Beirut (Part II): The morning after

Oct 4, 2006 by Constantine Markides

The first part of this essay is the September 4 posting.

ON THE EVE of the ceasefire, a photographer in the Mayflower Hotel bar told me that in southern Beirut there are “places where it looks like Hiroshima.”  He had been to a number of war zones, and he seemed a reasonable fellow, but this seemed to me a gross overstatement.  Upon visiting the area several days later, however, I found it was not nearly the inflated piece of exaggeration I had assumed it to be.

Seventeen hours before the ceasefire, Israel fired 20 missiles in the span of two minutes in southern Beirut, leveling a complex of eight buildings.  It was one of the places where, a few days later, I fired about 200 photographs in the span of two hours.

What follows is a photo essay consisting of about a quarter of those photos: blackened buildings with their tops smashed in, a lone tree standing impossibly amidst the wreckage, the Hizbollah TV crew broadcasting from their old destroyed site, a displaced resident salvaging her remaining belongings, a man contemplating the hills and valleys of rubble where residences once stood.  Arranged chronologically, they seem to me to be the best -- although perhaps not the most courageous or ambitious -- way of conveying what I saw.

The title is something of a misnomer.  The photos were not taken on the morning after the ceasefire but rather three days later.  But it may as well have been the morning after.  The devastation felt biblical in scope, and the reconstruction effort -- for both property and life -- cannot be measured in days any more easily than a lake’s contents can be accounted for with a thimble.  The bombing and fleeing may have ended in southern Beirut, the news media may have flocked elsewhere, the events may have already begun departing down the memory hole, but the morning after will persist for a long time.

To access Photo Essay, click here:

BEIRUT: THE MORNING AFTER

Constantine Markides

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