Beirut (Part 1): The eve of the ceasefire

Sep 4, 2006 by Constantine Markides

*To see a slideshow of the following photos, and of many more that I was not able include in the post, click here

IT WAS NOT your everyday airplane announcement: “Attention: due to bombings in Beirut, we will wait over the sea.” But the French military plane—which was loaded with pallets of humanitarian aid, two Handicap International employees, a Dutch embassy entourage, two journalists including myself, and a dozen armored French soldiers—must have only circled over the Mediterranean a few times. Twenty minutes later the C-130 touched down on one of the remaining intact strips at the Beirut airport. Only minutes after we had disembarked a plume of smoke mushroomed in the distance. The final day before the ceasefire—the 33rd day of Israeli air strikes—was not panning out to be a quiet one. Once a French military officer returned our newly stamped passports, we climbed into a French embassy van. An M-16, or something resembling it, was propped against the passenger dashboard. The need for guns in the south of Lebanon where a ground war was underway made sense, but assault rifles seemed to me futile in the face of air and naval bombardment. The giant French flag draped over the van’s roof seemed far more practical, though considering that warplanes had hit a UN post and ambulances, perhaps that too did more to give the impression of protection than anything else. Whatever the case, it was not long before the novelty of guns and armed men wore off. They became part of the general Lebanese scenery, a sight so common that, as with pigeons in Central Park or gondoliers in the tourist heart of Venice, you take no stock of them after a while. As we drove into the city center, our armed guide told us that a ceasefire had been agreed-upon for the next day and that heavy bombing was expected in southern Beirut, and possibly also in West Beirut, throughout the day and night. From a military perspective it made sense: today was the last chance—assuming the ceasefire held—to get some work done and smash things up. The van could not take me as far as my hotel, the Mayflower, so I instead they dropped me off near the French embassy at a plush downtown hotel where the other journalist, who was working for a French radio station, was staying. Before leaving the French guide told me that the West Beirut Sunni Muslim quarter of Hamra, where my hotel was located, was not a very safe area and advised I stay at this hotel instead. The other journalist, who apparently knew no one in Lebanon, seized upon this bit of advice. “Yes, I would stay here if I were you, it’s much safer!” But I already had a reservation at the Mayflower and the two members of the Cyprus Médicins du Monde (MDM)—who had just arrived on a Canadian chartered boat and whom I would be shadowing around Beirut—were waiting there for me. He made one last attempt. “At least maybe you should stay just for tonight, since it’s supposed to be the worst night…” But I was not budging and anyway, the hotel charged double the Mayflower’s rate, so I flagged a taxi and headed for Hamra. I was not as skittish as the other reporter, who seemed as much of a virgin at war correspondence as myself, but I cannot say I was unmolested at hearing it was best to stay out of Hamra. I asked the taxi driver about the Sunni quarter, but he could do nothing but mewl the word “benzene… benzene…” in an unsuccessful effort to squeeze a few more dollars out of me. But when we entered Hamra, the picture of desolation and abandonment that the warning had conjured in my imagination was quickly dispelled. People were on the streets, grocery stores were open, and kids were even kicking balls about. It is true that we were only several kilometers from the Shiite neighborhoods of Southern Beirut that Israel was pounding, but Hamra itself had not been hit. In fact, it may in the end have been one of the safest areas: the American University of Beirut is in Hamra. The street life surprised me. There were even a few window-shoppers out. The only sign that this was not an average late Sunday afternoon was that a couple of teenagers were siphoning petrol out of a Mercedes. Media coverage of conflicts gives the impression that when a country is at war every person is under siege and thinking about nothing but staying alive. The words “War in Lebanon” or “Israel Attacked” scroll in red across your TV screen under video footage of demolished structures or the fire from a Katyusha rocket blast and so you imagine that everyone in Lebanon and northern Israel is locked in a life and death struggle or at least scraping by in a constant state of panic. But what is not shown—unless it serves propaganda purposes—is the fact that while the bombs may be falling several kilometers away, human life, in all its complexity, must go on. Terror and panic are not emotions that can be sustained for long periods of time. And while the same cannot be said of fear, one often finds just as much of it in places under little threat of attack as in countries actually at war. But of course that is not to say that people are oblivious to the war. Like a belligerent drunk in a bar, war has a way of making itself heard, however unwelcome its presence. It is no coincidence that the Greek god of war, Ares, was a disliked blustering lout. It was while