A barbarian in Beirut

Michael Azar

3 May 2006

B is for barbaric, bestial, and bombed. Michael Azar on Beirut, the city that was one day
described as the Paris of the Middle East and the next lay bleeding on the ground. Out of
necessity, the story of Beirut is also a story of power, memory, and statecraft.

Beirut. Beyrouth. Bairout. Beryt. Berytos. Berotai. The name itself has the power to tame
this chaos without beginning or end that is the city. The name and the city are locked in a
life and death struggle with one another. A peculiar war, since one cannot live without the
other and since the death of one would immediately be followed by the death of the other.
The city will die if it cannot surrender to its name and the name will die if it cannot sink
its talons into the citys flesh in one place or another. They have to penetrate one another
mutually as skin seeks skin though they know that their union threatens them with
extinction: the knife, the virus, or the deadly melancholy of threatened loss. In each new
tale and perspective is a new city: this is the riddle and it is this that makes the origin, the
beginning of the beginning, the city before its naming, such a fatal attraction. To return to
Beirut in order to find once again how it really was there that is, here in order to
see once and for all where and how everything began. To be a witness to how the city
first came to life, when the name first came to the city, when everything later was shaken
to the joints just as the joints were trying to hold the shaking at bay, how the people live
their lives and meet their deaths in these tremors. How the people do everything that
people do no matter what is going on around them: lifes parasitic union with the world,
like the union of name and city, in more or less violent exchanges where the boundary
between person and world is placed at risk: the oxygen circulating in and out of the body,
the food transformed to movements and shit and fluids, the stimuli of the skin and the
souls invisible nerves that bring forth new worlds.

To wake up for the first time in Beirut is like waking to a new dream. Or better: to an
empire of signs, whose inner combinations and compounds at first seem fortuitous and
arbitrary. This is the agony of the barbarian: he does not understand the empire of signs,
is a stranger to the language that plays out before his eyes, and lacks the most elementary
means of taming the swarm. The name deserts him. He knows that he is in Beirut, but
where in Beirut? He knows that he has the city outside his hotel, but which Beirut?

At the same time I rein myself in: the barbarian is in agony because he has heard all too
many tales of the city that probably have less to do with the city than with peoples need
for tales. When we step into the city we step into the tales about it: we step into the name.
I realize that there is no other way than to become part of the tale: a part of the words that
circulate from ear to ear in the same way a coin moves from hand to hand, a virus from
body to body. At the same time one must not blindly repeat the name; one must stamp it
with the singular perspective of ones own seal.

The barbarian knows that no tale of Beirut is like another, that all of them are told out of
a particular perspective and a particular interest. In fact, Beirut exists only in these tales.
Or rather, there are as many Beiruts as there are tales, eyes, lips, sorrows, frenzies,
nerves, and hopes to perceive with. Not so much Leibniz, where the various points de vue
tend to radiate together, as Deleuze, where each perspective is a different city.

Not to speak of thresholds in time: there was a time when the city was not associated with
war, when it was, on the contrary, the name of a place where the Occident and Orient
soaked up the rays of the sun together in perfect harmony. The time of the dream-like
image of the city as it appeared to the French Orientalists: Lamartines, Nervals,
Flauberts, or Barrs Voyage en Orient. Beirut as the hope for a new world, a happy
fusion of spirit and body, of the Wests reason and the Easts magic. European artists and
authors hurried here in waves and followed in the path of the early Crusaders: this was as
much a holy land, a place where the first Christians collected their tales and spread them
over the world, as a land of reflection, a seat for dialogues about cultures, religions, and
civilizations. It was to this city they came, the refugees of the region: Armenians,
Assyrians, Palestinians, the intellectuals who hoped for free speech and an open life.

But it was also to this city that the conquerors of the world came: Phoenicians (since the
Iron Age), Persians (between 559 and 333 BC), the Romans from the west (between 324-
630), the Arabs (from 630), the Crusaders (from the twelfth century), the Egyptian
Mamluks (from the end of the thirteenth century), the Ottoman Turks (from 1516 to the
end of the First World War), the Russians (during a short invasion in 1772), the British
(who bombarded the city in 1840), the French at various times (for example in 1860,
when they intervened in order to rescue the Maronites from the Druses, and in 1920,
when, under a UN mandate, they divided Lebanon from Syria and thus created the
modern nation state Lebanon, Le grand Liban), the Israelis (in 1976 and 1982), the
Syrians (in 1977 and at the end of the 1980s), the Americans (in 1958 and at the
beginning of the 1980s), and so on.

