Beirut, Part 1

We’ve been here in Beirut for two days now. I have to admit that beforehand,
I was looking at the prospect of the trip with whole bundles of mixed
feelings. Who was it who said you can never, really, go “home” again?
Well, I lived here in Beirut for seven years when I was a young adult.
It was truly my home. I had my first two kids here, and started
defining a professional identity for myself as a journalist and writer that
has stuck with me more or less ever since.

How could I come “home” to that 23 years after leaving the city? Come
back to it, moreover, in such a new context; with a different husband; and
moreover, traveling with him in something like the always complex “accompanying spouse” role…
He has more of a defined goal in being here than I do; and when he suggested
it I was just more or less, “Oh, Beirut for two months in the fall? Sure,
yeah, why not?” and I didn’t think much more about it after that… (Fairly
intentionally didn’t think about it, I would say.)

So we stepped out of the airport terminal Sunday afternoon into the bustling chaos outside,
and the smell of the city just jumped right up off the sidewalk and hit me
in the face. How to describe it? Hot asphalt, a special kind
of ground-in dust smell, all leavened with a memory of dryed-out thyme and
something sweeter than that, too. Beirut’s end-of-dry-season smell.
I smiled to myself. Okay, I can deal with this…

And so I have been. We have been welcomed really warmly by our hosts
here at the American University of Beirut. They gave us a faculty apartment
down near the great broad corniche that rims the north-facing coast of the
city at this point, and we’ve spent most of the first two days settling in…getting
the ethernet hookup for the lap-top, getting university IDs, getting groceries,
figuring how we’re going to do things. I decided to be slow and intentional
about looking up old friends here. It’s such a pleasure to be here
for two months: I don’t have to rush straight onto the phones and say things
like, “I’m here for two days! When can we get together??” (Which
is often how it is when I go places.) I can actually be human and considerate
and respectful of other people’s time and the normal rhythms of life…

This morning I ran along the Corniche: roughly 3/4 mile one way, then back,
then the same distance the other way, and back. I got started
a little late– it was 7:45 and already probably above 70 degrees (F). Lots
of other people were out running or doing brisk exercise-walking as well.
The Corniche has a 23-foot wide sidewalk on the sea-side, and it’s
like a lung for people from many parts of the city. Sunday evening
it was throbbing with all kinds of family groups, till late. This morning,
most people out there were doing some form of exercise, including many other
women. Most of the female runners (and walkers) were in long exercise
pants; there were only a couple in bike shorts. A number of women were
running or power-walking in what you could call “exercise hijab” outfits:
loose pants topped with loose tops that came down over their butts, and all
topped with tight-wound headscarves… But the pants and tops were
definitely designed for exercise, with “racing stripes” and knock-off Adidas
logos etc on them. What a great market to break into, eh?

Last Friday, at around 9 a.m., a car-bomb was detonated on the Corniche not
far from where our apartment is, just as recently resigned minister Marwan
Hamade was driving past. Marwan was badly burned and his bodyguard
was killed. Marwan is closely allied to my old friend Walid Jumblatt,
the very quirky hereditary head of the Druzes here and also head of the Socialist
Party. Walid, Marwan, and several other weighty Lebanese political
figures have been protesting the recent Syrian-inspired move to extend the
term of current Lebanese president Emile Lahoud… More on this, later.

The only Lebanese people we’ve met so far have been mainy university-related
people. They seem quite edgy about the situation. One (Lebanese) dean
I was talking to yesterday said most of his colleagues at AUB are watching
the situation carefully, and if the explosion seems as though it’s the start
of a trend, then they’ll “pack up and leave”.

“How will you know when it’s a trend?” someone asked.

“You know,” he said.

I do recall having that kind of “expertise” at my fingertips when I lived
here in the ’70s… Maybe it wasn’t actually nearly as “expert
as we thought then… And of course, as journos, our interest was not in
running from trouble, but quite often in running directly towards it…

Anyway, I’ve also been doing some work on my Africa book, as I thought
I might. Mainly conceptual work so far. Today, I got intrigued
with the idea of why none of Spain, Portugal, or Greece–all of which underwent
very successful transitions from dictatorship to democracy in the late Cold
War period– ever tried to establish either war-crimes prosecutions
for the dictators of the past, or truth commissions… Truth commissions
started out in the 1980s, in a Latin American context, and then were considered–but
not, generally, established–by several of the East European countries that
democratized after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989… Then came
the creme de la creme of modern truth commissions– South Africa’s paradigmatic TRC…
And suddenly, everyone in the northern hemisphere said, “Oh, this is definitely
a trend, and one that ought to be replicated everywhere”. Okay, well
not everyone, but lots of people.

But if it’s such a “must-do” type of thing for democratizing countries in
the modern era, how come that so far Spain, Portugal, and Greece haven’t
had them? (And those three democratization experiences have all been
amazingly successful.)

Well, I don’t have an answer for this yet. But asking the question
has been kind of thought-provoking. I believe that there is somewhat more
interest now, 22 years or whatever after the end of Franco-ism in Spain,
in finding out what exactly became of all the people he’d repressed, ‘disappeared’,
and tortured to death back during the civil war of the 1930s. But I
don’t think that, even with that interest, anyone’s calling for a truth commission
or any kind of “individual accountability” for all the perpetrators of rights
abuses there in Spain, or in Portugal, or Greece. Why not? It really is
an interesting question; and it poses a powerful challenge, I think, to the
now increasingly widespread idea that a truth commission is something a country
“must do” as it goes through a period of democratization.