*This month [April] Fourth Night will be posted on the 14th instead of 4th

**Scratch that. Due to tax day, which I just found out is tomorrow, and due to a mystery lunatic emailer self-dubbed “Don K’ Shayne” (read that with German language in mind) who has been pulling a Fourth Fiction on me and humoring me to distraction with almost daily hilarious emails that are “sent live, bedside, from the broke ass depths of yo imagination,” I’ve decided to cash in my Get Out of Jail April Fool’s card and bypass this month’s post. By the way, Big Don, be advised that I can do an IP address search on yo’ ass if you post a blog comment…

Gaddafi, Berlusconi, and formerly virgin bodyguard

ON JUNE 28, 1914, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, thereby setting off World War I. Almost a century later, on December 17, 2010, a 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor named Muhammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of a local government building after authorities confiscated his produce. This act of self-immolation by Bouazizi, who died of his burns eighteen days later, sparked off the protests in Tunisia that toppled the government, an uprising that then spread to Egypt, toppling Mubarak, as well as to Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya, to name other recent headliners.

It’s fitting that World War I, with its meaningless trench-butchery and toll of over fifteen million, began with a bullet; and it’s just as apt that the 2011 uprisings, which have been spreading through the region like a raging forest fire, began with a flame. This conflagration has left Arab autocrats scrambling in confusion, with some of them promising democratic reforms (Yemen), others handing out $2650 to every family (Bahrain), and yet others staging absurdist umbrella video-ops and ordering warplanes to bomb their own citizens (Libya).

Last weekend, Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son Saif gave a press conference. “Now, everything is calm, and Tripoli is safe,” he said. “Today, in the whole of Libya, no casualties, no attacks. Everything is peaceful, so today everybody is happy…” His father’s hired men, meanwhile, were machine-gunning protestors from the back of trucks.  (Of course, Saif’s Theatre of the Absurd presentation comes across as sober diplomacy when compared to his father’s claims on Libyan state TV that Osama bin Laden and fellow al-Qaeda militants were fomenting the youth of the country by drugging them with “hallucinogenic pills in their coffee with milk, like Nescafe.”)

A dictator like a Qaddafi or a Mubarak, who has held power for decades by suppressing opposition and crushing revolt, inevitably develops a conviction that he is a demigod. The lavish U.S. military and diplomatic aid he often receives (Qaddafi being the exception, although even that changed in recent years) only further reinforces his sense that he is The Chosen One. His personal creed is best expressed by Louis XIV of France’s declaration “L’ État, c’est moi.” Of course, ‘I am the State’ can be a real bummer during revolutions, as Mubarak learned. One wishes that Qaddafi would learn it too, although it appears he’ll still be proclaiming, “they love me all” down to the final moment, when he may well be staring down the barrels of a firing squad (hallucinogenic Nescafe is as good as any explanation for his insanity).

Astonishing as the degree of delusion that these despots suffer from may be, the sudden uprising of the Arab populations is even more astounding. These revolts have unsettled not only autocrats the world over, who now fear that their flock of sheep might suddenly morph into a pack of wolves, nor business interests on the right whose salaries depend on the energy resources being in the right iron fists (‘stability’ for shorthand), but also those liberal academics, pundits and diplomats who once cleared their consciences over their complicity in Washington’s support of the region’s thugs by telling themselves that Arabs are too apathetic, tribalist, and unfit for or rejectionist of democracy to allow for a less authoritarian political structure.

As with the last awesome sweep of revolutions in modern history – the toppling of the Soviet tyrannies in Eastern Europe in 1989 – poverty and miserable social conditions have been central motivating factors in these revolts. But there’s no downplaying the calls for a more open society that has fuelled the Arab revolutions. Young and old, Muslims and secularists, bearded and clean-shaven, in t-shirts and in hijabs, they were all out there chanting the kinds of things one hears at any pro-democracy rally. Fox News pundits may rant about and long for the threat of an Islamist takeover but anyone reporting without a blindfold knows that the demands are for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, equal justice under law, more transparency, etc. – not exactly stuff out of an Islamist agenda.

I was traveling through Patagonia when the Tunisian protests began and was in the process of moving back to New York City from Buenos Aires as the revolution took place. As a result, I didn’t follow the events closely, nor did I recognize how momentous they were. And even after I had settled back into New York, I soon turned into something of an ostrich, my head buried in my inner sands. I was too consumed with my own petty preoccupations to give much attention to the grievances of the outside world.