unpacking in my hotel room that I heard the distant roar of Ares. I grabbed my hotel keys and rushed into a surprisingly quiet hallway and then down to reception. It was as if I had hallucinated the blast. “Did you hear that?” I asked the desk attendant. He eyed me for a moment and then laughed. “That was nothing. Earlier the front door was swinging back and forth from the bombs.” The sound of explosions had become background noise, like heavy thunder. In fact, just before sunset—while I was standing on the roof, listening to the call to prayer wailing from the tops of minarets that sent lengthening fingers of shade across the warmly illumined city—I briefly thought there was a thunderstorm underway in the distance. Within a dense but isolated cluster of clouds I saw flashes of light, which were followed by a rumbling sound. But then a cloud of smoke rose up in the same area, announcing that it was no storm, at least not of the thunder-and-lightning variety. There’s something dreamlike about being in a city under bombardment, so long as the bombs are not falling on your head. The distant rumbles, the vibrations underfoot, the power outages, these all help impart the feeling that you’ve been transported to some other land where daily life, though not ceasing, has been stripped of its superficialities and where the usual disinterest among strangers is replaced by an undercurrent of solidarity. It’s strangely seductive and addictive. I’d venture that aside from the lofty moral proclamations about the desire to “get the truth out” a good part of the reason why most war journalists feel such an urge to rush into every conflict is the craving for another fix. Later that night at the hotel bar, a veteran war photographer, who had been chasing bombs throughout Lebanon for several weeks to get post-explosion pictures of ambulance workers and victims said that it was especially difficult for press to cover the strikes because Israel would often hit the same spot after an interlude. He told me that last week in Tyre the New York Times Magazine writer Scott Anderson had his eardrum blown out upon arriving at the scene of a drone missile attack on a person. He and the photographer Paolo Pellegrin and their driver were in the lead car of a caravan of journalists and had just pulled up near the injured man when an Israeli drone fired a second missile 200 meters from where they were, killing the wounded man, and giving the three of them mild concussions and shrapnel wounds (the car windshields had shattered under the force). “Scott has been walking around with tissue sticking out of his ear,” he said. “I’ve been a lot of places but these bombs are something else. There’s an incredible vacuum effect when they hit. You can wear a helmet and a bulletproof vest but the shrapnel will get you in the face and neck. The first three weeks I was here I was fine, but now I hear the explosion and my heart jumps.” If his heart did jump, it did not jump very far. A moment later there was a distant rumble. “There goes another one,” he said in a flat tone and sipped at his beer. The following morning an explosion jarred me out of sleep, preempting my alarm by seven minutes. I put on a pair of shorts and shirt and climbed the stairs to the rooftop. It was still an hour and a half from the ceasefire. I saw no smoke anywhere but, looking up, suddenly noticed what looked like a flock of sparrows swirling in a cloud in front of the rising sun. They were leaflets. Now I knew that Israel as part of its propaganda effort often dropped leaflets depicting cartoons of Hizbollah’s leader Nasrallah as a snake or scorpion, etc, but I also knew they also dropped warnings to residents to evacuate before they bombed an area. As I watched them flutter down towards the buildings tops, I could only think of the warning leaflets. Perhaps the French military guide was right after all. It would be a dramatic way to herald in the ceasefire but I was not sure whether I wanted to be part of that drama. Had I been a bit coolheaded I would have instantly recognized that—unless the ceasefire had been cancelled, which as of last night it had not—it would be absurd to imagine that Israel would drop leaflets telling an entire quarter (maybe even city for all I knew) to evacuate if it was going to bomb an hour or so later. But due to inexperience and tingling nerves, I had grimly made up my mind that the warplanes were on their way. I lunged at the first leaflet, clutching at air as it whisked away and over the edge of the building. Neighboring residents were doing the same from their balconies. Another leaflet fell in the center of the rooftop pool. As the pool was the size of a large tub, I was able to fish the leaflet out with an extended leg. It was a cartoon of Nasrallah building a sandcastle as a giant wave approached. On top was some Arabic writing that I could not read. It did not look like a call to evacuate. But as I was crouched down by the poolside another leaflet fell on my shoulder. On it were several paragraphs of incomprehensible and—for that reason—ominous text. I went back down to my room and turned the television on to CNN, the only English-language news station that came in. It was a live broadcast from Beirut. On the screen was a photograph of the same leaflet in my hand and underneath it read “IDF leaflets: army will return if Israel is