Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  I knew nothing of all this at the time because I can only manage the most cursory Arabic.

  For 36 hours or more, the Christian-dominated Lebanese Force Command and Muslim soldiers did battle. They lobbed everything they had at one another: infantry, artillery, missiles and mortar bombs, together with the full gambit of light and heavy machine-gun fire. Those close enough to enemy lines even lobbed the occasional grenade.

  It was absurd enough for Soviet TM-57 anti-tank landmines to be laid by one side or the other on the concrete of what remained of some of Beirut’s super-highways; huge, 12-kilogram circular objects that you had to be blind to miss.

  Heavy DShKA machine-guns that more recently have been much in evidence in places like Georgia, and Grozny thundered into our defences. Nor could you miss volleys of Katyusha 122mm rockets that screamed over the rooftops. These emanated from what we later discovered were banks of Russian BM-21 rocket launchers that had been clandestinely ferried into the city at night by the Syrians.

  My friend Christian wasn’t the only one to die during those two terrible days. Many more people were ripped apart in bursts from ZSU four-barrelled guns. Fusillades of 23mm shells slammed into houses, blocks of apartments, villages, hospitals and schools. Carnage took place simultaneously on both sides of the line.

  During much of the Lebanese war, this kind of exchange would be sporadic. Only occasionally did it result in a total, all-out effort. When it did, opposing sides would launch full-scale, all-or-nothing attacks, with men and machines manning successive lines of steel that ringed the city. Only when you examine some of the photographs taken at the time is it possible to grasp the horror of these appalling battles that sometimes went on for days.

  I spent the night in the darkest, deepest basement garage at Sodico and was thankful for it because from then on, there were shells pouring down on our positions at ground level. Stalingrad, I imagined, must have been something like this. For hours the Syrians seemed to concentrate on our building, as if they knew that it was us who had started the crap. A few dozen Soviet 240mm mortars – fearsome, weighty bombs that they are – rocked the building all the way to its core. Every time one of them struck, shards of plaster, paint and dust would rain down on us. Sleep was out of the question, though I did fall into an uneasy doze for a few hours as Rocky’s men on the floors above retaliated. It seemed absurd, was one of the thoughts constantly going through my mind. Firing at what? Empty spaces in looming canyons of fire.

  Apart from Christian, there had been a handful of casualties on our side and only one more death: one of the irregulars had caught some shrapnel in his throat. As jagged and sharp as a carving blade, nobody was even aware that he’d been hit till morning; he’d silently choked to death in his own blood. When they discovered his body, it was in a halfcrouched position on a landing in one of the stairwells into which he had crawled.

  A few of the men and one of the female radio operators were slightly hurt by blast, one of them with a flesh wound in the butt. The Lebanese nurses who shared our ordeal dealt with them.

  Dawn came slowly. The image of Christian’s broken body was still before me and it must have showed, for an officer of the Lebanese Force Command came and sat on my stretcher. He told me to get a grip on myself. ‘There’s nothing anybody could have done,’ he said. It’s the price we all pay for this war… what those people do to us. What we do to them…’

  Almost half-heartedly he cursed his Crusader forefathers for not doing a more efficient job a millennium before. Then he stood up and smiled because he too realized that he was a product, if not of that epoch, then of this one, which was equally savage.

  He suggested I get something to eat. They’d got a makeshift canteen at the end of the garage, he said. But hummus and tahini at six in the morning wasn’t on my agenda. A bit later, perhaps, because there was nothing else, if you didn’t count the cucumber salad.

  A short while later, at about ten that morning, we heard bells. They echoed across a city of empty, pock-marked passageways and tall buildings that had been mutilated by war. Though the setting was vastly different, it sounded much as it does along Columbus Avenue when the bells of New York’s St Patrick’s Cathedral ring out early on a Sunday morning. These peals came from an adjacent Maronite church that Christian and I had passed on the way to Sodico. They were for my dead buddy.

