By Michael Karam
Beirut is usually a party
town, capital of the Middle East’s most glamorous country where people from all
over the region come to kick back — but this year’s been a little different.
Kidnappings, bank robberies, roadblocks and gun battles — no wonder the
free-spending and normally blasé Gulf Arabs have stayed at home, leaving us
Lebanese to consider not only a decimated economy, but also the very real
prospect of a descent into another civil conflict.
Which is why finally, after 20
years, I’m leaving. My Lebanese adventure, during which I married, had
children, lived through three wars, a popular revolution and an attempted coup,
has come to an end.
I moved to Lebanon from London
in 1992, two years after my Lebanese father died in a helicopter crash in
Sierra Leone. I was 27 and still wondering what to do with my life. Lebanon
seemed a good place to start looking. The 15-year civil war had ended a year
earlier and the country was rolling up its collective sleeves to start picking
up the pieces. I figured we would grow together, Lebanon and I.
Less than 20 years later, you
couldn’t move without bumping into fawning travel features about how Beirut was
once again the party town for the bling-fuelled Arab jet set (think a million
Kardashians) inhabited by a cast of edgy designers, restaurateurs and
architects (think Arab Hoxtonites, if you can) ably supported by photogenic
bankers, ad executives and politicians. They all told us that Lebanon was a
beacon of tolerance, creativity and entrepreneurship.
This was the truth — but not
the whole truth. Lebanon could also be a total nightmare, a country where
prosperity and fun was punctuated by periods of uncertainty, fear and
brutality. In 1996, while my wife was pregnant with our son, we watched from
our balcony as the Lebanese army, positioned on the Beirut seafront, fired
heavy machine-guns on Israeli helicopter gunships during Operation Grapes of
Wrath. Ten years later, at the height of the 2006 summer war, we slept four to
a bed as the Israeli jets bombed south Beirut. In the 2008 attempted coup by
Hezbollah and its allies, I had the surreal experience of being caught in a gun
battle as I walked home from the DVD rental shop. How do you explain this to
people who lead normal lives?
I knew many people — Prime
Minister Rafik Hariri and MPs Basil Fuleihan, Gebran Tueni and Pierre Gemayel —
who were brutally murdered because they wanted a free and sovereign Lebanon.
Fuleihan’s death was particularly poignant. When he was caught in the same
fireball that consumed Hariri and 19 other people outside the Hotel St Georges
on 14 February 2005, I remember asking ‘why him?’ Hariri we could understand,
but Fuleihan was a ‘civilian’, a technocrat, a Yale graduate who worked at the
IMF before coming back to Lebanon in 1993, no doubt to try to make a
difference. Months earlier, we had shared ideas about how to promote Lebanon’s
burgeoning wine industry. Now I was watching him on television stagger in
flames from Hariri’s burning car. He died in France from his injuries two
months later.
And for the next two years, we
never knew where and when the next bomb was going to go off. I was with my
close friend, the Lebanese-American writer Michael Young, not long after the
anti-Syrian Lebanese commentator Samir Kassir was blown up as he was about to
drive to work. Troublesome journalists were targets and I expected Michael,
another loud anti-Syrian voice, to check under his car. When he didn’t, I
pretended to take a phone call, moving safely around the corner, figuring the
wall would protect me if he went up in flames. He paused and wound down the
window. ‘Get in the fucking car,’ he said impatiently. ‘We’re three floors
underground. You can’t get a phone signal.’
Who lives like this? The
answer is we all did because when life is good in Lebanon, it is fabulous.
There is the weather, the food, the wine, the beaches and the mountains. There
is our well-appointed Beirut apartment and the family summerhouse in my
village. The kids are in a good school and we can afford a housekeeper and a
gardener. Beirut is a small and intimate town where there is a solution to
almost everything.
The wine critic Oz Clarke
declared when he came here in February that the Lebanese had a huge ‘generosity
of spirit’. He is right, but the Lebanon he saw — the five-star hotels, the
bars and, dare I say it, even the vineyards — often hides the reality of
seething sectarian hatred that has defined the region for the past 18 months.
Syria is key to all this.
Lebanon’s Sunnis, still angry at what they believe was the order from Damascus
to kill Hariri, support their co-religionists, while the predominantly
Hezbollah-led Shia community backs the beleaguered Assad regime. Battle lines
have been drawn and the fallout from divided loyalties is biting. And this
summer we all wondered if once again we were heading into the abyss.
My feeling that it was time to
get out came to a head during the furore over the now-notorious film Innocence of Muslims. Sunni protestors in Tripoli,
Lebanon’s second biggest city, torched the local KFC, the nearest symbol
of American imperialism, while Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah,
called for further protests across the country. The film was a godsend for the
militant Shia party, deflecting attention away from the daily slaughter in
Syria, which for political reasons it has been unable to condemn, and reminding
the world that the Arab Spring has a dark side.
Lebanon has of course seen it
all before. Instability has been the default setting since 1990 and has not
stopped bursts of growth and prosperity. It’s up to the Lebanese to determine
just how much of their destiny is in their control and what that destiny is.
I’m just not sure I want to be part of it anymore.
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