Harbingers of disaster gather - journalists, that is

Wissam Sharaf is not the kind of guy you’d welcome to your neighborhood, or to your city or country, or even the one next door, for that matter.

World-weary at 34, the television journalist is a veteran of conflicts and strife in Pakistan, Liberia and the Darfur region of Sudan. This year he’s moving from France to his native Lebanon. And not because he wants to get closer to his family roots.

“Now I want to come to Beirut,” Sharaf tells me, smirking. “Because I think it’s gonna move.”

Dark clouds loom on Lebanon’s horizon. In the streets, young men gather weapons. Off the Mediterranean shore, U.S. warships have approached for the first time since the 1980s. The Shiite militia Hezbollah boasts that it has rearmed in preparation for the next round of conflict with Israel. Throw in a series of bombings and assassinations and a paralyzed government, and the words “tipping point” come to mind.

Like a generation before, many young and talented Lebanese here are picking up and leaving -- for Europe, the Americas, the Persian Gulf.

Which leaves us journalists, bearers of bad tidings.

Since the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, more than half a dozen U.S. news organizations -- including The Times -- have positioned reporters in the country. Sharaf said he’s going to try to open an ad hoc office for a French television channel here.

“We like it when the journalists come, but not for a war or when something bad happens,” said Jad Mansour, 28, a receptionist at Le Meridien Commodore hotel, once a flophouse that played host to journalists during the 1975-90 civil war. “Journalists only come for the bad things.”

When my wife and I moved to Lebanon, we vowed that we would try not to hang out with only journalists. We would try to befriend the Lebanese and blend in, drawing doctors, engineers, artists and bankers into our world to expand our horizons.

Our friend Nadine, a brilliant twentysomething lawyer, is our ideal. She is the kind of person who plays paintball one day and reads Milan Kundera the next.

She just invited us to her goodbye party. She got a job in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. “Prospects here are just not great,” she said.

Recently, flying from Paris to Beirut, a receptionist at the check-in counter at Middle East Airlines took pity on us and forgave the penalties for the 40 pounds of excess baggage we carried.

“They’re journalists moving to Lebanon,” she explained to her boss -- as opposed to the doctors, lawyers, engineers and scholars moving out.

Foreigners also seem to be getting out of Lebanon. The Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti governments recently urged their nationals to hightail it out of town. The State Department “urges U.S. citizens to defer travel to Lebanon, and that U.S. citizens already in Lebanon carefully consider the risks of remaining.”

Some Lebanese are optimistic, convinced that Lebanon will pull out of its current mess, and the country’s U.S.-backed faction and its Iranian- and Syrian-backed group will agree on a new president and a new government. Lebanon’s been without a president since late last year, creating a perilous power vacuum. A few hope that a solution will emerge from the Arab League summit scheduled this week in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Thing is, the country’s track record on wiggling out of trouble hasn’t been so great. In fact, conflicts tend to spiral out of control.

Political tensions in the early 1970s between Christians and Muslims mushroomed into a 15-year civil war. An Israeli invasion in 1982 devolved into an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. A 2006 Hezbollah operation to take a couple of Israeli hostages to trade for other prisoners turned into a monthlong war and an international crisis that drew in the U.S., France, the United Nations and the Arab League.

So when a journalist appears, everyone stiffens, as if the Grim Reaper has walked into the room.

“In general it’s not positive to see a lot of journalists,” says Michel Attar, who runs an antiques shop in the Hamra district. “They’re not tourists. They’re not here to buy. It’s not a good sign that they’re here.”

Recently, Lebanese-Canadian filmmaker Katia Jarjoura got an unexpected phone call from a French freelance war photographer. She didn’t even say hello to him.

“I told him, ‘It’s not a good sign that you’re calling me,’ ” she says. “He wanted to know if I could host him if he came to Lebanon, because he senses it’s going to explode.”

War is bad for business, but the journalist trade spawns its own unseemly side industries. During the civil war, when journalists could be frequently seen around the Commodore lugging their television cameras, young men would run after them offering tawdry services: sex, hashish, a ride to the front lines.

“For me, it’s a business,” said Saad Amer, a shop owner who shows a picture of himself in 1982 wearing a BBC T-shirt.

“It was work,” he said. “I charged them $1,000 a day plus 25% fees for processing credit cards. I became an expert at creating phony media receipts.”

Older, heavier and with a lot more to lose, he’s found safer ways to profit from the mayhem. During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, he sold T-shirts of his own to visiting journalists.

“Sorry!” says one. “The press is back.”

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daragahi@latimes.com