Is the Past Catching up with Lebanon?

​​We know this day. We have experienced it once before. I mean the day that lasts several days. Our language, Arabic, uses the singular, "the day of disaster", to describe a phenomenon that can last longer and even become an entire era. I was once very surprised, reading the major dictionary "Lisan al-Arab" compiled by Ibn Mansur in the 13th century, when I realised how all temporal forms in our language indicate destruction.

"The year came to them" means: they experienced dryness and drought. And when "the hour comes" it means: the end of life is nigh.

In Beirut, we are experiencing just such dictionary days at the moment. With the same fear as once the tribes awaiting an attack, we are looking upon what is to come.

"War of the two standards"

If I think back to the thirty-three years that have passed since the beginning of the Lebanese civil war, I get the impression of having experienced martial acts like no Bedouin of Ibn Mansur’s times.

​​It has been a life made up half of war and the rest waiting for the return of war. And I have experienced a "day" like this one – I mean the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th of this May – on more than one occasion.

Nothing is different about it to the earlier days of this kind, for example in 1982, 1984 and 1987, just as back in 1976, when we spoke of the "war of the two standards" or "Black Saturday" and of the re-conquering of Beirut from the hands of those who had previously claimed the city for themselves.

New battles, old fears

Nothing has changed in this new war, at least as it affects me. The street outside the building is the same as in all the previous wars. I stand at the window and notice that I am just as afraid of the howling projectiles that crown the hails of bullets.

I notice that I am afraid, that the sound comes closer, reaches our street, and then the fighters come into the building, up to our apartments, to ask everyone who opens their doors: "Shiite or Sunni?" Just as they once asked: "Muslim or Christian?"

Everything is the same as ever. Everything stays the same as ever. From the beginning to the end of time. The new militiamen are the same as their predecessors twenty or twenty-five years ago, their faces covered or uncovered.

Then there are the streets, where we let the car think for itself which roads it wants to take, if we have the chance to flee. It sniffs out the way for itself, as an animal senses danger. The fighting has lent the streets the familiar appearance we know from times of war.

In the middle of war

In a single day, the refuse of a month piled up: the wrecks of burnt-out cars turned to layers of ash; trash from the waste sites dragged onto the streets as barricades and set alight; the sand brought by the militias on loaded-down trucks; the wooden desks and chairs and the sofas – particularly popular for their highly inflammable foam – fetched out of the houses.

Within a single day, the armed men on the streets transported the people back to the war; not to the beginning of the war, no, to the middle of the war, to the climax of the war. In a single day, in a single hour. It is as if one had travelled to a different time zone and simply adjusted one’s watch on arrival.

​​Everything has happened before. I can find nothing new I could write in the newspaper to describe the 8th and 9th of May. How could I, when war never changes?

"You’ve written something like this before," a colleague at the newspaper told me. I was saved from embarrassing myself in front of the Lebanese public by the fact that the article was not published – the militia had set the offices on fire before the paper came out.

My office is burnt out, and while I drive around with my family in the car, packed full of everything necessary for a two-week escape, I count up in my mind the things left behind in my desk drawers, on the shelves and the cupboards. That’s how I occupy my mind. It is as meaningless as an arithmetic exercise counted on my fingers.

Fleeing further and further away

The important thing is: we’re fleeing, we’re fleeing further and further away. When we heard on the car radio that the fighting had moved on to the mountains, we drove back towards the valley. The North was no longer safe either, after fourteen men had been killed there the day before.

The Beqaa Valley was sealed off, and the armed men had started setting up checkpoints on the streets. Yet returning to Beirut was dangerous too, once they had killed several people there as they were burying their dead.

War is like a fertile woman, said the poet Suhair Ibn Abi Salma 1.500 years ago – it always gives birth to twins. "The news . . . where is the news?" asks my wife, switching from one radio station to the next to find out where we can go, where the car should take us.

The war won’t be over soon, for those killed in Beirut will be revenged in Tripoli, and in Akkar. And that will fan the flames anew in Beirut.

Hassan Dawud

© Neue Zürcher Zeitung / Qantara.de 2008

Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire

Qantara.de

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