‘I Am Really Terrified’ : Beirut: City Careening to Nowhere

A bomb went off the other night behind the kitchen of the Smuggler’s Inn, one of West Beirut’s most popular restaurants.

The blast killed the salad chef and a waiter and set off a series of gas explosions that leveled the building. George Zeine, the restaurant’s owner, lamented, “I have built this place with my life--all my life--and now it is destroyed.”

A few days earlier, a thief had dashed into the city’s most fashionable supermarket and snatched a woman’s handbag. As he dodged among the neat pyramids of imported fruit, several elegantly attired women coolly reached into their grocery carts, produced pistols and shot at him. One wounded the thief before he could reach the door, and he was later placed under arrest.

Overdose of Crime A prominent Lebanese journalist tells of a woman friend who was robbed not long ago when she emerged from her bank. The next day, gunmen stole her car. The day after that, she and her husband were mugged. At that point, the woman was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown.

Ten years of political violence have already made the Lebanese capital one of the world’s most sinister cities, but now the people of Beirut are caught up in constant fear.

Six months of relative calm brought on by a compromise security plan among Lebanon’s warring militias have given way in recent days to a rash of robberies, kidnapings and unexplained bombings.

The economy has crashed, shattering the illusions of the Lebanese upper classes that this nation of wheelers and dealers could survive years of civil strife without major effect on their opulent life style.

‘Country Is Finished’ “The country is finished; it is deceased,” a member of Parliament, Kazem Khalil, complained recently. “The economy has collapsed, security has vanished, the army is splintered. The public administration has been transformed into a group of boutiques where the bureaucrats sell their services.”

Even the weather seems to have turned against the perennially optimistic Lebanese this winter. Nearly every day there are ugly rain clouds--the color of raw liver, towering as high as office buildings, veined with lightning and rumbling like distant gunfire.

The streets of predominantly Muslim West Beirut, where most of the violence has occurred, have been transformed into obstacle courses as shop owners try vainly to defend themselves against bomb blasts.

Along the streets, lines of metal posts have sprouted like winter wheat from the concrete, linked by thick chains to prevent anyone from leaving an unattended car too close to the shops. Yet within a single week, four people were killed in bomb explosions and more than a score were wounded.

Shopkeepers along Hamra Street, West Beirut’s flashy shopping district, have employed dozens of gunmen, many armed with submachine guns, to protect them against robbers.

“It’s not enough to be a businessman anymore; you have to be a warrior,” Walid Noshie said. Noshie, the owner of a chain of boutiques, keeps a shotgun by his desk and a sharpshooter in his stockroom.

“It’s no longer a question of which party or which group, right or left,” he said. “They’re all killers. There’s no turning back now. The people all talk with guns.”

Even in times of the worst sectarian strife since the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, longtime Beirut residents say, they were never confronted with so much personal violence or crime.

Now, marauding gangs roam the streets in broad daylight, stripping jewelry from women on the sidewalks, invading restaurants, stealing cars stopped in traffic. Only the very brave or foolhardy venture out at night.

The marauders are armed with a variety of weapons that have filtered into the country over the past decade in the arms race between Christians and Muslims.

A man reported that his car had been stolen by a youth who pointed a grenade launcher at him. A banker said that for Christmas he had been given four rockets that are sold on the black market here for $40 apiece.

A Swiss diplomat was abducted while driving through West Beirut at lunchtime. An American priest working as a missionary was kidnaped for what appeared to be political motives while on his way to work.

Even the most jaded Lebanese were astounded by a newspaper report that a 1-day-old child had been kidnaped from his hospital crib by gunmen who wanted to sell him.

‘I Am Really Terrified’ “For the first time in three years, I am really terrified,” said a Western diplomat who acknowledged reluctantly that he keeps a rifle in his office in case his embassy should come under attack.

The Lebanese army’s 6th Brigade, which was given responsibility for security in West Beirut under the security plan adopted July 4, appears to have abandoned its patrols in the face of increased criminal activity.

The police, who are armed only with revolvers, rarely venture out of the safety of their station houses. Amal, a powerful Shia Muslim militia, has tried to stem the violence by arresting marauding teen-agers, shaving their heads and publicly tying them to stakes.

“We are very near total anarchy in West Beirut,” said former Premier Saeb Salaam. “This is the reaction of a desperate people. It’s like the period leading up to the French Revolution.”

There is general agreement that many of the recent thefts can be attributed largely to the depressed state of the Lebanese economy. Since July, the value of the Lebanese pound has slid from 5 to the dollar to around 10 to the dollar.

Because Lebanon imports virtually all of its consumer goods, including food, prices have soared at a time when many people are either unemployed or low-paid because of the devastation caused by almost a decade of factional fighting, climaxed by the Israeli invasion of 1982. Laundry soap that used to cost 35 pounds now costs 75; a kilo (2.2 pounds) of lamb, which cost 35 pounds not long ago, now costs 60; the price of gasoline has shot up by 33% in a month after the lifting of government subsidies.

“Poor people are starving; they can’t afford these prices,” said a resident of Borj el Brajne, a lower-class area in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Newspapers reported that a shopper in East Beirut, the Christian heartland that is thought to be less dangerous than the western sector, pulled a gun in a supermarket when he was told what his purchases would cost. Nearly in tears because he could not feed his family, the gunman was given the food by a sympathetic clerk.

Salim Hoss, a minister in the government of national unity formed last April, said the country is approaching bankruptcy because of the collapse of productivity and loss of traditional business such as banking.

Hoss noted that the government’s efforts to raise revenues by closing illegal smugglers’ ports lasted about six weeks; now, he said, the government is receiving less money than ever.

“One can say the government is not viable, but there is no alternative,” Hoss said. “There is an appreciation for the extent of the crisis, but the feeling is that there is a limit to what we can do. This is the worst of times we have lived.”

A banker with close ties to the government said Lebanon has about $150 million in cash reserves and is spending it at the rate of $35 million to $40 million a month.

“There’s nothing anyone can do,” the banker said. “It’s too late. Things have gotten out of control.”