> Paradise Lost
> Robert Fisk
>
> 19 July 2006
> The Independent
>
> ROBERT FISK'S ELEGY FOR BEIRUT


Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The
> heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out
> oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to
> get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and
> destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet
> again, Robert Fisk, a resident for 30 years, asks: how much more
> punishment can it take?
>
> In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus-headquarters
> of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a
> massive earthquake. In its after math, these a with drew several miles
> and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out
> on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front
> of them.
>
> That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the
> city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that
> the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to
> every family left alive. Some cities seem forever doomed. When the
> Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th
> century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In
> the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine' the
> Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers
> blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here
> 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked
> and abandoned.
>
> An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed
> women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly,
> pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage
> heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them
> greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable
> weeds among the grass along the roads..."
>
> How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place
> die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment
> blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its
> people massacring each other.
>
> I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives,
> and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost
> the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless,
> legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of
> houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity
> amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame,
> and whose suffering we almost always ignore.
>
> They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin
> and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their
> women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of
> their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks
> on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their
> homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water
> and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we
> compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last
> night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.
>
> And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate
> like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious
> foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate"
> response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.
>
> I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it
> reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful
> to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so
> brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the
> city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the
> prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February
> last year.
>
> The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war
> in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still
> stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator
> to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long
> ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.
>
> At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut,
> where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and
> watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the façade of the
> French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy.
> So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French
> mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian
> doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via
> Maxima a few metres away.
>
> Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he
> caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he
> roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a
> canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I
> couldn't rebuild Beirut!"
>
> And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International
> Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening
> halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into
> the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway
> viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway
> bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been
> smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel
> of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.
>
> It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been
> levelled and "rub-ble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of
> a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned
> parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of
> Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West
> keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah,
> the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man' and
> Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of
> clerics' and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no
> doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two
> Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.
>
> But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act
> of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point
> accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue -
> what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about
> ourselves?
>
> In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by
> chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck
> white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go on if we have to for
> days or weeks or months or..." And he counts these awful statistics
> off on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger
> surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see.
> Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small
> concessions."
>
> I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over
> the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and
> a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and
> scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like
> paradise.
>
> As for the huddled masses southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found
> hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the
> parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut
> by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.
>
> Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the
> USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards
> the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of
> the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to
> help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.
>
> And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way
> through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning
> buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below
> our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the
> morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth,
> breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.
>
> The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss
> was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil
> Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the
> 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:
>
> My people died of hunger, and he who
>
> Did not perish from starvation was
>
> Butchered with the sword'
>
> They perished from hunger In a land rich with milk and honey.
>
> They died because the vipers and
>
> Sons of vipers spat out poison into
>
> The space where the Holy Cedars and
>
> The roses and the jasmine breathe
>
> Their fragrance.
>
> And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an
> aircraft - perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although
> the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of the sky over the
> eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly
> decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the
> army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers
> of Kfar Chim, who have been mending power and water lines these past
> six days to keep Beirut alive.
>
> I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick because I think the
> Israelis will bomb again but we'll show you everything we can." And
> they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the
> wreckage, standing around me to protect me.
>
> And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the
> small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks
> and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked
> after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.
>
> And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why
> they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military
> radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend
> electricity lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to
> be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on
> fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men
> had to be liquidated.
>
> Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of
> last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily
> papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near
> Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue
> pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from
> the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and
> several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity
> between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in
> a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.
>
> I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli
> invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of
> broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one
> headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under
> Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".
>
> Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700
> Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy
> Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops -
> as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the
> killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached
> 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.
>
> Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed
> last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot
> where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of
> them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were
> trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive
> here for 30 years.
>
> I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an
> Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine
> novel about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take care," she says. "I
> am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is
> unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians,
> and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the
> graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.
>
> Then, on my balcony - a glance to checkthe location of the Israeli
> gunboat far out in the sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from
> an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city.
> "Beyrouth" was the dateline. "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our
> properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be
> obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans
> have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to
> find protection in more peaceable countries."
>
> On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph
> of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian
> Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins,
> which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a
> few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their
> evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of
> Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to
> sea.
>
> Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed
> at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's
> festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most
> popular songs is dedicated to her native city:
>
> To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart
>
> And kisses - to the sea and clouds,
>
> To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.
>
>> >From the soul of her people she makes wine,
>
>> >From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.
>
> So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?
>
> 'Disgracefully, we evacuate our precious foreigners and just leave the
> Lebanese to their fate'