Okay, we’ve been here in Beirut for 16 days and finally, tonight, Bill and I made a foray into the rebuilt “downtown” area.
We’ve driven through it a few times; at some speed, remarking on the number of new buildings that have gone up there in the five years since we were last here. Tonight, we exited the AUB campus onto the Corniche and walked east about a mile (through the old hotel district) till we came to the still-being-rebuilt areas of the old downtown.
For a period soon after I came to live here in 1974, I would transit downtown three or four times a day. I was living in Fakhani, a strongly Palestinian area quite a ways out of the central district to the southwest. I was studying Arabic at St. Joseph, the Jesuit university not far from downtown, and I also had a part-time job in an ad agency up on Hamra Street. So in the mornings I’d get a service (share-taxi) from Fakhani to downtown, walk briskly the few blocks to St. Joseph– where Bashir Gemayyel was studying law at the time. After a couple of hours there I’d walk back to downtown, perhaps pick up a knafeh bi-kaakeh to eat along the way, and get a service up to Hamra to go to my job for 2-3 hours. Then, a service back to downtown and to St. Joseph for the afternoon classes. Later, go back to the ad agency.
Gosh, I got to know certain routes and parts of the downtown really well… Where to go and look for a gypsy service if the main thoroughfares were blocked. Which corners were, on a dark evening, places where some stupid guy might make a grab at you. Where there would often be Egyptian migrant workers fighting on the street. Which were the fun little souks to come to late at night with friends for a sahlab treat. Where the cheap restaurants were that you could sit at late at night and watch the porters sweating as they hauled huge loads of fresh vegetables in to the market stalls at 3 a.m. Where the tricksters and shell-game artists would congregate to take advantage of people coming fresh into the city from the countryside. All of that.
Later, I’d come and hand in my copy at the Daily Star offices downtown.
A little after that, downtown became a battlefield…
The Palestinian and Lebanese-Muslim forces which held West Beirut fought their way eastward from the hotel district and were blocked exactly at downtown. A whole mile-square block of downtown became the northen anchor of the “Green Line” that snaked southward throughout the whole city. (Much of it is still more or less “green”. That is, the population divided there. The ruins of the city buildings along that line became no-go zones for everyone, and within a couple of years voracious green creepers, seedlings, and bushy great plants had taken root there. Now, 25 years later, many of them are large trees, growing out of the still-uncleared ruins.)
In 1989, at the time of the Taef Agreement, which laid the cement for whatever degree of social-political peace the Lebanese have been able to win among themselves, the Lebanese Sunni contractor Rafiq Hariri, who had made billions of dollars in the construction business in Saudi Arabia, came “home” to be Prime Minister. Part of the deal was that he’d use some combination of his own capital, Saudi capital, Lebanese government-backed loans, and goodness knows what other funding to completely rebuild downtown Beirut.
Heck, by then, he’d probably already built 20 entire cities inside Saudi Arabia, from scratch. If anyone could do this job in Beirut, the thinking went, it would be Rafiq Hariri.
At the technical, project-management level, much of it has been impressive. Whole swathes of ruined building in the downtown were demolished; the rubble was carted out to sea and dumped to form a bunch of new land (title to which, I believe went to Hariri’s company?) On the blocks of old downtown thus cleared, Hariri’s architects and builders then went to work with a will. In many or perhaps most cases they sought to rebuild the phsyical aspects of the old downtown almost exactly in the same style it had had before the war.
So now, you can walk down graceful cobbled streets lined with commercial buildings faced with high arched arcades in an instantly recognizable French-colonial style. Six or seven streets come together in a replica of the old Sahet al-Najma (Place de l’Etoile). The old Serail (government) building has been lovingly restored– andf now it sits atop an architectural park that features many of the carvings that were found during the reconstruction work.
At some technical level, it was a very classy job.
But the social fabric that had been an essential aspect of the old downtown never got repaired. The city is still just about as divided– Chrsitians in the east; Muslims, Druze, and Christians who like living with them in the west– as it ever was. And no accommodation at all has been made for low-income people to have a real role in the new downtown. Goodness only knows where the wholesale produce markets are held now. It’s not there. Goodness knows whether there are any conglomerations of Egyptian migrant workers anywhere in the city these days. They certainly aren’t there. Very few businesses have moved back in.
What does exist there, however– in much greater numbers than when we were here in 1999–are restaurants and cafes-trottoirs. The restauranteurs, who have always been among Lebanon’s most innovative entrepreneurs, have colonized the rebuilt buildings in droves… So there’s quite a lot of activity at street level, in the evenings; but probably not much activity in upper floors, or at other times of day.
When we were there in 1999, the whole place was eery; like an echoing stage set for a movie that would never be made. Block after block after block of it. And the whole built area surrounded by empty bulldozed blocks that had yet to be built.
Now, it connects better to the hotel district. (Which still holds its own atrocities, like the towering, shell-shattered concrete walls of the old Holiday Inn.) And there’s good street-lighting, which meant that we felt quite safe walking to downtown from the Corniche.
There were some impressive, even moving, aspects of what the downtown project has achieved so far. We arrived just before some Muslim evening prayers. Three or four beautiful smaller mosques in the downtown area were broadcasting rival calls to prayer. Old, golden stone structures with lovingly nested domes atop them. A couple of them were attracting sizeable numbers of worshippers. All of them looked as though they’d been rehabbed with care and attention to detail.
We looked in on a couple of equally well restored churches: one Catholic, and one Orthodox. At the Orthodox church, a sacristan told us a little about the church’s history. The present structure was, he said, at least the fourth to be built on this site since the Roman era. The foundations of the older three churches were still under the floor of the present church, he said, with the oldest dating back to the fifth century. On the walls were some lovely frescoes– some, with bullet-scars still visible, dating from before the war; others, recently painted by artists from Greece and Russia.
We walked down to the old clock-tower. It was surrounded this evening by a large-scale, outdoor exhibit of photos of people who have overcome serious physical or mental impairments… It was really sobering to read the captions. Of the eight or so portraits there, three of the subjects–all of whom had lost two or more limbs– were described as war-wounded. One was described as a land-mine victim from 1987. And no fewer than three were people from age 17 through 34 who’d lost functioning as a result of polio.
Polio!!!
That is exactly what happens during protracted wars. People get wounded from munitions… They also suffer because of the breakdown of immunization systems.
I wish every single person in the western human-rights movement who thinks that it might be worth fighting wars “for the sake of human rights” would come and look at that exhibit.
Well, we had a really fine dinner there, then found a cab to come back here to AUB.
I’ve beern working on a bunch of writing these past few days. Including some ideas for posts for JWN that have not, so far, panned out. They will sometime soon, I’m sure.
Ramadan Karim to everyone, by the way.