Say right away that youre Swedish then well get through faster, says the Lebanese
taxi-driver to novelist Jan Guillous protagonist Hamilton when they pass the first of
three private roadblocks on the way from the airport to central Beirut. Why, asks
Hamilton, is it good to be Swedish? Its the only country that hasnt tried to invade
Lebanon, answers the driver.
Origin and repetition I
What is left of before in after? What has time made of the people, the ruins of the city?
And at the same time, the question has to be raised from a longer perspective in which
conquests and wars are just some of all of the violent tremors that have shaken Beiruts
body. Can she ever be herself again after the violent earthquake that levelled her
completely in 551 AD? Can Beirut find her way back to herself after the Arab conquest in
635 or the attack of the Crusaders in 1110? Can she find herself as she was before the
arrival of the Turks in the middle of the sixteenth century, before the massive Russian
attack in 1772, before the British bombing that destroyed her city walls in 1840? Or why
not before the enormous famines and the typhus epidemic during the First World War (the
dead were reckoned by the hundred thousands)? What should we say about the massive
inroads in urban planning and architecture backed by the French during the 1930s which,
in the name of transparency and surveillance, modernized away the old Beirut, le vieux
Beyrouth, le zouk the city of small marketplaces, of narrow alleys, the shady
bathhouses, the city of bazaars sung by the poet Nerval, dressed as an Arab, and whose
great Hammam was left such detailed testimony by Alphonse de Lamartine? How was
Beirut before the Second World War and the anti-colonial uprisings? Before the French
fought their civil war between the adherents of the Vichy regime in the country and the
forces of de Gaulle? Can Beirut ever find her way back to the life before the bloody
conflicts of 1958 and back to a city that lost its entire centre ville during the civil war
between 1975 and 1990? The name is always inscribed in the movement between origin
and repetition, between before and after. The city is founded as an independent kingdom
in Phoenicia (around 1400 BC) and takes the name that is perhaps her first from her first
queen, Beryt. When the Romans besiege the city under Emperor Augustus in 14 BC, she
is rechristened as Colonia Julia Augusta Felix Berytus Julia Augusta after Augustus
daughter. And the emperor transforms her at the same time into the symbol of both
happiness and repetition: Felix, happiness in Latin, the name for Phoenicia, is at the
same time the bird Felix (also Phoenix trans.) which, like the city, always rises from
the ashes In this happy military colony, symptomatically enough, prominent schools
are founded: one of the Roman Empires foremost law schools (under Septimius Severus,
192-211 AD) and a centre for education which rivalled even Alexandria and Athens.
When the French author Alphonse de Lamartine arrives in the city during his Oriental
tour in 1832, his Voyage en Orient, he places his hopes in its healing powers. Lamartine
believes that this terre sainte, this happy Berytus, will be able to save his seriously ill
daughter and make her as happy as the city that bears the daughters name: Julia.

Even though the country has been plagued constantly by inner conflicts and has been
subject to all the political turbulence that has always shaken the region, there were still
many who were astonished by the rapidity with which the relative peace disappeared in
the absolute war during the spring of 1975. The peculiar aesthetic of rapidity: suddenly
everything people, houses, streets, schools, radio broadcasts, rumours, noises, smells
everything is drawn into a completely new whirlpool of life. All of Beirut accelerates;
the subtle difference between a man who one day playfully demonstrates to his children
how one loads a weapon and the same man who the next day protects the same children
with the same weapon from the other sides fire.
It only takes three months to demolish Beiruts centre ville, that magnificent, open, and
very beautiful downtown. Al-Bourj, the tower. Places des Martyres, Place des Canons.
The famous battle for and from the hotel now begins. The luxury hotel and the
skyscrapers had to be taken over as quickly as possible: its a matter of finding a secure
point de vue from which to observe ones enemies and fire missiles at them at the same
time.

Looters and snipers take over the core of the city, the battle lines are fortified and the
legendary green line is established. The object is to not stick your nose out through the
window or door: to stock up (with food, water, medicine, wax candles, and flashlight
batteries) and stay indoors for as long as possible. No place is secure, the snipers can find
their way at any time to people eating, making love, and sleeping even through walls
and roofs. Beiruts children, like my cousins, spend half their childhood in dark shelters
and hopefully learn slowly to tolerate the sound of falling missiles and buildings.
Centre ville/downtown Beirut: the obvious objective for all occupiers. If you control the
downtown, you own the city. Here are the citys fortresses and towers (al-Bourj), her
panopticon, the place from which power rules and holds surveillance over life. The
original twenty-metre-high tower lacks a year of origin, but we know that Emir
Fakhreddin had it restored during the 1600s and that Emperor Napolean IIIs generals
chose to put up their base camp here in 1861 even though the tower itself had already
disappeared earlier in the nineteenth century. As Roland Barthes writes, the centre of the
modern city is always filled up it is from this centre that the values of civilization are
unified and condensed: spirituality (with the churches), power (with the offices), money
(with the banks), the market (with stores), the language (with its agora, cafes, and
promenades). To move through the city centre is to encounter the social truth, to
participate in realitys magnificent excess.

And then suddenly, in a few intense and sun-baked months, Beirut loses the entire ground
on which she rests. The city centre dissolves into an empty nothing while the citys soul
fights to resist being sucked into this black hole. The hole in a ring, the nothing at the
centre of being: during the entire civil war the hole has gradually expanded at the cost of
the ring; the city implodes into herself while large portions of the population choose to
flee into the mountains or away from the country entirely. The whole downtown becomes
a desolate landscape of ruins that scarcely anyone visits for fifteen years. Probably
Beiruts centre ville is the place in the world that has had the most ground zeros per
capita.

