Authors: Brian Keenan
New notes a hollow boost to ill economy
A few weeks ago, one of the Middle East Airlines’ ponderous old Boeing 707s flew into Beirut national airport on a scheduled flight from London with a six ton cargo of cash. De La Rue’s printing works had just produced the latest financial drip-feed for Lebanon’s collapsing economy; and there, next to Runway 1-8, the Lebanese army was waiting to collect it.
Stashed in boxes, the brand new bank notes were loaded into armoured personnel carriers. The Army’s Sixth Brigade had brought along heavy machine-guns, rocket launchers and even a couple of Saladins to guard the cash on its four mile journey to Central Bank in Hamra Street.
However, it was not until the powerful little convoy actually left the airport runway that the real protectors of the national treasury revealed themselves; four scruffy youths in combat jackets holding AK47 rifles, waiting to climb on board one of the vehicles. They travelled into Beirut perched atop an armoured personnel carrier with the government troops sitting meekly beside them. Nor was anyone surprised: if Lebanon’s economy has to be defended by the Army, the Army has to be defended by the local militias.
It is not just a question of erosion of power. The legitimate state authorities in Lebanon long ago forsook even the basic governmental duty of raising taxes. So many illegal ports have now been built by the Christian and Muslim militias that the Finance Ministry believes the private armies are now collecting taxes worth more than Ł175 million sterling that should rightfully have gone to central government funds. Every militia in the country -Christian Phalangist, Shia Muslim ‘AmaT, Druze, Palestinian, pro-Syrian and pro-Israeli -now levies its own taxes on shopkeepers and businessmen.
If corruption and smuggling permeate Lebanon’s financial affairs to an unprecedented degree, however, the civil war militias have ironically become a mainstay of the economy. Many of the leftist Muslim groups are paid in dollars by other Arab states while Mr Yassir Arafat channels millions of US dollars -funds given him by the Saudis -into Lebanon to buy the continued loyalty of his PLO guerrillas. The Syrian Army, whose troops are spread across more than a quarter of the country, generates its own economy. Militias have meanwhile initiated their own housing projects, hotels and businesses which in turn replenish Lebanon’s depleted financial resources. In one sense, therefore, an end to Lebanese conflict would bring almost as many financial problems as it would solve. Yet as long as hostilities continue, so Lebanon’s economy is going to decline.
I read this article and reread it. I got a contrasting insight into the country I was travelling to from the one that my friends Mike and Shelagh had given me, though their memory was a much older one, of the place long before the civil war began in 1976. But I found it funny in its own way. Here I was entering a kind of Rambo-land, an Arabic John Wayne country where everybody was toting a gun and everybody was part of some paramilitary machine. So was I really travelling from the frying pan into the fire, from one kind of political and social turmoil to another? I suppose I was, but it didn’t worry me too much.
I keep the article and still reread it, and still find the humour in it, particularly that passage where Fisk talks about ‘… four scruffy youths in combat jackets holding AK47 rifles’. I felt old bells ringing, echoing out of the place I had just come from, where local militias had become the defenders of a half-understood political aspiration and had taken upon themselves a brief not drawn up by the people they claimed to defend.
They say that an aircraft arriving in Beirut has to make a careful approach and a difficult landing. The nearness of the city to the airport and the proximity of the sea and hills add immeasurably to the pilot’s difficulty; no-one lands by computer card in Beirut. Entering at dusk I couldn’t see the landscape below me. Only the jostle of the Lebanese emigrants we had picked up in Frankfurt indicated that ourjourney’s end was at hand. The fume of cigar smoke and the reek of whiskey began to disappear as the travellers made ready their baggage and said goodbye to their workmates.
The darkness as I emerged from the aircraft seemed to intensify the night heat. A short walk took me to the airport proper. It was small and decrepit, far removed from what I had left in Heathrow. But it was packed with people. Strangely there were no women. The night, the heat and the strangeness of the place gave it an eerie quality. I felt myself, along with two other Irish teachers who had been on the flight being watched, stared at. It was disconcerting, I felt very much at sea. I was an alien here and I felt it from the moment of my arrival. It was difficult to distinguish simple curiosity from mindless animosity or worse still a kind of festering hatred that seemed to lurk behind some of the faces.