I’m embarrassed to say that it wasn’t until long after the Egyptian uprising was in full swing that I began to realize the magnitude of the events. On Thursday, Feb 10, shortly after Mubarak declared he wouldn’t step down, I looked into flights to Cairo and began conniving ways to make the trip happen. By that point the events in the Middle East had touched me to the core. But I was too late to witness the revolution: the next day newly appointed vice president Omar Suleiman appeared on state TV and grimly announced Mubarak’s resignation.

This wasn’t a revolution headed by an intelligentsia vanguard or a mutinous officers corp or even a religious or ideological group. It was a true broad people’s revolution whose common fabric consisted of a demand for basic rights and decent living conditions. No foreign powers assisted the rebellion (to the contrary, the dictator overthrown was a cherished U.S. ally whom top US diplomats have previously called a “family friend,” hence the “Made in USA” labels on the discarded tear gas canisters). As far as revolutions go, it was non-violent, despite every effort by Mubarak to instigate violence through Molotov-throwing camel-riding undercover police. And it was successful: it led to the overthrow of a despot of the largest Arab country – no small thing seeing that as Egypt blows so blows the Arab world.

Not that there’s little to be concerned about now: power has temporarily been assumed by the military – not an institution known for promoting democracy and human rights – and a good part of the modern history of the Arab world is one of revolutions gone awry. But things were already awry in Egypt. And when a population so large forcefully articulates a vision for a more democratic society, it’s not easy for the next chump in power to keep the dungeons and torture chambers running, no matter how much his zest for them.

No political event in my life had ever stirred up so much in me as the Egyptian Revolution. These events in the Levant and the neighboring spontaneous, non-violent revolts against decades-long authoritarianism and repression are to me at least the most astonishing and inspiring uprisings of my generation. But along with a sense of exultation at the ousting of Mubarak, I also selfishly felt regret that I hadn’t flown to Cairo in late January. I’d been in regular communication with my friend Sean, who’s now living in Cairo and who recounted his experience of the Alexandrian uprisings in last month’s post. The post-revolutionary euphoria wasn’t lost on him: he announced a couple of weeks ago that he’d gotten engaged (he mentioned he might get married in his post, although no one took him seriously at the time since the possibility applied to both of the Egyptian sisters whom he was traveling with to Alexandria). My enthusiasm and support, meanwhile, found outlet in a more modest and less committal way: I enrolled in an evening Beginner Arabic course.

It raises one’s spirits to watch these despots get the public boot. So to those men and women who’ve risked and faced teargas, imprisonment and live rounds, I raise a non-alcoholic beer in several toasts:

• Here’s to Tunisia for kicking it all off.
• Here’s to Egypt for putting on the most spectacular show (with the hope that you remember that, while the guy in the undecorated fatigues may be your brother, the one with the stripes and medals is Mubarak’s buddy).
• Here’s to Libya who’s been handed the hardest act yet.
• Here’s to the rest of you: may your respective uprisings bear fruit, or at least shed the rotten ones, as they did in Tunisia or Egypt.
• And finally, here’s to el-BrotherLeader, Qaddafi: may Your Homicidal Eminence overdose on Nescafe and plunge raving mad with umbrella in hand (but without Amazonian once-virgin bodyguards) into the Mediterranean, where a misplaced and disoriented great white shark might mistake You for an elephant seal and bite off Your testes, leaving You after four months of drifting in agony to wash up a dispirited eunuch on the topless shores of the French Riviera, Inshallah.

Alexandria burning at the corniche. Photo by Sean Moylan

Last night around midnight I spoke with a friend who moved to Cairo in the fall to teach English. I hadn’t heard from him since the uprising began. Several days ago he left Cairo for Alexandria. Our webcam conversation about the protests there was abruptly cut off ten minutes later due to a lost connection. I tried calling his phone and contacting him online but there was no getting through. Instead I messaged him, asking if he’d write an account of his experiences over the next few hours for today’s Fourth Night post.

I woke up five hours later to find a long message from him that had been hastily written from an internet cafe. He didn’t recount everything that he’d described to me the night before – which included telling details like the Made in USA teargas canisters used against the protestors – but the piece offers a picture of the tumult in Alexandria that may be news to those who might assume from the Cairocentric news coverage that only the capital is burning.