But perhaps the shock was hardest for the name itself: one day Beirut was the
magnificent symbol of peace, harmony, burgeoning economy and smiling bodies
stretched out in the sun; the next day we see her bleeding bodies in the street. First the
massive idealization of the city that took off after the Second World War, when she was
depicted as the Paris of the Middle East in tourist guides, the media, postcards, and film
(during the 1950s and 1960s a must for the international jet set). Here is how she was
portrayed for example in a guide from 1957: Everything is free, trade, the press, the
individual.1 And like this right before the war breaks out: Welcoming, open, tolerant,
these words that usually seem abstract in the extreme, permeate the Lebanese even in
their most modest gestures and daily life.2

After that, the crime: Beirut appears in film after film, book after book, as the very
symbol of war, kidnapping, suicide attacks, snipers, and terrorism. She becomes the abyss
of the world, the new Babel, the city of the barbarians. During the final phases of the
Cold War it was always here that spies were sent (Kim Philby, for example, was one of
the citys regular visitors), Islamic terrorists were hunted, contacts with weapon traders
were made, men were picked up for new militias. Beirut becomes an arena for the politics
of the superpowers: it is here that the globes and regions states battle each other via
emissaries. With the collapse of the Lebanese state, every political actor steps forward as
a representative of the real Lebanon all of them with a greater or lesser power backing
them. The Shiite Hezbollah backed by Iran, the Amal militia by Syria, SLA (South
Lebanese Army) by Israel, The Chamounists by the US, and so on.
Shibboleth/Checkpoints: Barbarians at the gate
It is soon as difficult to know whom one is fighting with as it is to know whom one is
fighting against. Against the accelerating paranoia which is always in danger of
spreading into a war of everyone against everyone else influential interests strive to set
up clearer lines of division, sharper threatening images, and to enforce fragile loyalties.
Firm boundaries are required in order to control the inside as well as the outside, intricate
passwords to hold the line against ambivalence. So new checkpoints are continuously
invented: first and foremost the requirement for the correct name the definitive
metonym for religious as well as tribal belonging and then the requirements to come
from the right quarter, to carry the right identity papers, to be able to pronounce words in
the right way. Sibbolet or shibboleth. The interrogations about identity organize life,
without them you do not know who should take part in the circulation of lifes gifts or,
respectively, decrees of execution. To measure the correct distance to the other, the one
we dont yet know, who can just as easily constitute a danger as a possibility, is a difficult
art. Not least of all in a country where anyone could be your future murderer.

A password, un mot de pass: skin colour in South Africa, the Star of David under the
Nazis, glasses under Pol Pot, the passport for so-called illegal refugees at the walls of
the EU. And so on. The right shibboleth opens the important gates; the wrong one can
mean that you will have no tomorrow. In Lebanon, the tragedy by the River Jordan is
repeated. That is journalist Robert Fisks description of how, at the beginning of the war,
the Falangist and Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel, after four Christians had been found
dead in a car in December of 1975, gave his men orders to kill the first forty Muslims
they got in their sights. So they set up a roadblock and cut the throat of all who could not
prove that they were Christian. This so-called black Saturday soon tallies more than 300
dead. The tactic goes on to kill legions.

It is not what an identity is thats important, but what it is possible to do in and against its
name; not what a political faction or nation really is or has been, but what is signed with
its name.

The constantly emerging new militias deal with one another and foreign interests as if
Lebanon were already in their hands: that is how a certain militia that controls a part of
Beirut can sell land for European nuclear waste, while another militia a few quarters
away sells to foreign investors the right to the land for a future construction project.
International drug and weapon dealers from around the world turn up in the city. The
black market blossoms in the midst of a raging war. In 1979, a luxury hotel is even built,
Hotel Summerland, in the middle of an area in which bombs fall daily, equipped and
protected by its own militia. In 1982, the same year Israel invades Lebanon seriously for
the second time, with almost 20 000 civilian dead and a bombed out Beirut as the result,
the famous Barbar Bakery opens, and it is soon transformed into a part of the popular
Barbar Street, an entire pedestrian zone with Lebanese fast food specialities. The conflict
escalates from year to year and the city collapses like a house of cards; the people pull
away from the wave of newly formed militias and assault forces from the rest of the
world. The refuge to which earlier so many people fled now becomes the city from which
everyone flees. In 1982, even the PLO is put to flight by the invading Israeli troops. Not
all of the Palestinians: it is especially the military forces that are driven out, while
defenceless older men, women, and children are left to be slaughtered in short order by
the Christian Falangists under the supervision of Ariel Sharon. The massacres in the
Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila become the new symbols of Beirut. B as in
barbarian, bestial, and bombed. Instead of being the land of religious tolerance and
diversity, Lebanon is now the example of the impossibility of the multicultural society.
In political debates in western Europe it is a favourite tactic to use her like the Balkans
later as a warning sign for immigration in general and the Middle East especially.

Orientalisms other side: the rhetoric of the age of the Crusader, the Christian worlds
paranoia against Islam, the tolerant Western worlds resistance to oriental despotism
hits the Lebanese at full force. Both George Bush Sr and Jr place Lebanon on the list of
rogue states and terrorist strongholds and perhaps it is just a matter of time before the
US finds a reason to intervene yet again in the name of civilization.