A small, fat man shambled quickly forward, holding up a piece of paper with my name and the letters A.U.B. written alongside. I hurriedly moved to shake his hand, hoping that some confident human contact with him might dispel the oppressive atmosphere.
Beside him, grining from ear to ear, stood a burly sergeant of police.
They were an odd couple. The thought of a comic double act crossed my mind and perhaps made my greeting more honest and relaxed.
The policeman’s exuberant handshake, complete with hand at his heart contrasted with the smaller man’s obvious anxiety about getting us quickly through the customs and the tedious bureaucracy of officialdom. A surly customs man asked me if I was English without bothering to look at my passport. I answered, pointing at the passport ‘No, Irish’. He was puzzled for a moment, brightened and embraced me warmly: ‘You are welcome to Lebanon,’ he said with some enthusiasm. I felt myself becoming less apprehensive, though still anxious to be gone.
As we crossed the car park with this strange twosome I noted that we were being accompanied by ten or twelve men in full uniform, all of them armed. The whole airport was stiff with them, sitting or standing on the tops of cars. Each of them had a gun and they watched
our amoeba-like movement, encumbered with luggage, the way predatory birds might watch the last living movements of their intended prey. I thought of the articles I had read on the aircraft and asked ‘Why the soldiers?’ The burly policeman opening his hands, shrugged, smiled at my foolishness and answered ‘They are for you, they are your bodyguards.’ I looked at the huge green cadillac, in which our bags were being loaded, then at the ‘military escort’ and the sea of staring faces around us, and thought that such precautions were more likely to highlight us as potential targets. I sank low in the rear of the vehicle and wished I could take a deep breath and disappear. Such reception committees I could have done without.
The journey through the southern suburbs did not make me any less uncomfortable. Here was a night time landscape of such desolation and destruction that it made me seriously question why the hell I had come here. That drive through a night of squalor reinforced the sense of intimidation that seemed to surround me at the airport. To break the nervous silence in the car, I asked the driver his name. ‘Omar Sharif he answered. I was dumbfounded and could only find an outlet for my nervous tension in laughter. The edge of hysteria in the laughter barely concealed my apprehension. Omar laughed also, but he assured me he was not joking.
We arrived, eventually and uneventfully at The Mayflower Hotel in the Hamra area of Beirut. There was a curius comfort in this. Apart from the reassurance of light and convivial surroundings, the name itself was welcoming. My home in Belfast was in Mayflower St. ‘Home from home?’ I thought and then again: ‘Frying pan to fire?
Another Belfast?’
A few drinks with some members of the teaching faculty who were there to welcome us helped dispel some of the feelings my first impression of Beirut had left lingering. A momentary thought that these new friends were as desperately happy to see us as we were them I put from me as the product of an over-excited and overanxious imagination. We chatted politely, exchanging backgrounds and work experiences for some hours and finally I retired. Someone said, ‘Don’t mind the call to prayer at dawn, you’ll get used to it!’ … And how right they were!
Morning came. I had not heard the ‘call’. My mind, more tired than my body, had dragged me into a deep sleep. The day was so dazzlingly bright it took me some minutes for my eyes to adjust and focus. One of the new friends from the previous night called and showed me
around the neighbourhood and the University. The next week I spent wandering the streets getting to know my bearings; finding the location of the Irish Embassy, the Library and walking around the University campus. Most of all I remember the noise. The deafening racket of the street life. Street sellers calling out their wares, people arguing and shouting conversations. The continual stream of traffic blaring horns insistently. People talking with their hands, sometimes in wild excitement, sometimes with slow deliberation.
When hands are engaged in driving, the car horn becomes a compensation for this restriction on expressiveness. On more than one occasion the horn proved inadequate and someone would let loose a few rounds from his hand gun to make his point more clearly.