Noam Chomsky, who is 83 and no abecedarian in the history of revolutions, referred on Democracy Now to the events in Egypt as “the most remarkable regional uprising that I can remember.” The monster in the closet of every unpopular political regime is that a popular revolution in the neighboring country (the proverbial “rotten” apple in the barrel) may spread to their corner. From Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen, this is what’s happening in the Arab world now. The ‘rot’ of revolt against authoritarians allied to Washington is spreading. And the events are increasingly looking to be not a footnote to history but a new chapter.

I’ve decided, therefore, to postpone Part II of my “Es Complicado” essay on the convoluted psyche of the Buenos Aires porteño until next month. Instead I append the message that my friend sent through this morning. I’ve minimally edited it for clarity, breaking up the stream of text into web-friendly chunks and occasionally including bracketed asides for clarification. I have, however, preserved the uncapitalized facebooky format.

The photos are his. But he claims his best material is his video footage – of clashes between protestors and police, of men praying in the street while police cars burn. Unfortunately, he’s been unable to send any of it through yet. As soon as I receive the files I’ll edit and post the video here.

So here it is, the Alexandria uprising in the words of Sean Moylan:

“i went to alexandria last thursday night with two beautiful alexandrian sisters. there had been protests in cairo and we knew there would be a protest in alex after friday prayers but we thought the demonstration would only be in the main midan [square]. friday morning we head downtown to the corniche [the road that runs along Alexandria's seafront] to see the library, shop, have lunch and avoid the protests in the main square.

after the noon prayers, we found our backs to the ocean and tens of thousands of protesters to our right, left, and front. there was a violent confrontation with the police. strangely, there were still families sitting along the ocean. there were kids. fishermen were fishing. but no taxis. no direction was safe. so we stayed put until the protesters passed. we walked behind them in the opposite direction of their procession. tear gas was in our eyes.

Alexandrian uprising. Photo by Sean Moylan

the city quieted for 3 o’clock prayers. i remember seeing police vehicles burning and hundreds of men praying in the street adjacent to the mosque. immediately after the prayer ended, the men rose in a tumult. the group sounded like an angry beehive. they wielded pipes and clubs and began a fast walk. the girls and i had to run or else be caught up in the mob. each street we ran to had more protesters. we passed a group who was praying. i wasn’t sure how they’d react to us walking through them. fortunately they were in a deep conversation with allah and ignored us.

we slipped into the cecil hotel, where al’jazeera, the new york times, and other journalists were staying. from the rooftop bar i saw the crowd burn the next hotel over and the bank and train station. they paraded the body of a dead protester on their shoulders. i searched for every exit in case they torched us. i was with a group of pirates – salvage crew actually – dutch and south african engineers, divers, captains. i’m not going to lie. i was nervous and drinking beers to calm my nerves.

after 5 or 6 hours, against everybody’s advice, we left. managed to find a taxi and headed to the outskirts of the city. the next day, saturday, i taxied all the way to cairo because the train station was burnt and the bus would drop us off in downtown cairo in the country’s biggest melee, the one you’ve most likely seen on american news channels.

when i arrived in cairo, many businesses and government buildings were torched. tanks and armored vehicles were everywhere. in the shadows of the pyramids, civilization was crumbling. in my neighborhood the banks were out of money. food and water was flying off the shelf, but the egyptians were working together to get through these difficult times.

one of the most impressive and memorable sights was of the young men of every neighborhood erecting whatever roadblocks they could and defending the neighborhoods all night long. they built fires for warmth. we brought them food. occasionally they fired a gun into the air to communicate with neighboring streets and to scare potential looters. they caught a few and treated them humanely, turning them over to the army. the police were gone. the militia worked with the army.