Death solves everything (Stalin) The biopolitics of

siege
There is a scene that is deeply engraved in my memory, though I have seen it only on
film: during a family wedding, where one of my cousins is getting married, two powerful
bombs suddenly explode in rapid succession somewhere in the vicinity. The happy and
beautifully dressed guests throw themselves to the ground to take cover, lie there for
several long seconds, but then get up again immediately as if nothing has happened and
apparently without commenting on the event at all. This is an example of the ethics of
the siege that Lidija Ginzburg speaks of in Notes from the Siege (about the German
armys siege of Leningrad 1941-44). People continue to live in the midst of a raging war,
they try not to notice it, they hold out so that others will hold out and because they
themselves would not hold out if the others did not. The powerful abstraction of social
prohibition, she writes, demands that one does not give up, that one does everything to
preserve hope that it is possible to live in the world:

In calm and peaceful times, for example, one can wake up at home in bed, stiff with
terror at the unavoidability of disappearance, while one can walk around distracted and
indifferent in the midst of a bombardment [] Sometimes it is easier to approach a
deadly danger without thinking about it than going to work without thinking about a
public reprimand one has received. There is no other situation in which it becomes so
obvious and visible what kind of power social pressure exerts. Since time immemorial
and up to our day the word coward has been a magic word. It is all right to be afraid of
catching cold, but to be afraid of death is shameful. How was it possible to engrain
something like that in human beings, with our strong sense of self-preservation, how was
it possible to educate us for that? The explanation is perhaps that no society or state could
have otherwise existed, and that is why all of them have invested their educational
resources in that very thing.

Politics are biopolitics, a way of regulating a persons relation to his life and to his death,
to threaten death and tempt with life, but at the same time it has to play a double role and
exploit the riddle of death in political economics. On the one hand, one has to get people
to stop fearing death, or even further, to dare to die for a cause that is depicted as so
valuable that life itself has to be sacrificed to it. On the other hand, people really have to
fear death, or better, a particular way of dying, so that power can still have the ultimate
means of terror to use against the people. It is less a question of extinction than the form
of extinction. From the public executions (whose logic Foucault so thoroughly depicts in
Discipline and Punish) to the public humiliations (which were incarnated in images from
the American torture centres in Iraq). To torture to the verge of death without necessarily
killing in a physical sense, that is a form of politics whose aim is the dissolution of all
personal dignity in the victim by subjecting them to the trauma of total powerlessness.
Powers extreme stagings of naked, harrowed, and mutilated corpses: Christ on Golgotha,
the dead American soldiers who were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the
staged execution of Nick Berg in Iraq, and so on. It is a matter of killing in the name of
life. For every death on their side, another life on ours. Soon the entire country is
possessed by this politique du massacre. Out of nowhere they show up in a
neighbourhood, a village, or a camp and the massacre is launched. No one is spared:
they club and slash people to death, scalp people alive, use small children in target
competitions, slit pregnant women open and use the foetus as a football. Examples are
set; it is shown what a deadly power ones own life possesses. Terror spreads as does
the demand for vengeance. As Foucault stresses, power develops through this double
movement: on the one side, destruction, subjection, annihilation (of the enemy); on the
other, creation, construction, mobilization of new life forces. By killing the enemy
together, community is strengthened: it is with the blood of the other that the oath of
ones own group is sworn. This invests executions with the feeling that, in the midst of
the most gruesome massacres of civilians, they work in the service of life despite
everything. Foucault: one gets entire populations to kill each other off in the name of
survival. Massacres have become vitally important. It is as stewards of life and survival,
of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to conduct so many wars and
thereby kill so many people.
With the collapse of the Lebanese state and the outbreak of civil war, the state loses this
power: it loses its role as steward of death as well as life.

The executions and declarations of war now become the business of the militias. They
perform their power clearly by making manifest their ability to control and torture the
bodies of others, they demand no loyalty of the dying but hope for their fear and pain,
they do not expect love, but fear and subjection. The militias are not controlled by a state
apparatus; now the Lebanese mafia structure takes over entirely. The politicians who
were once influential leave the marketplace in order to take up (once again) their role as
head of family and clan leader (zuamas), which in practice means that they become a
kind of commander of their own armies, directing troops from particular regions of the
country. Here we find the Druse clans Jumblatt (with their father Kamal and the still-
active son Walid at their head) and Arslan, the Maronite families Chamoun (where
Chamille, for a time the countrys president, functions as leader), Franjieh (with
Suleiman, who was also president for a time, as leader and his son Tony as heir) and
Gemayel (with the father Pierre, who is building his organization and his army the
Falangists according to the model of the Nazis after his visit during the Olympic
Games in 1936, and whose two sons Bashir and Amin were both president), the Sunni
clans (Sohl, Karame, etc.) and the various leaders of the Shiite groups. The civil war is
just as much, or perhaps more, a dispute between these various clans.

The world is full of demons (Heraclitus)

Meanwhile, death solves little. The dead tend to become even more alive. In a capital
with a city centre called Places des Martyres this ought to be obvious: the dead return as
ghosts and get their lifes blood from the unsettled affairs of the living. Beirut is literally
besieged by ghosts, phantoms, spirits, demons, zombies one for every unpaid debt
and life circles to just as great a degree around the necessity of satisfying them as it does
around the necessity of satisfying the living. The dead walk again on the legs of the
living. As long as the dead are not really dead, the living are doomed to eternal repetition:
the ghost is reminiscent of the director who forces the actor to perform the same action
again and again, and who is only satisfied when the actor has realized his debt to him.
Meanwhile, the living forget for some reason that they themselves are the marionettes of
the dead. Within every living person hisses the sound of endless generations of dead,
within every person the dead and the living fight a dreadful battle that always ends with
the dead taking the victory as well as the person they inhabit. And for every person who
dies, they strengthen their hold on the survivors.
Every battle between human beings plays out against this background: will the enemy be
sent into the realm of the dead or is there some other way of neutralizing his power? In
Lebanon today it is difficult to forget the risks that are run in political murders not
least because the martyr and suicide bomber annul the classical foundation of biopolitics
by turning the threat of death into a gift. The privileged classes of the country choose
instead to intensify the classical strategy in order to control the threat from the others: to
erase them from the political map, marginalize and reduce them to outlawry, as homo
sacer. If there is no possibility of giving everyone political influence, social rights, and
economic power, one is forced to ban them from the agora, from justice, and the citys
zones of pleasure. And most importantly: they must be erased from memory and
knowledge. The poor masses do not exist.

