Beirut: a city in war By Paul Cochrane
Open Democracy 3 Aug 2006
Three weeks into the war with Israel, the capital of Lebanon is a city damaged, deserted and in limbo. Paul Cochrane reports.
Modern “greater Beirut” has long been a tale of two cities. The core areas of the Lebanese capital are markedly cosmopolitan, notwithstanding the confessional-geographic division between the Christian east and the Muslim west. To the south, beyond this relatively prosperous and spacious urban centre, lie the sprawling suburbs where up to 750,000 people, mainly Shi’a Muslims, live. This is the urban heartland of the Hizbollah movement, the base of its headquarters and television channel (al-Manar) as well as of its political and social support. In the past three weeks of war it has been intensively targeted by Israeli bombs. The destruction is massive; even conservative estimates suggest that more than 50,000 apartments have been destroyed here.
The southern suburbs of Beirut were once predominantly Christian villages, as was the coastline from Beirut down to the town of Saida. During the industrial expansion of the early 1970s, Shi’a flocked to the outskirts of Beirut from the south and the Beka’a valley in search of work. The numbers swelled following Israel’s invasions of the south in 1978 and 1982 (the latter leading to an occupation that lasted until 2000). The sectarian civil war of 1975-90 also caused many Christians to leave the area.
This social transformation, with all its attendant disruptions and violence during the civil-war era, was echoed in a common designation for the southern suburbs: “the belt of misery”. After the war ended, a new and more straightforwardly descriptive term was adopted: al-dahiyeh (the suburbs). There are other suburbs in greater Beirut, but the word refers only to the southern suburbs – a recognition of the area’s political, social, demographic and even symbolic power.
Many first – or second – generation residents of al-dahiyeh maintain strong ties with the south and the Bekaa – travelling to their home villages at weekends and during elections (under Lebanon’s archaic electoral laws, citizens are obliged to vote in the village or town where their family is registered). This factor, combined with the huge subventions to Hizbollah from the Shi’a community (which helps fund its $1 billion annual social-services budget) and its successful resistance against Israeli occupation, helped the movement to success in the national elections of 2005.
Shi’a and their neighbours
Al-dahiyeh has long been home to more than Shi’a. Indeed, the largest district of Bourj al-Barajneh (with 350,000 people) was home to Syrians, Iraqis, Sudanese and Sunni Muslims, as well as around 15,000 Palestinian refugees. The infamous massacres perpetrated by rightwing Maronite militia in 1982 in two Palestinian camps on the edge of al-dahiyeh (Sabra and Shatila) included around 900 Lebanese Shi’a among their approximately 3,500 victims.
I lived for two years in the Mreyjeh district of al-dahiyeh, a fifteen-minute walk from the now-destroyed Hizbollah headquarters in Haret Hreik. Many Lebanese in other areas asked me why I chose to live there, referring to its supposed dangers and making snide sectarian comments about the Shi’a and Hizbollah. None of this tallied with my own experience. The area’s friendly atmosphere and strong sense of community owed much to the fact that many people from the same village or family would live in a particular neighbourhood. Hizbollah certainly knew I lived there – I was informed of the fact – but I encountered no problems, far less animosity.
I was in Damascus when the fighting started on 12 July and waited two weeks until the spate of more widespread Israeli bombing appeared to have eased to make the trip to Beirut. On 29 July I drove into deserted Lebanon along near-empty roads, passing several vehicles destroyed by missiles, including a UAE aid truck. I arrived in Beirut on Sunday 30 July to what resembled a scene from a post-apocalypse science-fiction movie. The usually teeming streets were deserted, metal shutters covered shop fronts for block after block, and only a few cars were to be seen.
At a lone fruit and vegetable stall in Mreyjeh, Ali Mroueh offered a meagre selection. He waved his hand towards the buildings of an area that had housed 70,000 people. “There is nobody here to buy anything”, he told me. While we talked, a man on a motor-scooter pulled up and talked to us. “He is from Hizbollah, and wondering who you are”, Mroueh said. “But it’s ok, I said you were a friend.”
A side street containing five eight-storey apartment blocks that usually housed around 500 people was almost deserted. Hassan Awali, 41, was still living on the seventh floor of one with his wife and young daughter. “There is only mine and another apartment occupied in the building, everyone else has gone”, he told me. The family’s other apartment nearby was a refuge for over ten family members (including Awali’s mother and five siblings) who had fled their village in the south a week earlier. His brother Abass told me: “Bombs were falling just outside the village so we left, but my father decided to stay in the village, as did all the other old people. They have weathered invasion after invasion, and now they just don’t want to go”.
Abbas was in Mreyjeh when Israel dropped twenty-three one-tonne bombs on Hizbollah’s offices. “The building shakes, your ears ring and you feel real fear” Abass Awali recalled. “We know it isn’t safe here but we have no place in the mountains. We will stay unless the bombing starts here again, and we feel in danger”.
Some Shi’a have found refuge in areas adjacent to the southern suburbs, others in central Beirut or the northern suburbs; more have escaped to the mountains and the northern port city of Tripoli. The exodus of more than 600,000 Lebanese to Syria in the first week of the bombardment has now eased, and in any case only one border-post is now open after the bombing of the eastern crossing at Masnaa on 29 July.
On the exit roads from al-dahiyeh, bridges lie destroyed and roads are dotted with craters from Israeli air strikes.The desolation here contrasts with the “other” Beirut, where there is at least a façade of normality. More cars and passers-by are on the streets, although the majority of shops are shut and people are buying only essential items. Some bars and restaurants are open, but generators hum in the background to compensate for power-cuts and fuel shortages.
Beirut, east as well as west, feels empty. Tens of thousands have gone to the mountains, to the north, to Syria, abroad. The remaining residents of Beirut stay at home, glued to the television news. Under pressure of war, the two cities are one.
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