Muslims, Christians Return Home : Beirutis Breathing Sighs of Relief as Truce Holds

Philippe Nacousie peered anxiously over the humped-dirt parapet on the Christian side of the Green Line, looking for business. The airport had reopened five days earlier, and Beirutis were coming home.

Lebanese children clutching stuffed bears bought in the haven of Cyprus toddled out of Muslim-owned taxis and led their parents through Syrian checkpoints at the Museum Crossing, walking the final 200 yards to an uncertain future.

“Today it’s quiet,” Nacousie said. “Tomorrow?” His shoulders rose in a Gallic shrug.

Around him stood the grim testimony of yesterdays in Beirut: the glass tower of the Parliament building, unused for the past year, its panes in shards; the ocher marble facade of the National Museum etched with bullet holes from 14 years of civil war; a shelled-out pediatric hospital, no longer safe for patients but filled with squatter families, who from the balconies, watched a parade of cars returning to the city from the relative safety of the suburbs.

Nacousie is a survivor, an ebullient man fallen in station but still hopeful.

“I was in the water business,” he told a visitor to Beirut. “In all this area, I drilled the wells. But when this war started”--he was referring to the intense shelling of the past six months--”my machinery was wrecked. It’s finished.”

Now Nacousie drives a cab on the eastern, Christian sector of the divided capital. With the planes coming in again, he works the Museum Crossing, the main dispersal point for Beirutis moving east or west. With the tenuous Arab League cease-fire announced Sept. 23 still holding, business has picked up.

Throughout their enclave, 310 square miles stretching 28 miles north from Beirut and into the sharply rising fastness of Mt. Lebanon, the Christians are speaking of peace with tightly guarded hopes.

“Optimism that goes beyond reality,” observed a senior militia official.

On both sides of the Green Line, the first two weeks of truce at least provided a breather from the terrifying artillery war. Many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees are taking the gamble and returning to Beirut, back to their families and businesses. The Santa Maria, a Norwegian-skippered Hovercraft that carried thousands of refugees out of the Christian port of Juniyah under the cover of darkness during the shelling, is now returning some of them in daylight.

Aboard a recent run was a Juniyah woman and her two sons who had fled to Sao Paulo, Brazil, four months ago. The boys, speaking a babble of French, Portuguese and English, were able to get in two months of schooling in Sao Paulo, where they stayed with relatives. The schools of Beirut have been closed since March, when the fighting flared up between Syrian and Muslim militia forces in the west and the Christian-dominated Lebanese Army in the east. In effect, students have lost a year already. Classes are due to resume on Monday.

The Lebanese government is meeting in Taif, Saudi Arabia, to try to forge a lasting formula for peace, but if the fighting begins again, hope will die with the first rounds. Lebanese will seek permanent exile in Europe and North and South America. They have sons and daughters to educate, the next generation, and they will not wait out the war in Cyprus or Syria this time.

The loss would be incalculable, far beyond the physical damage to homes and businesses wrought by the shelling, which was bad enough. When the cease-fire took hold after the six months of intense fighting, more than 800 Beirutis had been killed and another 4,000 wounded, according to police tallies. Dwellings, offices and factories on both sides of the Green Line had been wrecked by shells, particularly in the densely populated Muslim side of the capital.

Damage Was Heavy

On the Christian side, the damage was heavy in some districts near the center of the city but appeared haphazard farther out. The fuel terminal of Dora, between Beirut and Juniyah, hit by Syrian shelling early in the conflict, is a wasteland of blasted oil tanks, trucks and piping. But along the main roads north, apartment buildings with top-floor flats caved in by shells are separated by long stretches of structures untouched except for windows shattered by the concussion of the explosions.

Beirutis speak less of the damage than of the terror of the shelling.

In a Juniyah hotel, Sunny Mann, a doughty Briton whose husband, Jack, was one of the Westerners kidnaped this year in Lebanon’s ugly wars, spoke of the shelling around her apartment in West Beirut.

‘Absolutely Terrified’

“This was the worst,” said the silver-haired, 70ish woman, stroking the head of her white toy poodle, Tara. “It was worse than the Israeli invasion (of 1982), particularly the rockets.

“They (the Christian forces) fired 17 rockets at our neighborhood one night. I counted the bastards. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. The 11th hit the building next door.

“I was absolutely terrified. I took Tara and lay down in the hall. One doesn’t want to get hit by flying glass most of all. Imagine having glass hit your face or slice off a leg. Terrible.”