Around Beirut one encounters a special category of the Lebanese nations outlaws: the
Palestinians. It is not easy to identify them with the naked eye since they bear no obvious
outward signs. For that reason the specific checkpoints and shibboleths are required to
distinguish these intimate barbarians, those who in language as well as appearance are
almost the same, but not quite (according to Homi Bhabhas formulation). Baudrillards
description of the modern neoliberal states fits the Palestinian existence in Lebanon quite
well:

Whole portions of the population fall into oblivion and are completely abandoned. []
Society forgets them, and they forget themselves. They end up outside the field of vision,
like zombies destined for extinction, destined to be recorded on the statistical graphs of
disappearance. Whole sectors of our modern societies, whole countries from the third
world wash up in this fourth worlds desolate zone.

Just to name one example: on 16 February 1996, during the rebuilding of the old city
centre by the powerful private company Solideres, their bulldozers crushed a bombed-out
house in order to build new houses and hotels for the well-to-do on its ruins. The only
problem was that the house was occupied by a whole family of homeless Palestinians
and that they were still in the building when it was razed. With their deaths it became
clear to many that the new Beirut would in fact be two: one for the privileged and one for
the countrys zombies. One Beirut for those who belong to both the political and
economic elite like multibillionaire Rafic Hariri, who at the time was both owner of
Solideres and the prime minister and one for those who are robbed of power to the
point that only violence can break through their isolation. When Hariri explained that
Solideres aim was to recreate and reproduce the original look and feel of central
Beirut, it was clear to many that it would (once again) be a kind of gated community for
the rich. Lebanon would be reborn, return to its origin which meant that it would again
take up precisely the same position it had before the war, on the edge of the same abyss.
But this execution order for the living creates a whole new arena, a gruesome scene in the
middle of the River Styx where zombies arriving from death unite with zombies arriving
from life. The dead that refuse to leave life and the living that refuse to die build a
powerful alliance, a reserve army for revolutionary as well as fascist interests. Soon
various leaders are competing to get them on their side with every thinkable temptation:
revenge, drama, drugs, and bread.

Origin and repetition II: The past begins in the future

One does not invoke the dead, however, in just any way; one has to call upon them in a
certain constellation and lay claim to a certain affinity and lineage in order for them to
mobilize their resources. In all ethnically loaded confrontations we find these
repetitions, where ones groups identity is rationalized by examples of historical
persecutions by other groups from the past and by horrific visions of how it will go for
them in the future. Many Christian groups, for example, the Maronites especially, anchor
themselves in an historical collective that binds them to the Phoenicians rather than to the
Arabs, thus setting themselves against the latter. The Maronites imagine themselves as
having been threatened constantly throughout history for example by the Arab
conquest, the Ottoman rule, the massacres by the Druse, the growing Arab nationalism,
the arrival of the Palestinians, and not least by the wave of Islam beginning at the end of
the 1970s. They like to see themselves as the Wests and Christianitys last outpost in the
Arab world.

In fact, they can take up a position as an active subject in the history of Europe. They are
the ones who make up the first Christian congregations (St Paul founds a Christian
congregation in Tyros, for example, which also becomes the first episcopal seat); they are
also active along with the Crusaders in the battle for the spread of Christianity. Their
close relationship to France, la douce mere, was established during the era of the
Crusades; the French King St Louis IX (Louis the Holy) can even proclaim the following
already in 1250: We are convinced that this nation that was founded by the holy Maron
[the founder of the Maronite church] is part of the French nation. At the same time he
promises the Christians that they will be protected as if they were Frenchmen
themselves. During the nineteenth century, Maurice Barrs notes hopefully during his
Oriental journey that the Christian Lebanese might be in the process of creating a
French-Oriental civilization and warns of the dangers that threaten them. They are
striving, he continues, through their language toward an ideal they call France and
which they desire with the kind of nostalgia that plagues exiles.

At the beginning of the war, the mainly Christian alliance keeps a low profile because of
potential inner conflicts. Later, when Bashir Gemayel unites the separate groups within
the alliance at the beginning of the 1980s, its Christian profile becomes more striking.
They now put themselves forward as representatives of a threatened Christian trans-
historical us with thousand-year-old roots which must hold together for its future
existence against a threatening Muslim trans-historical them. The dead on their own
side are invoked to fight the living on the other side while the living in their own
group are mobilized to fight the return of the zombies to the other group. During the civil
war, certain Christian groups are supposed to have dressed as Crusaders in order to give
themselves courage in the face of attacks by Muslim groups. The living walk literally on
the legs of the dead.

Two well-known creation myths about Lebanon are widely prevalent. In the first, God
creates the land according to the image of any paradise; a land of milk and honey where
the sun always shines and the sea embraces the Lebanese earth like a lover. When the
people of the neighbouring countries see Lebanon they are green with envy and ask God
how this injustice could have occurred. Gods answer calms them: Note well that I also
created the Lebanese for this world. In the second, it is the Lebanese who wonder how it
is possible that God has given them all this goodness. When they ask God why he
privileged them to this degree, He answers instead: Note well that I did not leave you
without neighbours.