Tank in Alexandria. Photo by Sean Moylan

the people love the army and cheered the tanks as they rolled through. the people hate the police. the police who rob blatantly. the police known for their torture chambers. every cop who got his ass kicked probably deserved it. the looters were criminal elements in a city of 20 million. no surprise there. what is surprising is mubarak encouraging anarchy in the hopes the people will want his return to power for sake of stability alone.

the political protesters were peaceful. criminals are criminals. yesterday mubarak paid thugs 50 LE to throw molotov cocktails and rocks on the peaceful protesters in tahrir (‘liberation’ in English). the same thugs who intimidate voters. the monster cut off our phones and internet in the middle of an emergency, as if people didn’t know to meet in tahrir to protest.

on monday my school evacuated us to sharm al sheikh. there is no military in the sinai according to the treaty with israel. halfway down the peninsula, we hit a bedouin roadblock. they took control of the sinai. they made us wait while they prayed and then allowed us to pass. the bus drivers hauled ass for many kilometers after that roadblock.

so here i am, put up in a 5 star resort in the middle of a revolution. it’s not my fight, but i’m pulling for the people. i love the egyptians. love em. in fact, i think i’ll marry my alexandrian friend. it’s sad it came to this. i can’t believe the mubaraks of the world have held power as long as they have. the protests turned into a revolution quicker than anybody could’ve imagined. egypt is the most populous arab country. it has the suez canal, billions of american taxpayer dollars every year, and many more vested interests than tunisia. mubarak is stubborn indeed. he would rather watch his country burn than step down after 30 years. the man is 82 years old. give it up, asshole.

let me add too obama has got swagger. his statement after mubarak’s speech was right to the jugular. i only wish he’d come out stronger against mubarak. america’s fear is that strict islamists would take over if no dictator was here. but the egyptians don’t want that. only a small percentage of the population supports that approach. i don’t know where it will lead. but i hope it is resolved soon.

tonight i will hike to the summit of mt. sinai and watch the sun rise over the holy land. i may head to addis ababa and wait this out. pardon my sloppy writing. my thoughts are a bit jumbled as i haven’t had time to sort all this out myself yet. the situation is complex. many institutions are involved. there are social, economic, political, and other issues to be resolved. i hope minds stronger than mine are working hard on it.”

And I just received these messages from him:

“another thing. during the crisis, my neighbors formed long orderly lines at the grocery store. typically, egyptians politely elbow their way to the front the way americans get a beer in a crowded bar. there were runs on banks for cash. today is a crucial day. the VP is negotiating with opposition groups.the state run media is stepping up anti-foreigner rhetoric. one of my colleagues was harassed in cairo yesterday for the first time ever in 5 years. and he speaks decent arabic. i’m going to try to download pando [software to send and receive large files]…“

“the free pando is inaccessible in this country. the $25 one says ‘This product is not available at this time.’”

“and the so-called strict islamists here in Egypt are the Muslim Brotherhood. they are of the most moderate and tolerant of all islamists. mubarak and the west have played out the islamist bogeyman card. the islamic brotherhood will have a voice in the new govnerment proportionate to their numbers in the population. we may as well get used to it.”

-quoted text by Sean Moylan

*Read a more extended account by Sean in a Feb 11 Daytona Beach News Journal interview HERE

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

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

The young have their sturdy legs and their health, and when lacking those, a constitution th at can endure, even thrive, in the changes and uncertainties of a refugee’s plight. Even the sight of young mothers being evacuated with their children gathered about them is somehow not as gut wrenching as we feel it should be.

Of course in the actual war zone it is different; there we lament the huddled family trapped in the shelled house or the hospitalized child staring unblinkingly out of a face pockmarked with shrapnel wounds. But in the evacuation it is the laborious stilted movements of the old that most upsets us.

The young—mobile and adaptable but less practiced in suffering—can handle evacuation better than war. But not the elderly. Having experienced almost the entire domino of life’s troubles and private failures, they have learned to cope with hardship. But they have also progressively lost the mechanisms to handle tribulations on the move. Their roots, though tough and weathered, are also deep and brittle.

One avoids dislodging the elderly from their environment for the same reason one avoids transplanting ancient trees: while they may survive the uprooting, they may not have the strength to re-root themselves. This regard for elders is just one of the countless reasons why war—that great destroyer and uprooter—should be an absolute last resort.

One realizes how insensate and feeble are the reasons cocksure jingoists often give for going to war—the respectable term for strafing a country with bombs—when you see its effects firsthand. Casualties aside, war is a sprawling mess even when merely witnessed on its outer edges. If the media did not oblige their respective governments and their governments’ allies by portraying their war efforts as well-intentioned, albeit complicated, surgical procedures to remove tumors, then there would be more of a public clamor to exhaust all options before resorting to violence. 