(Jack Mann, 75, a retired pilot, was kidnaped May 13; a day later, a group calling itself the Cells of Armed Struggle said it had taken an unidentified Briton hostage. On Sept. 8, Sunny Mann said she had been told by “a completely convincing” informant that her husband had died in captivity. His death was never confirmed, however, and on Friday, she told Reuters news service that she now believes her husband is still alive because she had been contacted through the British Embassy to send him medicine.)

No government agency has put a price-tag on the war damage, and in Beirut it is difficult to separate new wreckage from old. But the devastation to the economy can be measured qualitatively. War has debased the Lebanese pound, driven professional elites from the country and crushed industrial capacity.

In the heyday of oil riches in the Middle East, Beirut was both Paris and Zurich. Its seaside hotels beckoned Arabs from restrictive Islamic societies. Terraces were blanketed with Scotch-sipping visitors from the Persian Gulf states. Water skiers zipped along the shoreline. In the evenings, the high rollers assembled at the Casino du Liban on a coastal spur north of Juniyah. And Lebanon’s banks gathered in the petro-dollars.

Roosts for Snipers

Those days are long gone. The grand hotels have become roosts for snipers. The casino is dark, its driveway rumpled by shells from this latest round of fighting. The banks have moved their money offshore to correspondent operations in Europe, and both home and foreign offices battle reports of under-funding.

The famous Lebanese resiliency is being put to the test.

Fouad Abi-Saleh, a former minister of industry and now president of the Assn. of Lebanese Industrialists, a forceful, thoughtful man, has let a thread of pessimism creep into his outlook.

“We need to stop the erosion of our infrastructure, of our estates and of our qualified people,” Abi-Saleh conceded over a sweet Turkish coffee in his pool-side “chalet” at the still-luxurious Aquamarine resort north of Juniyah. “We have to reverse the tide. Otherwise, we will be faced sooner or later with annihilation. People will have left. We will have a vacuum.”

That, he said, “would be a loss for the whole region,” for Abi-Saleh sees Lebanon as a “capital of civilization,” a European window to the Arab world.

The economy, he admitted, “is not in the best shape.” Dislocations within the Christian community, with tens of thousands forced by war and fear to abandon homes in south and north Lebanon and move into the security of the enclave, have flooded the labor market. There are not enough substantial jobs, so workers double-up, taking nonproductive spots in the marginal economy.

“Too many people are dormant, too many doing service jobs or joining the militia,” he noted. And, he argued, the blockaded ports have hurt the Muslim side even more than the Christian.

He searched out the bright spots: $3 billion on deposit in Lebanese banks, and at least twice that deposited outside the country; another $25 billion held by Lebanese living abroad, an important cushion in a country where the family provides welfare for the needy; a standard of living, while depressed with inflation running in double-digits, that remains high for the region.

“Things will come back to normal if we have a minimum (political) settlement,” the industrialist insisted.

In the Christian heartland of Lebanon, where the French tongue of Lebanon’s prewar administrators is heard more frequently than Arabic, life has an indisputable elan. The Muslims, a longtime Beirut resident insisted, have the better sense of humor, and perhaps they have needed it. The Christians focus on style.

At Ease in Beirut

Roadside signs for new boutiques have a European panache. Like Southern Californians, men are described by their cars. Two young men with Western-cropped haircuts and designer polo shirts bounced through East Beirut the other day in a white Volkswagen Golf convertible--California plates held by a bracket advertising a Dodge dealership in Torrance.

On any Sunday during the shelling, Christian families wound up the mountain road east of Jubayl in a caravan of sleek German sedans to the Maronite Church of St. Charbel. The second Sunday of the truce was different only in the size of the multitude.

Hundreds of cars filled the road. At stops along the way, young men blasted the mountain brush with Italian shotguns, bagging birds no bigger than a fist. Small boys were dressed in the black cloaks of the Maronite monks in honor of the 19th-Century hermit for whom the church is named.

The air was festive, and the talk was of politics. Michel Sfeir, a banker, laid out for two visitors the basic Maronite line: The United States and Israel are trying to keep Lebanon divided and weak, and Syria is their agent. It is all a conspiracy.

“We are here at St. Charbel to pray for peace and unity,” said Sfeir, surrounded by his family in front of the church. “But the foreigners won’t let us have it.

“We don’t know how long this cease-fire will last, but we have endured a lot already. We will keep on.”

Three thousand feet below, in the commercial and residential neighborhoods of East and West Beirut, men in working clothes spent their Sunday patching up their stores and homes with brick and plaster. No one was replacing windows yet. No one was removing the sandbags.

Williams, The Times’ Nicosia bureau chief, was recently on assignment in Beirut.

LOST CHILDHOOD: ‘It was not easy to even think of fun,’ says Rima Torbay of her youth in Lebanon. Page 16