We find the first version, according to the historian Fouad Said, among those who
continue to blame the countrys misfortunes on other Lebanese, on other ethnic and
religious groups. The other version prevails among those who attribute the causes for the
war and conflicts to the involvement of foreign elements; whether Palestine, Israel, Syria,
Iran, or the US. Both cases are of course tragic, says Said, but in the latter case there is
an ounce of feeling for the nation that at least promises the possibility of a Lebanese we.
We should not forget, he believes, that no national state has been able to establish itself
without aggressively marking its specific nature against that of other peoples.

At the beginning of the national mythology there are always the others, the neighbours.
The nation never begins on its own its utmost foundation always exists in an external
element, a founder that created it from the outside, or an enemy that is externalized out of
the chaos so that a certain inner order can be possible. This logic can be expressed in
many ways: the essential thing is that the powers of nationalism work to hide this
anomaly in order to cover over the nations own original otherness, its original
foreignness to itself. America did not begin with the Americans, the Nazi would have
been nothing without the Jew, Christianity nothing without the Judaism from which it
developed, the West would lose its identity and self-image completely without the so-
called uncivilized barbarians and terrorists in the Orient. In one of Freuds most beautiful
texts, Moses and Monotheism, he lays bare this dynamic in the heart of Judaism as well
by maintaining that its founding father Moses was in face an Egyptian. The Israeli
national state like all states that insist on the state as a kind of vessel for a single
identity, whether confessional or ethnic is thus struck at its very foundation, since in
this case it is working to close out the very grounds on which it rests.

At the beginning was not the nation, but the resistant shard; not the race, the nation, or the
community, but the antagonistic fragment. No original puzzle into which the pieces will
harmoniously fit, but pieces that cannot be put together no matter how one tries. An
agonistic combination that different forces try to exploit and put together in conflicting
ways. Besides, we know where metaphors of organic and harmonic unity usually lead us
that which does not fit in is thrown out, fenced in, or exterminated like a virus, a
cancer, lice, rats. On the whole, these sort of social ideologies develop a violent
sensitivity to deviance, to antimony, that is, to everything that does not belong to the
name. Everything that the name has not managed to tame and that falls outside the
nations, the races, or the religions unified body: the stateless, the nationless, the
godless, the paperless, the illegal refugee, the immigrant, the stranger, the homosexual.
The negation of negations. The intimate stranger who from within undermines the powers
that look for transparent structures. The one with no state, who like the barbarian does not
speak the language of the state, is either a wretch or better than human, according to
Aristotle. A person without a nation defies all known categories and arouses revulsion,
explains Ernst Gellner. Against homo sacer to use Agambens term again
civilization cannot uphold civilized standards, since this type of human, or non-human,
knows no language other than violence. Homo sacer, writes Giorgio Agamben, is a
being one is allowed to kill a pure, naked, and pared down life, a bios, unprotected by
any judicial restrictions. It suffices to name Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib in order to
understand what were talking about: in the name of civilization one gives oneself the
right to become one with ones own image of the barbarian.

The double negation and the birth of the nation

One should, according to George Naccaches famous formulation, be able to maintain
that the modern nation state of Lebanon is the result of a double negation. At least that is
the foundation that was formulated in the unwritten National Pact established in 1943
among the countrys powerful men of that time: the Maronite leader Bishara al-Khoury
(who also became the countrys first president) and the Sunni Muslim leader Riyadh al-
Sohl (who became the countrys first prime minister). In that decisive agreement, it was
determined that the country should be neither solely Arab (Muslim) nor solely Western
(Christian). That is how the countrys historical compromise is articulated: a kind of third
way, or, if you like, the choice of an identity without identity. The Christians would
promise not to try to turn the country into a part of the West, while the Muslims in their
turn would promise not to try to turn it into part of the Arab world. In this way, Lebanon
would become a nation large and tolerant enough to accommodate several visions, an
institutionalized and independent meeting place for a peaceful cross-fertilization between
the Orient and the Occident precisely in accordance with the European fascination
with the country during the nineteenth century. One could also, however, formulate the
pact as a double affirmation: the country would be Christian and Muslim, Arab and
Western at the same time.

Thus, in the same pact, the right is inscribed to preserve the already existing bonds to the
Arab world and the West, respectively if only to a certain limit, the specific location of
which can of course not be specified. The bonds will be both preserved and broken: it is
out of this difficult birthing process and balancing act that the new national state Lebanon
fights to find a future after the declaration of independence on 22 November 1943 (and
again after the French troops leave the country in 1946).

In order to guarantee this order, life has to be breathed into the political system of
representation that was already worked out in the constitution of 1926 and that defines
Lebanon as a parliamentary republic, made up of different religious sects. The
distribution of political posts will be made on the basis of confessional identity: the
president will always be a Maronite, the prime minister always a Sunni Muslim, the
speaker of the parliament always a Shiite Muslim, the chief of staff a Druse, the
commander-in-chief an Orthodox Christian, and so on in a hierarchal distribution for the
nearly twenty officially registered religious groups that exist in the country. (A structure
that borrows essential features from the Ottoman Empires mutasharrafiyah.)