The weeks before my disappearance were filled with apprehension, particularly for us foreigners living in Beirut. We were quite obviously targets. Everyone knew by our appearance that we were not Lebanese and probably knew where each of us lived and the routes home that each of us took from the University. Leigh Douglas’s disappearance, along with his friend Philip Padfield, had only exacerbated this anxiety.
Those of us who lived outside the University campus felt ourselves even more threatened. The teachers who lived on campus had the security of the University perimeter, with its Lebanese army and police guards. Though life was pleasant enough in the wooded and landscaped grounds of the University, the sense of being contained there, of it being the only sanctuary made it its own kind of prison and it was not for me. I had come from a city where such anxieties were rife, where people were contained within their own ghettos and lived out their lives in a small area of perhaps only a quarter-mile radius which they were fearful to go beyond. I felt that I must have a life separate from the University and not be a prisoner inside it.
My friends and I had agreed that since we lived off campus we should maintain contact with one another. We should regularly ring each other just to say ‘Hello’ and let one another know that we were at home, that we were safe. It was necessary, if we were going out for dinner or visiting friends, that we should ring our homes to let the people we lived with know where we were and what time we would be returning. If we did not return at a given time they would know immediately that something was wrong. I had been doing this with the people with whom I shared my Turkish villa for some weeks. I could not abide the containment of the villa, the forced necessity of finishing the teaching day, going straight home and locking myself in until the next morning.
The night before I was taken, I had been out to dinner with a friend and had rung home to tell my house-mates that I would be home around ten o’clock in the evening. I duly showed up. I went through the garden gates, up to the patio of the villa, unlocked the gates and entered my barred sanctuary. I had coffee with one of my colleagues. We discussed some of the events of the day at the University, and then he told me that the teachers who lived in the apartment above our villa had suggested that we should henceforth all leave together for the University. I thought it was a good idea. But as I lay in bed that night I thought to myself ‘I don’t know how this is going to be really helpful. After all if they want you they will get you, and it may be just as easy for them to take two or three people as it would to take one walking alone to school.’ I put the thing from my mind, remembering that I had an eight o’clock class in the morning and no one else was teaching until nine or ten o’clock. So I had to go on my own in any case. I went to sleep.
The nights were becoming warm. The summer was approaching very quickly and sleep was difficult. I tossed and turned, throwing off sheets. The next morning was bright and clear. There was a noticeable lack of street noise. This was always the best time, before that hustle and din of noise and voices: people arguing, people talking, motor cars blaring horns, which I always found oppressive. I had to condition myself to turn my mind off so as not to hear this constant racket. I had a quick shower, packed my briefcase and dressed.
I left at twenty minutes past seven. It only took ten minutes at the most to walk from my villa to the University. In a hurry I could easily make it in five. I left the villa, walking through the long garden that fronted it and separated it from the street.
I stopped as I always did to look at three or four carp which swam in the fish pond with its fountain, which is so much a part of a traditional Turkish villa. I was never sure exactly how many carp there were in that dark murky pond. I could never see them all at once. The garden was about to break out in flower, giving its first hint of the colours that would fill it as the summer approached. I went to look at some of the creeping plants that were already beginning to spread with some vigour along the wall, wondering just what colour would emerge from them. I had previously planted some bulbs and seeds in the very sandy soil, not sure whether they would take and break through or whether it was just wishful thinking on my part.
I had come to understand the importance of the garden in Arab culture as a source of peace, of rest, a place for meditation, a kind of sanctuary, and this garden had become the same for me. I remember the day that one corner of the garden seemed to have come alive with butterflies. It was not unusual if one woke at the right time to look out and see the garden filled with a blizzard of butterflies. It was like looking through a child’s kaleidoscope. Before leaving the house I had carefully watered the indoor plants and hanging baskets which I had been buying, feeling that today would be oppressively hot and that the plants would be glad of a drink before the sun got up and its ferocity began to dry them out.