  ‘They’re burying the young man’ said the officer who’d spoken to me earlier. He made the sign of the cross, kissing his thumb as he completed his devotion. Apparently the boy’s parents were there, even though the fighting went on. They’d been called in the night and, as a precaution, had been escorted to wait in the church in the early hours. Fluent in Arabic, French and English, fit and strong for his years and an outstanding shot with an M16, young Christian was also some mother’s son.

  His parents buried his body before it was cold; such was the custom both in that war and elsewhere in the Arab world. As somebody explained, the dead putrefy quickly and Beirut that summer was steaming.

  These were things that simply had to be done in wartime, ‘a precaution’, said another before he went off to comfort a young soldier sobbing alone in a corner. It was one of Christian’s schoolboy friends.

  Jacques Tabet, an old friend from many visits to Beirut, fetched me from Sodico about noon in an almost derelict VW Beetle. He arrived at high speed and we left with as much urgency as before. I was struck by the crazy look in his eyes and that worried me, though in retrospect his concerns were justified. Alone, he had driven through one of the toughest urban battles to hit Beirut for a while.

  ‘Let’s go’, he said brusquely, ‘you can’t spend the whole fucking war here.’ He had his own way of expressing himself and was invariably impatient to get an unpleasant job done. Just then the firing intensified: they must have spotted him racing along the Line.

  ‘You’re joking’, was my reply. ‘We’re not going into that?’

  Even though there was still some heavy mortar fire coming in, he insisted that we move. I was happy to wait in the basement until it eased a little, I told him. Give it an hour, was my suggestion.

  A strange conglomeration of weapons converged on Lebanon as the war progressed: these ranged from Steyr Mannlicher sniping rifles from Austria (bought by Iran, purportedly for that country’s Olympic team and handed to Hizbollah), to Chinese recoilless rifles, Soviet Katyusha rocket batteries and many more. This jeep with its American recoilless rifle was fielded by the Christian Lebanese Force Command. (Author’s collection)

  ‘No. it’s not going to get any better… You must come! We’ve got something else for you’, was his retort. That said, he walked briskly towards the car without even checking whether I was following. Jacques obviously hadn’t time for patter and I acquiesced by squeezing myself into the front seat alongside him. There were no other passengers.

  Jacques didn’t hesitate a moment and shot out of the Sodico building like a man possessed. As with much else that had taken place in the past few hours, it was an unusual experience roaring out of that basement and on reflection afterwards, I realized that it was probably the single most dangerous journey of my life. We were the only car on the road and suddenly we seemed to attract an awful lot of attention.

  Jacques swerved, criss-crossed a dozen highways, ducked under bridges and zigzagged in an ongoing effort to confuse those who were targeting us from across the Line. Because we were moving fast, we probably didn’t present an easy target, even though there were chunks of brick and mortar constantly falling onto the road around us. There was no missing the unceremonious pasting as we passed. The Beetle was compact and presented a low profile… for once, comfortably so.

  The time that it took us to get away from the Line was the longest couple of minutes ever. Meanwhile, attrition of another kind had begun as both sides opened up again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Levantine Woes

  ‘Now I watch from another continent, but I find those same emotions resurfacing.
The conspiracies, the car-bombs, the threatening rhetoric and political deadlock are all eerily familiar. The actors are like shadows from a long gone past. They are more grey perhaps – those who have avoided assassination. But the cast in Lebanon’s tragedy has changed little in two decades. Then, as now, a presidential election is the setting, and the struggle where religion and clan play the main roles threatens to set Lebanon back 20 years.’

  16 November, 2007: Octavia Nasr, CNN’s senior editor for Arab affairs, on how little had changed in Lebanon’s political hierarchy since the 1980s.

  BEIRUT, THEY USED TO SAY when I first came ashore from Cyprus in the early 1980s, was a city of shattered facades, bad dreams and few prospects. To this newcomer, it was impossible not to perceive a fundamental, visceral antipathy towards peace, which is how it often is when people are trying to kill each other.