But these other options, often as elementary as “do not commit aggression,” are rarely exhausted for a straightforward reason. Most wars are not the acts of self-defense or liberation that they claim to be, but rather conscious efforts in the old-fashioned imperial sense to control resources and territories and to crush national independence movements. While the rhetoric and, to a lesser extent, the techniques may be less barbaric than in the conquests of past centuries, the motives are as old as war itself.

For several weeks in July, the predictable dead-end pontifications on the Cyprus problem that dominate headlines in Cyprus came to a halt. Tens of thousands of foreign nationals were flooding from Beirut into Cyprus, mostly by sea, to escape the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. Since Israel had shelled the Beirut airport as well as the road to Damascus, a boat ride to Cyprus—a little over 100 miles to the east—had become the safest way out of Lebanon (or for war correspondents, who travel against the flow of terrified traffic, into Lebanon).

For foreign and local reporters covering the evacuation, myself included, it was a busy time. Aside from writing the evacuation stories for the Cyprus Mail, I was also working for CNN with the Anderson Cooper 360 degrees crew for a few days as a “fixer”—the local go-to journalist for everything from translation and research to chauffeuring, lugging, and food delivery. International news crews run exorbitant tabs when they travel to other countries, so sleep does not pay. For them to squeeze four hours of sleep per 24 hours is a rare luxury; the norm is two or three. After several days at the port the pavement at the Larnaca port started to undulate. It was the first time I could say I was hallucinating from lack of sleep without lying.

It did not help that I was trying to simultaneously work two jobs. It demanded unscrupulous improvisation and cunning. At one point I had to drive to the Larnaca airport with the show’s producer to pick up the crew’s body armor, which Israeli security had confiscated the day before at the Tel Aviv airport. We left the dock at the very same time that a French-chartered cruise ship bearing 970 evacuees, including 200 unescorted children, was docking. Now I was supposed to do a “color piece” on the boat arrival for the newspaper.

Obviously I had missed all the color. But upon returning with the body armor to the hotel, I managed to get a rundown of what happened at the port from two other members of the CNN crew. I dashed off the article from the hotel lobby. The next morning I was amused to see at a newsstand that the editor ran my story—or rather Tommy and Neal’s story—as the cover piece.

It was about a week after the evacuations began, as I was preparing to indulge in an escapist Sunday afternoon of sloth, when I got a phone call from a US military press officer. It was regarding my request several days prior to join a US evacuation mission. Three hours later I was on a Navy Seahawk helicopter bound for Lebanon.

There were five journalists onboard—two from WAVY-TV NBC Norfolk, two from Inside Edition,  and myself. The helicopter ride, not including a half-hour stopover on the USS Whitney to refuel, took just over an hour. We touched down off the coast of Beirut on the deck of the USS Nashville, a troop transport vessel that had already made two evacuation trips to Cyprus carrying 1,200 on one trip and 1,000 on the other.

In wars and mass evacuations, inevitably nothing proceeds as planned. Not only was it unclear if we would be able to pick up any evacuees but there was also some initial doubt as to whether the vessel would even be returning to Cyprus or would be headed to the southern port town of Mersin, Turkey.

But it was finally established that we would indeed be picking up about 500 Americans from a Beirut beach in an LCU [landing craft utility]—vessels used to transport troops and equipment to shore, recognizable from war films like Saving Private Ryan. Upon returning to the USS Nashville, we would steam for Limassol, Cyprus.

It was approaching sunset when we finally set out in the LCU along with several dozen marines.  There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about the verdant mountainous Beirut shore except for a patch of smoke in the distance and the numerous helicopters and warships in the area.

As we neared the shore, the bow ramp lowered, revealing a desolate beach buffered by some concrete barricades. It was no Normandy, but neither was it the hectic Beirut port I had earlier expected. We braced ourselves as the boat ground to a halt on the pebbly beach and then spilled out down the ramp and onto the shore. A bulldozer, which had been stowed at the stern, followed us and began to smooth out the pebbly shore in front of the bow ramp so that evacuees did not stumble while boarding.

