Beirut’s Envoys: Amid the Shells, an Air of Normalcy

Scotch is served on a silver salver by a white-jacketed retainer as cicadas chirp in the pines and the sea shimmers in the sunlight.

This is not the French Riviera but a hillside overlooking Beirut, smoldering from a deluge of artillery and rocket fire.

British Ambassador Allan Ramsay makes every effort to maintain an air of normalcy in highly abnormal circumstances. Most of his ambassadorial colleagues seem either to have left Lebanon or gone away from the battle zone.

Ramsay studied Arabic in the Druze-held Shouf mountains long before Lebanon’s civil war erupted, and his anguish over the slaughter in Beirut streets is very real.

For him and other Western envoys, a continued diplomatic presence underlines their governments’ support for reuniting the divided country and restoring Lebanese sovereignty.

Ramsay, a patrician career diplomat, makes a point of welcoming visitors to his residence, decorated with pictures of sea battles, Persian carpets and silver candelabra.

The discreet presence of fit young Britons carrying submachine guns--a “close-protection team” in diplomatic jargon--and shrapnel holes in Ramsay’s book-lined study are the only overt signs of the mayhem of recent months.

But things are clearly not what they used to be. The intensive round of entertaining is a thing of the past. The last time Ramsay gave a dinner party, only seven of the 16 guests turned up.

That was in June, three months after the Christian army commander, Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, launched a so-called war of liberation against Syria’s presence in Lebanon. Few Lebanese venture out at night for fear of being caught in a sudden artillery blitz.

The British example is not matched by many missions.

No one answers the telephone at the Swiss Embassy.

At the U.S. Embassy--a fortress-like complex protected by 150 Lebanese guards and steel barricades--journalists are told that the press attache has instructions not to talk to the media.

For the diplomats who remain, contact with the world outside is made during lulls in the fighting, in high-speed trips through the city in bulletproof cars.

Diplomats agree that the artillery attacks on the city are a form of psychological attrition.

Relaxation is the key.

Ramsay, when the situation permits, goes into the pine-clad hills and nets butterflies behind a screen of bodyguards.