  The war had been going on a while. Dawn was greeted each day by the unholy trinity of Israeli reconnaissance planes in the sky, mortar bombs exploding at intersections and muezzin calls from the minarets in the foothills of the Shouff. All that and more car-bombs than you could care to count, along with roadblocks on the outskirts manned by factions that were almost exclusively Islamic and at war with one another and anybody else who came into contention. Anarchy ruled.

  In its day, Beirut had been among the wealthiest and most delightful of cities; ‘Pearl of the Mediterranean’, aficionados would call it. With its boutiques that rivalled those of the Avenue Montaigne, it had the best on offer from the world’s capitals including its own up-market versions of Harrods and Bloomingdales, chic cafes and the finest patisseries east of Lyon. It had long ago put Cairo to shame as the finest city in the Islamic world. Still more important, Beirut was the hub of the oil-rich Arab banking world.

  By the time I got there, few vestiges of that old exuberance remained. Half the population had fled and the other half was fighting a rear-guard action that was hopeless. The future, one sensed, was a narrow tympan of confidence so easily shattered by daily bombardments that sometimes resembled earlier European wars. Still, the people who stayed could only hope for better because for the majority, there was simply no other option.

  Also, this was Beirut, their beloved Beirut. Public buildings and private houses that sometimes gave the city a look of Tuscany or Provence were still there; at least those hadn’t been destroyed, although just about all had been hideously disfigured by gunfire. Their occupants – the ones with the money – were long gone. Others had retreated to high ground outside town, especially those with children.

  While war waged, there were stark contrasts. There were many Christians around who were extremely well off, many having made fortunes in West Africa’s diamond fields. In contrast, to the west of the Green Line – the ‘World of the Mullah’ as some liked to call it, and still do – there were warrens of poverty where people with nothing to lose but their faith gathered in semi-permanent camps. They did so amid a stench and pestilential filth that was utterly unforgiving.

  A scene of destruction along Beirut’s Green Line. We were not to know it then, but this kind of warfare was subsequently to repeat itself in a spate of other wars that ranged through the Balkans, Chechnya and Iraq, as well as in parts of the African continent. (Author’s collection)

  Some of the most radical Muslim or Palestinian fighters came from there. When they joined one or other faction, they might have been given a bit of cash, perhaps enough to keep their families alive or they would simply take what they needed from travellers like us at roadblocks. For these journeys, I used my second British passport because it had no Israeli stamps in it.

  The Islamic rebellion had its start in a string of festering slums south of Beirut, including those at Sabra, Bourj al Barajneh and Chatila. Almost all were as fetid as anything I’d seen in Lagos, Accra or Luanda after the Portuguese had been evicted; cesspits that had become home to millions. Journalists came and went and reported what they saw, but let’s face it, they really couldn’t even begin to relate to the squalor because none had ever experienced it for themselves.

  One American journalist, having been taken around a camp near Sidon, said in a report home that he thought it ‘quaint’. Commonly described as ‘refugee camps’, these dreadfully impoverished ghettos underscored the oldest of axioms: poverty and conflict tend to spawn euphemisms that are rarely appropriate.

  In fact, the Muslims in those days didn’t hold any kind of a monopoly either in misery or poverty, and a generation later almost nothing has changed. The truth is that Christians living near the Green Line in the 1980s hardly suffered any less than their former Islamic neighbors, gathered together as they both were in clusters and little more than a holler away from each other.

  As some of us were to discover later, those stuck (or abandoned) there had neither the means nor the will to leave. Why should they? They’d been there all their lives. In any event, the majority were too old or too sick to go anywhere.

  The churches helped of course, almost all of them Maronite, that staunch and uncompromising Eastern following that embraced Constantine and forsook Rome, even though Catholicism has persisted, always a powerful presence among Christians in the Levant.

