Amid Mounting Casualties, Beirut Pauses to Mourn 2 Who Died Helping Others

Even by Lebanese standards, the last few weeks have seemed a paradigm of violence: Shia Muslims battled Palestinians, Muslims fought Christians, hundreds were killed and thousands left homeless.

In the midst of the mayhem, when casualty tolls were recited on the radio like soccer scores, many Lebanese paused to mourn two men killed after a decade of stolidly helping others survive the country’s civil war.

Neither Tanious Geries Nassar nor Hajj Omar Faour was particularly well known. Neither belonged to one of Lebanon’s warring militias, and they were not politicians.

But each man, over the years, became a symbol of Lebanese tenacity in the face of what often seemed overwhelming adversity.

Nassar was a deliveryman for the morning newspaper An Nahar. Faour, whom everyone knew as Hajj Omar, was the head of the motor pool at the American University Hospital.

Courage in Prosaic Jobs

Despite their prosaic jobs, both men gained respect for their courage in crossing back and forth between Muslim West Beirut and the Christian East, which often meant running a gantlet of snipers and artillery shelling.

Nassar would rise at dawn each day in West Beirut, collect the day’s newspapers and make his way across the treacherous Green Line that divides the city.

As Joseph Nassar (no relation), director of the newspaper An Nahar, noted in an obituary, were it not for Tanious Nassar no one in the northern half of Lebanon would have had any news of the war.

“Everybody knew him and respected him,” Joseph Nassar wrote. “The guns would fall silent when he crossed the Green Line.”

Known Everywhere

Along his route, Nassar gained friends among the various militia groups by shouting the latest news as he drove past.

Two weeks ago, after 10 years of crossing the Green Line, never having missed a day, he was shot to death by a sniper.

“I cannot believe the man who killed him knew who Tanious was,” Joseph Nassar wrote. “Tanious paid his due to martyrdom, and he won’t be the last. He reflected our obstinacy in carrying out our duty to the end.”

Ironically, Hajj Omar Faour had not worried about his personal safety until he heard of Tanious Nassar’s death.

In 1975, at the outset of the civil war, Faour had simply accepted the responsibility of seeing to it that the staff of the American University Hospital, the largest in Lebanon, was able to get to work despite the shooting.

Crossing the Green Line

Ramez Azouri, the head of obstetrics and gynecology at the hospital, said Faour would often make two round trips a day across the Green Line, despite the shelling and shooting, to take nurses and doctors who lived in East Beirut home at the end of their workday and pick up a new shift for the start of their day.

“Hajj Omar would always offer his help to anyone who asked him,” Azouri said. “He would expose himself to danger but not his drivers.”

In addition to shuttling staff around Beirut during the war, on occasion he would make the perilous 120-mile round trip to Damascus, sometimes twice in a day, to bring scarce drugs and oxygen cylinders to the hospital.

One Christian woman recalled that he would frequently drive up to groups of pedestrians who were taking cover from the gunfire along the Green Line, roll down his window and pick them up, saying simply, “OK, Let’s go.”

Went Where He Was Needed

Azouri said that despite his heavy workload, Faour would often materialize at the Damascus airport when a hospital staffer arrived without advance warning during times when the Beirut airport was closed by the fighting. On one such day, he later appeared in Beirut at the battle-ruined home of a doctor to supervise the repairs.

Faour was killed by shrapnel May 23 when he crossed the Green Line soon after dropping off three nurses at their homes in East Beirut.

“So many of us for so long had our lives in his hands and his heart in ours,” said Calvin Plimpton, president of American University of Beirut, who spoke at a service for Faour that was attended by 1,000 people. “He was Lebanon to us.”

For several days after Faour’s death, most of the hospital’s drivers refused to cross the Green Line, Azouri said. But now, he added, Faour’s son-in-law, Abd Rahman Kibbeh, who is not an employee of the hospital, has started making the daily Green Line run.