attacked.” There would be no bombing of Hamra. It is a curious irony of modern technology that though the leaflets were falling on my head, someone else who was sitting on a reclining chair six thousand miles away with a can of beer in one hand and a remote in the other knew more about their content than I did. But that said, it is also a curious irony of modern propaganda that the facts presented in such a timely manner to this man will—due to the ideological platter on which they are served and the assumptions that garnish them—result in a sum picture that will likely do more to misinform him than anything else. Despite the fact that the previous day had been the heaviest day of strikes on part of both Israel and Hizbollah and despite that the attacks continued past sunrise, the strikes ended by 8am. It was similar to the eerie silence of a schoolyard six minutes after the teacher has announced to a deafening mass of elementary school kids that their break is over in five minutes. But though the bombings came to an abrupt and unconvincing end, the population did not wait around to see whether the ceasefire would actually hold. At once they were out and traveling to the most heavily bombed places to see whether their homes, or in some cases neighborhoods, were still standing. The roads heading south--completely deserted just one day ago--were suddenly bumper-to-bumper with cars loaded down with mattresses and plastered with pictures of Nasrallah. On the day after the ceasefire, the Secretary General of the Lebanon Branch of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), Dr. Mohammad Osman, drove me and the two members of the Cyprus MDM to visit a hospital and refugee camp in the port city of Sidon, normally a 40-minute drive south from Beirut. The drive took us over three hours. Had we stayed the whole way on the coastal highway it would have taken even longer but we bypassed most of the traffic and the bombed-out bridges by detouring through winding mountain roads. But even there the roads were congested. Dozens of cars were left stranded on the curbside from overheated engines or lack of petrol—a scant wartime commodity that Osman had astutely stocked up on. Everyone I spoke with in Lebanon told me that the devastation Israel had wrought over the last month was greater than anything from the 1982 Israeli offensive or the 15-year civil war. The more I saw, the more I believed it. Just about every bridge we passed, especially along the major highways, had been either damaged or destroyed. The previous day Osman had taken us to the outskirts of the southern suburbs of Beirut and pointed out a ruined apartment building that looked like it had been strafed with heavy gunfire. “This is my house,” he had said. “It wasn’t hit, but the buildings next to it were.” Shrapnel alone had wrecked his building. Those that had taken direct hits were generally no more than mounds of rubble. We paused a while longer at the foot of the pockmarked building. “I hope the furniture isn’t damaged,” he mused to himself and then put the car into gear. But his office at the PRCS headquarters had fared better. Aside from the windows, which had collapsed inwards after a warplane struck a bridge several hundred yards away, the building was undamaged. In southern Beirut, it was a stroke of good fortune if your building had suffered no more than shattered windows. At one point as we were driving towards Sidon, Osman looked at me through the rearview mirror. “Is the wind too much? I can roll up my window.” I told him I preferred the wind on my face. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping the windows down so that they don’t break if a bomb falls nearby.” He paused. “Hopefully we won’t have to start worrying about that again.” Upon arriving in Sidon, the first order of business was to get permission from the Lebanese government for us to enter the Ain el-Hilwe refugee camp. Cyprus MDM had packed and shipped over from Cyprus 21 pallets of clothing, which we had helped load onto two trucks at the Beirut port the previous day. Fifteen of those pallets were to be donated to the refugee camp. Osman waited at the PRCS Al Hamshary Hospital while a young woman named Nesrine helped us secure and complete the necessary bureaucratic paperwork and then took us to the heavily fortified eastern camp entrance. Even with government approval, the Lebanese soldiers almost denied us entry. They first gave a vague nonsensical reason and then said it was because I was a journalist. A ten-minute row broke out between the soldiers and Nesrine, who refused to turn back. Just when I thought they might haul us of the van, we were grudgingly waved on to enter. I could not understand why it was such complicated business to let us enter a refugee camp to deliver some pallets of clothing. I gathered that it was partly due to sheer harassment and partly to security concerns. The Lebanese army does not enter Ain-el Hilwe and the Lebanese authorities have no presence there. Though the camp lies on only 1.5 square kilometers of land, there are about 70,000 refugees there, making it the biggest refugee camp in Lebanon. It was only the next morning, when I was doing some background research online for a newspaper story, that I realized why there was such a fuss over the camp. Ain el-Hilwe is considered to be a center of Palestinian resistance