The American evacuees, who were waiting on a dune above the beach, descended in the dark  towards the LCU, first those in wheelchairs and then the elderly. Lebanese soldiers and US marines worked side by side to help people board. It was an odd and silent collaboration, and the silence was maybe not entirely due to the language gap seeing that Israel could never have gone on its Terminator mission in Lebanon without the consent of the US, its diplomatic bodyguard and sugar daddy arms dealer. Of course, it was also a curious sight to see marines saving Americans from possible incineration from weapons that the US had delivered to Israel. Just two days earlier it had been reported that the US was rushing a delivery of satellite- and laser-guided munitions to Israel.

There are plenty of scenes from that trip that will remain with me: the Beirut skyline viewed from the open doors of the helicopter; the flush of eagerness on the faces of the marines (“people go through entire careers and don’t get to do something like this” one marine told me); the beaching of the LCU in Beirut; the panic of evacuees fearing they were going to be left behind when the LCU began to fill; the Lebanese Americans girls flirting with the marines in the USS Nashville’s dining hall over fried chicken and grilled cheese sandwiches; the rows of evacuees sleeping on deck in cots and on mattresses, many of which the marines had offered up from their own beds; the dark outline of an unlit assault warship trailing us for protection as we steamed towards Limassol “all lit up like a goddam party boat” as one officer put it; the chaplain who spoke to me on the upper deck about Jesus and the exorcising of the demons of Vietnam and how on Sundays they hit golf balls off the deck and shoot skeets and spar with giant boxing gloves and dress up in Sumo suits “to return a degree of normalcy to these marines.”

But one sight particularly affected me. It was while the evacuees were disembarking from the LCU onto the USS Nashville. A heavy older Lebanese man with a cane and a severe limp began working his way down the ramp, assisted by several marines. On the Beirut beach it had taken about ten minutes for two Lebanese soldiers to assist him from the dune to the boat.

He made it to the end of the ramp and then paused. There was a minor swell and the ramp was slightly shifting about. He stood in tottering hesitation as the water splashed around his feet, soaking his shoes. The marines had their arms around his waist but he was a big man and if his good leg gave out on him, as it seemed it might, they might very well all go down.

It was then that the enormity of war struck me. And I had seen none of the violence. I had merely experienced, at least in these last few hours, the first leg of evacuating a fraction of the Americans seeking to escape Lebanon, who in turn made up a fraction of the total evacuees, who in turn made up a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people [by now over a million] displaced within Lebanon. And yet the effort and project required to handle this tiny fraction was enormous.

Most declarations of war are an act of hubris. The rest of the world must accommodate itself to the decision. It is a decision that leaders can take with little physical and psychological discomfort—guarded as they always are by a ring of troops and a cushion of yes men—while those who lack the protection are left to suffer the consequences.

There were few illusions about Hizbollah’s indiscriminate and deplorable attacks against Israel but when Israel in turn demonstrated it was scoring an almost perfect 10 in civilian deaths, respectable media outlets soberly explained this was due to Hizbollah’s use of civilian shields. IDF officers assure that Israeli strikes are precise. But unless Israel can offer evidence that Hizbollah recently recovered Tolkien’s Ring, with its power to grant invincibility, from the Mount of Doom, then they are going to be increasingly at a bind to explain the strikes on Red Cross ambulances, humanitarian convoys, hospitals, power plants, a UN observer post, fuel storage tanks, fleeing civilians in cars, and hundreds of homes throughout Lebanon’s south.

On the steam back from Beirut to Limassol I spoke to a number of evacuees about their final days in Lebanon. One American had been trapped up in the mountains north of Beirut after Israel had bombed the bridges and highways leading north. She managed to escape thanks to an intrepid US embassy worker who knew some secluded side roads up into the mountains.

A pair of Lebanese-American siblings who lived in the border village of Yaroun described to me how an Apache helicopter had one night beamed floodlights through the windows of their home. The Apache hovered in place for some time and then flew off. Their grandparents’ house, however, had not been spared. Fortunately, their grandparents had moved into their underground garage a few hours before the shelling and emerged unscathed.

But these stories, dramatic as they were, were not in my mind as I drove back to Nicosia from Limassol the next morning, exactly 24 hours since I had received the phone call from the press officer.

It was the image of the limping man that stuck with me. The man with the bad leg pausing at the edge of the ramp, drenched to the shins, worrying about his next step.

Constantine Markides

*To see a slideshow of all of my photos from this evacuation mission click here.