Furthermore, in accordance with the same constitution, the share between Christians and
Muslims in the parliament and other political organs should always be based on a 6:5
ratio (that is, six Christians to five Muslims). All of this in accordance with a principle for
the division of power that takes as its point of departure the religious groups supposed
demographic strength (a principle that created enormous problems because the only
census ever taken which was accepted by the privileged groups was from 1932 in
which the Christian population was declared to have a slight majority over the Muslim).

In essential features, this Lebanese political structure could be classified as a

consociational democracy. The national pacts role for the future history of the country is
hotly debated. On the one hand, it has been held up as an example of a successful
compromise it is thanks to the pact that Lebanon was able to enjoy relative stability
and a rising economy up to the war. It hindered any single group from taking power, it
made it possible for every group to feel a certain amount of security: they were always
able to count on representation in elections and their leaders, with the help of coalitions,
could resist coalitions from the other side that threatened their interests. The confessional
representation system lent a certain security in the form of a guaranteed influence for the
countrys minorities. That was in any case Michel Chihas idea, one of the minds behind
the constitution of 1926: the system should guarantee a fair political and social
representation of minorities and allow these often exiled groups to be able to continue to
freely practice their own religion. In this way, the state would recognize the different
identities of the various groups, until they would slowly disappear and no longer be
required as a protection against that same state.

The national pact gave, in other words, an institutional form to the right to deny other
religious groups their right to nationalize their version of Lebanons past and future, of
the countrys political and cultural identity. The right to protect yourself against others
was written into the legal system, so to say, just as belonging to a particular confession
was sanctioned as a form of social and political identity. The balance of power in political
sectarianism was, as long as it did not break down, accepted relatively well by the
population and often praised as successful by intellectuals both within and outside the
country. It was especially appreciated by those groups Maronites and Sunni Muslims
who were accorded the lions share of political influence over the future of the country
and who saw it as a security measure, a barrier against what they saw as a threat from one
another. The lack of a common positive Lebanese identity for these divided groups was
taken for granted and raised to the level of an organizing principle for the nation.

If it was useless in any case to find a dominant content for the Lebanese nation state, if
every attempt to a hegemonic power structure would have to result in a mobilization for
war, a cold war was preferable. Better to distinctly and clearly recognize which
inhabitants were the intimate strangers in order to be able to hold them in check. A most
fragile balance of power, which at one and the same time sanctioned and regulated hate.
The great risk was therefore always that the various groups would not be able to hold
their own under control: the least conflict between individual representatives of the
antagonistic groups threatened to spread throughout the entire nation.

When I put the question to Samah Idriss, the editor of the legendary journal al-Adab, how
the National Pact ought to be judged now, after the war, he answers dryly and laconically:
Isnt the civil war itself proof enough of its complete idiocy? We lived for more than
twenty years under a system that sanctioned daily a sectarian identification with our own
groups, which distanced us from all the other groups and annihilated any striving for a
sense of Lebanese unity. We did not turn to the state as a kind of representative for the
interests of all of us we turned to our own representatives in order to represent us
against the state and all the other groups. We lived in a society that from the very
beginning declared its lack of confidence in us and in which we from the very beginning
declared our lack of confidence. The National Pact raised this suspicion to the norm.
The researcher Samira Natallah, whom I meet in her office on Hamra Street, takes her
criticism even further. The decisive question we have to ask, she maintains, is the
question of which groups it was that benefited most from this political system: In whose
interests was the National Pact designed? By encouraging identification with the most
primitive of loyalties, this political system hid the actual class differences that were
emerging in Lebanon during the 1940s and which were gradually established in the
country during the whole period up to the breakout of civil war in 1975. The National
Pact buried the emergence of an ideological and political climate where a secular class
politics could have taken root. She points out that those groups that lost most in the
National Pact especially the great numbers of Shiite Muslims who were the losers in
the new economy and were clearly under-represented because of the dated census
never mobilized in terms of class, but instead reverted to a religious argument. Instead of
fighting against the great economic class differences and the National Pact as a
reactionary constitution, they took on the role of the Iranian revolutions extended arm in
Lebanon. This made it possible for the privileged classes themselves to protect the ruling
order with the same theological rhetoric: every question about social, political, and
economic injustices was put in the background; instead we had the menacing images of
religious and sectarian hysteria. In fact, Natallah says, we have to understand how the
National Pact and the political elites who formulated it founded a political system that
corresponded precisely to the economic interests of the elite. In that way, the National
Pact was a constitution that best protected the common interests of the upper classes
because it strengthened their position by giving them legitimacy as the representatives of
the people and by giving them the right to enter into alliances with international capital.
And indeed, it was the political elite which benefited from the economic boom that took
off in Lebanon during the 1950s and onward. Lebanon became a paradise for foreign
investors, both for the multinational companies that wanted to escape high taxes and
cooperate with a benevolent state and for the OPEC states that wanted to deposit their oil
profits in banks with high rates of interest.