against Israel, with various armed Palestinian factions allegedly running the camp and fighting against one another for control of various neighborhoods. Due to its unmonitored status many believe that wanted militants and terrorists hide out there. Right wing think tanks have even quoted Ain el-Hilwe as the “single most important al-Qaeda base of operations in the Middle East.” Osman on the other hand, claimed that while Ain el-Hilwe was once a hotbed of militancy, it had quieted down recently. Perhaps it was best I knew nothing about the camp while I was there because I could better see it for what it basically was: an overcrowded impoverished concrete shantytown that, like a ghetto or prison pen, does not nurture sunny dispositions and placid living. Ain el-Hilwe, which means the “eye of beauty,” opened after the 1948 war when over 100,000 Palestinian refugees sought shelter in Lebanon. As Nesrine said, “There are people who are born in Ain el-Hilwe and who die in Ain el-Hilwe.” We first visited a school that had been converted into a temporary shelter for the displaced Lebanese. Month-old friends hugged and wept before being bussed out of the camp to return to their southern homes, promising one another that their friendships – which had been forged under wartime duress – would not end with their separation. Nesrine introduced me as a journalist and I suddenly found myself besieged. I was a vehicle through which they might communicate their hardship and sorrow and fury to the world. “We want the United Nations to not only give us schools and food,” said one man who could have easily pursued a diplomatic career had his circumstances been different, “but to also oblige Israel to respect international law and international decisions and not only this decision 1701 but also to implement other decisions because—” and while I would be standing there nodding and scribbling in my notepad, someone else beside me would be yelling, “Israel has only killed civilians but Hizbollah only kills Israeli soldiers, it hasn’t killed one civilian!” a claim that any Human Rights Watch report on Hizbollah attacks would refute, but I would nod my head anyway—to each their propaganda—and keep on scrawling at the paper, no longer even aware of what I was writing because I was thinking about a photo I wanted to take of two women in tearful embrace so I would grab my camera with one hand, while scribbling on illegibly with the other. It was amidst this sort of chaos that I heard someone say that Israel had bombed the refugee camp an hour and a half before the ceasefire. I instantly put my camera and notepad down. I asked Nesrine if it was true. She said it was. Could we go to the site of the strike? No. I instantly grew suspicious. I did not rule out the attack as an impossibility, but at the same time I knew that no one, whether victim or aggressor, is immune to distortion and fabrication. But my suspicions proved wrong. We had some time left over after visiting the community health center and seeing to it that the 15 pallets of clothing had been delivered, so we headed to the site of the attack. I will not forget that moment I turned the corner and saw the row of smashed up cars and the parking lot of rubble. The cars had been crushed in the fountain of debris that the ‘smart bomb’ had created. I had expected to see a building with the roof caved in, not a crater the size of a town swimming pool. Neighborhood residents were busy shoveling debris off their rooftops and clearing paths to their front doors amidst the rubble, careful to avoid setting off any unexploded ordinances. In Maine one clears snow in front of one’s front door and tries to avoid slipping; in Lebanon one clears rubble and tries to avoid being blown up. Lebanese and Palestinian officials later said that a warship shelled the Ain el-Hilweh camp, while the Israeli military said it was an aerial targeting of a house used by Hizbollah guerrillas. I did visit one house that was on the outer edge of the crater. Inside was a couple with their infant daughter. There was now a hole in their roof and their walls and ceilings were spider-webbed with cracks. They were in the process of sweeping up the rubble; there was nothing to do but go on living. The infant smiled at me from her stroller. A terrorist, no doubt. The 6:30 am attack on Ain el-Hilwe succeeded in destroying a dozen or so cars, turning a parking lot into a rubble field, wrecking several neighboring homes, injuring five people and killing a sanitation worker. At the time I was there I had not heard of Ain el-Hilwe’s reputation as a militant stronghold, but even if it were one, I would bet that the death of the garbage collector did not particularly bolster Israel’s security. But I am sure that educated people whose nerves are not frayed by exploding bombs and whose judgment is not clouded by womanly sentimentalism have heralded the strike as a vigorous affirmation of a nation’s sovereign right to self-defense, a vital victory for freedom loving peoples over a culture of hate, a notch on the belt in the war on terror. One simply needs a little perspective—and the right color goggles—to see things in their proper light. The second half of this essay is the October 4 posting Constantine Markides *To see a slideshow of my above photos, plus many more that I was not able include in the post, click here