebody said at the time, this corner of the Levant typified the old homily that it is easy enough to start a war, but sheer bloody hell to bring it to an end.
Killings intensified still further and the conflict see-sawed back and forth. With time, a few significant differences with conflagrations elsewhere emerged. Many more women and children were being murdered than fighting men, underscoring the perception in certain circles that traditionally the Lebanese have a predilection for soft targets.
Also, it didn’t take long for torture to become the norm. There were instances of victims not having been shot outright, but subjected to unspeakable acts of cruelty. Some innocents had their eyes gouged out before a coup de grace was delivered. In the end, there wasn’t a single family, Muslim or Christian, that hadn’t been affected by the carnage.
These days, those few Lebanese who might be prepared to discuss their woes will talk guardedly about the events of 1976. To some it might have happened yesterday. Robert Fisk, then of the London Times, described it as ‘a kind of catharsis for the Lebanese… who have long understood the way in which these dreadful events should be interpreted’.
He went on to say that in Lebanon during those extreme times, ‘victories were the result of courage, of patriotism, of revolutionary conviction. Defeats were always caused by the plot; the mo’amera… a conspiracy of treachery in which a foreign hand – Syrian, Palestinian, Israeli, American, French, Libyan, Iranian – was always involved.’
In his book on Lebanon, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War,1 Fisk – no apologist for either the Lebanese Christians or the Israelis – makes a reasonable attempt to explain the origins of this conflict. What he concludes is as relevant to what is going on in Lebanon in the 21st century as it was 30 years ago.
The causes of conflict go back centuries, Fisk suggests, but the consequences of Christian Maronites (who owe their name to a 5th-century Christian recluse from Syria) unwisely associating themselves with the Frankish crusaders are still visible.
With the defeat of European Christendom, the Maronites too retreated, up into the mountains of northern Lebanon, where their towns and villages still stand, wedged between great ravines, clinging to icy plateaus of the Mount Lebanon range. Under assault by Muslim Arabs, they found that these pinnacles provided their only protection and they clung on there, up amid the remains of the ancient cedar forests. They were a pragmatic, brave, distrustful people who learned that responsibility for their continued existence lay exclusively in their own hands, that their ultimate fate depended solely upon their own determination and resources. It was a characteristic that they were to share with all the minorities of Lebanon; and later with the Israelis.
Certainly Robert Fisk has the measure of these issues.
Ultimately, strife between Christian and Muslim, when it came, was both prolonged and bloody. The history of Lebanon is full of disasters in which the casualties are numbered in tens of thousands. There was the Christian–Druze war of 1860, which left at least 15,000 dead. Some historians say it was more than 20,000 and the final tally depended rather on who was doing the counting; if anyone bothered. This butchery was serious enough to result in French troops being brought in to protect the Christians.
History repeated itself when the Americans arrived a century later. US Marines landed in Beirut for the first time in 1958 at the behest of the Christian President Camille Chamoun. That happened because the threat from Islam had become still graver after Nasser’s strident call for what he termed an ‘Arab revival’. That event took place a few years before Britain and France made their half-cocked attempt to invade the Canal Zone.
By the 1970s, for reporters trying to write about the war, there was only one safe way for a Westerner to enter Lebanon once Beirut International Airport had been closed by the machinations of Muslim fundamentalists and that was by sea.
We could, of course, drive in through Damascus and Syria, but that still meant an overland haul through the Beka’a Valley, across the Litani and over the Shouff. It also meant being stopped at perhaps 30 roadblocks by the PLO, Amal, Shi’ite freebooters, local warlords, ideologues or another anti-Western group. Most liked to brandish their AKs in our faces as they plundered baggage for booty and occasionally arrested somebody for no evident reason.
There was always more than a whiff of danger. Some of us ended up feeling very uneasy, especially if we’d spent time in one of the Christian enclaves. An Israeli stamp in a passport meant certain arrest and that could be followed by a death warrant. As subsequent events showed, being a journalist counted for nothing; in fact you avoided that marque if you could.
In theory, it was possible to enter Lebanon through Israeli lines in the south, but that was difficult and only possible with connections in Jerusalem. I went through the Good Fence on numerous occasions on assignments with the South Lebanese Army (SLA) at the time of Sa’ad Haddad and afterwards, once, with my wife Madelon. We were shuttled across by the enigmatic journalist-appointed-colonel Yoram Hamizrachi, who originally created the SLA.
The author spent a lot of time in Beirut with the Israeli Army during the course of 1982. The events then taking place shaped much of what subsequently happened in this troubled land. This photo shows him with a small IDF column near Beirut Airport, an area that later became notorious for the number of snipers around. (Author’s collection)
Once the Israeli invasion force had pulled back from Beirut, I was allowed by the spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to go with my cameraman, George De’Ath, in and out to Naqoura, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) headquarters, while making a documentary film there.
It was always hairy on that coastal road north of Nahariya. Hizbollah was active in the region, only in those days the movement called itself the Pasdaran, the name by which they are officially known in Iran. Pasadran, it should be remembered, has always been a close affiliate of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or, as it is referred to in the media, the IRGC.2
Although we were moving between one UN camp and another, t
here were some lonely stretches of road in-between. The only unit that ever offered us an escort of sorts was the Ghanaians, and half of them were smashed, high on either alcohol or Ganga or possibly both. Their infantry fighting vehicles were comforting, though, filthy as they were.
In Lebanon, snipers were a far more serious problem than the mines. Both sides had numerous snipers who were as professional as those in any regular army. Christian forces used a variety of American weapons, including specially adapted M16s. (Author’s collection)
In the end, most of us were routed into Lebanon through Cyprus. Cut off from the outside world, there were ships leaving the ports of Larnaca and Limassol almost daily.
Quite a few scribblers would land at the Christian port of Jounieh and later, a regular ferry plied the route. Those intent on covering the war from the Islamic side of the front would try to go in through Beirut harbour, then still under Muslim control. If that wasn’t possible, they would land at Jounieh and most times the Christians wouldn’t stop them from crossing the Green Line – an avenue of sepulchral ruins that stretched from the water’s edge near the port all the way through Chiyah, Galerie Semaan, Quadi Dbaa and on into the foothills of the Shouff – in the heart of this all-but-devastated Middle East conurbation.
It was a lot more difficult the other way round; then all sorts of questions would be asked, with some scribes even arrested for ‘wanting to go over to the enemy’. In fact, all they’d hoped to do was go home, since most of the ferries used the Christian sector of the city for berthing.
Twice, getting to Beirut, we were transported by the last word in luxury, high-speed motor launches that completed the 120-odd miles in three or four hours – once through an Allied warship blockade. On that occasion, French, British and American helicopters hovered overhead and took photographs while our craft raced for the mainland.