Lebanon became the Switzerland of the Middle East: since the country had free currency
exchange, upheld statutory secrecy in banking, and offered the possibility of secret bank
accounts, it attracted capital from around the world. Shortly before the war there were
more than eighty big banks available, sixteen of which were domestic. As usual, the rich
became richer while the ordinary citizens, in the absence of a secular political power
that could distribute the wealth, became more and more dependent on the religious and
political zuamas for their social existence and actual survival. (That is also how the
extensive infrastructure for military recruitment needed by the mafia leaders when the
war was imminent was developed.) Thus the postcolonial Lebanese state was at once
both an expression of a very complex history of conquests and sieges, of global
capitalism, of deeply traditional family and clan models and of religious-ideological
loyalties, and of regional and international tests of strength. The absence of a public
agora, where the feudal antagonism of interests is replaced by a more individualized
debate, as well as the absence of a public sector, produces a very fragile nation state
where all the groups guarded each others slightest movement and where the state
itself was in the hands of the divided collectives.
The least disturbance threatened to wipe out the delicate balance of power. A decisive
event of that kind occurred when Nasser came to power in Egypt in 1952 and stirred the
feelings of the masses of Arab nationalists. In 1958, the Nasser-effect sucks the country
into a kind of whirlpool that brings it to the brink of civil war. Armed clashes take place
for several months. With the threat that Lebanon might lose its independence and be
swallowed up by Nassers new realm, the US soon intervenes, with the approval of the
Maronite President Chamoun, in order to secure the balance of power in Lebanon and
establish a new ally in the so-called Cold War. The interventionists refer to the
Eisenhower Doctrine, which gives the US the right to intervene throughout the world in
order to protect the free world from the spread of Communism, which Nasser is
accused of representing. The next great challenge to the delicate balance of power comes
in 1970 with the so-called Black September in Jordan. King Hussein drives the
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) violently out of Jordan, and they take refuge
instead in Lebanon. The number of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon rises radically
along with the refugees driven into Lebanon in connection with the formation of Israel,
there are approximately 400 000 of them. The fragile state is now put under heavy stress.
This happens first when the PLO gradually takes over the control and administration of
the refugee camps, introducing a mobilization and military discipline of the refugees, thus
in time emerging as an ever more independent force in the country. The stress develops
further when the PLO continues its armed struggle against Israel from Lebanon (raids,
mortar attacks, etc.), which leads to Israels revenge against Lebanon in the form of
massive bombing attacks on Lebanese villages and cities (that is, not only against the
Palestinians, but also against civilian Lebanese). Lebanon is drawn, regardless of its own
desire, into an increasingly intensive war against the state of Israel while it is not able
to control this newly emergent state within a state, the PLO.

This new predicament creates deep uneasiness among the privileged and Western-
oriented political elite, since it sees the Palestinian mobilization as a threat against the
countrys independence and a step toward an increased Arabization-Orientalization-
Islamization of the country. After the catastrophic defeat of the Arab world in conjunction
with the 1967 war against Israel (when Israel conquers and takes over the control of
Jerusalem, the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights), the PLO steps
forward as a kind of replacement for Nassers lost power. The Palestinian freedom
fighters, the Fedayin, interpellate large portions of the radical portion of the population
and threaten a radicalization of the entire Middle East. Lebanon begins to be shaken
by hot debates about the Palestinians, and two opposing demands are put to the state:
from the conservatives that the state should neutralize the PLO (as Jordan did during
Black September) and from the radicals that the state should actively intervene on the
Palestinians side.

It is a political dividing-line that pits the Lebanese Left loosely organized in the
National Movement under secular Muslim and Druse leaders like Kamal Jumblatt
against the Lebanese and especially Christian Right in the so-called Lebanese Front under
the Falangists of the Gemayel clan and the Chamoun family. If the former want to reform
the country and pursue a pro-Palestinian line (Palestinian groups were also included in
the National Movement), the latter is defined by its desire for the political and socio-
economic status quo and its fear of the Palestinian presence. Traditional historiography
situates the lighting of the civil wars fuse on 13 April 1975, the day when the first real
battles break out between what would come to be known as Palestinians and Falangists,
ending with the massacre of twenty-six civilian Palestinians. On the other hand, almost
precisely two years earlier, another event takes place that mobilizes all of the violent
paranoia that will be channelled into the war two years later. For on 10 April 1973, the
Israeli security service, Mossad, conducts an underground operation in the middle of
downtown Beirut to be precise, in a house on Rue Verdun, where my family lives
and assassinates three highly placed Palestinian leaders, Kamal Nasser, Kamal Oudouan,
and Abu Youssef, who was Arafats second-in-command and a co-founder of Al-Fatah. A
few minutes before Mossad storms the building, killing the doorman and several
neighbours, my father (at that moment having arrived home from Sweden) had just shut
the door to the building on his way to see his family a door that is shortly blown up
and which admits not only the macabre execution of the Palestinian leaders but the
onslaught of paranoia that soon will seep throughout Lebanese society.

Confidence for the Lebanese state bottoms out: how was it possible for the Israelis, under
the leadership of a certain Ehud Barak, dressed as a woman, to conduct this kind of
commando raid in the middle of the capital? How did they know that Abu Youssef
who, like Arafat, rarely stayed more than one night in the same place was there? How
did they get into the country at all? And why were the Lebanese police and army so
passive? Protest marches take over the streets of Beirut and the countrys prime minister,
Saeb Salaam, chooses to step down. For the groups on the Left and the Palestinians, all of
these vague circumstances became a sign that the Lebanese state could not be trusted
on the contrary, it was suspected that it had in fact taken part in the operation.

Photographs: Michael Azar

1. Album des Guides Bleus, Lebanon 1957.

2. Album des Guides Bleus, Lebanon 1975.
http://www.eurozine.com/a-barbarian-in-beirut/