  It was the Maronites who were able to breach the gap and provide the adhesive that kept Lebanon cobbled together for a thousand years. They were still doing it in 1980 and they’re at it again as we reach into the second decade of the new millenium. With that fair sprinkling of Catholics, they do what they’ve always done, quietly and without bother. Remember, these Christians had been fighting for survival even before the first of the Crusaders arrived. They espoused a fundamental credo that encapsulated the oldest communal philosophy of all: one for all and all for one…

  With time, even that touchstone became flawed. More recently it has been viciously exploited by Syrian leaders who have expansionist dreams and created schisms within the Lebanese Christian community. The Franjieh crowd who travelled on the ferry with me from Larnaca to Jounieh were among these dissidents. With all the assassinations that followed over the years, there were wounds generated that will probably never be healed.

  The last President, another old friend, General Emile Lahoud – whom I got to know in the days when he was still Lebanon’s army chief – seemed to have become used to taking his orders from Damascus, which was a pity because I regarded him an as enterprising fellow. He even brought the civil war to a halt, something I covered in some detail for Washington’s Middle East Policy.1

  In the hours I spent at the building that housed the Lebanese Force Command near Beirut harbour after I’d come off the motor vessel Ali from Cyprus, I was asked scores of questions by a succession of officials. They had good reason to be suspicious. Why should anybody who had not been specially sent to Beirut by a news agency or network wish to come to such a dangerous place? Didn’t I know that I might get killed?

  I showed them some of the tracts that I’d written on other wars, but it was my books that probably won the day. Also, they could have checked with their friends, the Zionists (I’d been there often enough in recent years), and no doubt they did.

  I knew that there were good links between the Lebanese Force Command supremo, the youthful, ever-charismatic Bashir Gemayel, and Jerusalem. Even after he’d been assassinated, again with Syrian collusion, the Jewish State continued to cooperate with the Christian Forces. Many of the weapons used by his Lebanese Force Command troops came from the south by sea, usually at night. A common enemy explained this apparently unnatural alliance: the enemy of my enemy…

  Gemayel was always cautious of Israeli motives. He was wary, as his spokespeople would indelicately phrase it, of getting into bed with the Jews. That could also have been because there was a link between the Phalanghists and the Iraqis. Some of the weapons then reaching the Christians had been sent by Saddam Hussein in a complex attempt to weaken relations between the Iranians and Arab fundamentalists who were then supporting another group of Islamic zealots.

&
nbsp; It was certainly a hotchpotch of ideologies, all of them convoluted and more times than not, conflicting. By then almost the entire Arab world, in one way or another, had been dragged into the fray, even the Saudis.

  There were also strange little groups of European radicals from France, Germany, Italy, Ireland and elsewhere working closely with the PLO. Meanwhile, Americans trained Christian soldiers in close combat. Lurking everywhere, we all knew, was Shin Bet, whose influence extended northwards throughout Lebanon, though we would never know who their agents were.

  The plot was murky, and to us relative innocents, impenetrable.

  Buildings sometimes had their foundations blown out from under them. However, life in Beirut tended to go on, down to a small bunch of flowers among the mayhem on the balcony. (Author’s collection)

  Moving about Beirut in the ensuing weeks and on later visits, I was amazed at the ability of the people to endure.

  Every basement had become a home. Beds and tables were placed so that at least two walls separated any occupants from the outside; the first, it was hoped, would absorb major impact. For years these people had been subjected to bombings, rockets, mortars and artillery barrages that sometimes lasted for days. There was no point in talking about ‘getting used’ to such things. Nobody could.

  At the time of my first visit, the war was into its sixth year. Already more than 10,000 Christians were dead. The casualties on the Muslim side of the Line, partly as a result of Israeli attrition and from actions of the Lebanese Force Command – and, to a much lesser extent from Sa’ad Haddad’s South Lebanese Army – were almost ten times that number.

  Even so, there were diversions to relieve the stress: parties up the coast at Byblos – beyond the range of the guns and the Katyushas. There were picnics in the mountains, regular events when the fighting and the weather conspired to lift. As were fishing in the sea (guarded by patrol boats) and the endless 15-course dinners that are always a feature on the Lebanese social calendar. Christian radio stations helped relieve the tension, mostly in French, and invariably hip. Some of their DJs were easily as good as their counterparts in Brussels or Cannes.