Schooling Is a Casualty of War in Beirut

Under a shell-pocked 11-story building in the east Beirut neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh, 30 children aged 4 to 13 struggle to read by dim candlelight in a cavernous basement.

“They have forgotten many things, such as counting or identifying drawn animals,” said Hoda Azzam, 24, the teacher of a dozen of the children, who clustered around her in a scene reminiscent of the Middle Ages.

Christians have established a number of such makeshift schools in embattled Beirut, but many children, exposed daily to the atrocities of a bitter war, have lost the capacity to learn and turned violent, educators say.

Since the end of January, east Beirut has been a battleground in a power struggle between Christian strongman Michel Aoun and his Christian rival Samir Geagea. More than 1,000 people have died in the fighting and thousands more have lost their homes and livelihoods to the almost constant pounding of heavy artillery and screaming shells.

“It’s a difficult task,” Azzam said of her students. “They keep quarreling among each other. They have largely lost their capability to concentrate and learn, apparently because of the deafening shellfire blasts.”

The smell of food overwhelmed her makeshift class as several families who live in the basement cooked in a corner. The coarse voices of four men playing cards echoed through the chamber, drowning out the instructions of the young teacher.

Alfred Madi, a member of the Christian Phalange Party Politburo who is attempting to create a network of underground classrooms, said his group has managed to organize three schools serving about 700 children.

“We realize that it’s not a perfect deed, but we want to collect our children from the streets where they imitate the adults and fight mock street battles with wood-made rifles and dummy pistols,” Madi said.

“We definitely don’t want them to follow our example. We wish them a peaceful future.”

Officials said the ongoing warfare between Aoun and Geagea has destroyed or damaged more than 100 schools in the 310-square-mile Christian enclave that encompasses east Beirut and nearby towns. They estimate that more than 100,000 children have been affected by the battle.

Madi said Christian officials are racing to set up more underground classrooms now that the inter-Christian violence has subsided somewhat due to Iraqi mediation efforts. They fear the violence will eventually flare again.

For many Christian students, it is the second year without regular schooling. In March, 1989, Aoun launched a wide-scale effort to oust the 35,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon, a move that led many schools to close.

Aoun’s war against the Syrians ended in September, 1989, as a result of mediation efforts by the Tunis-based Arab League. But almost as soon as students returned to their schools, the current battle between Aoun and Geagea erupted in January.

“The failure to send children to school for two years in a row is a prime reason for the massive immigration from the Christian region,” said Elie Mikhail, the head of the Phalange Student Assn.

As many as 200,000 Christians have fled the enclave, with many seeking refuge and a stable future for their children in the Moslem-controlled west. Officials said an equal number of people, most of them Christians, were attempting to flee the country altogether.

Mikhail, also involved in the underground school project, said it was not enough to protect children physically from the violence that surrounds them.

“We’ll have to provide them with education and not only secure food and drinking water,” he said. “If this war drags on for a long time, we fear that the children may lose their ability to learn.”

In the basement of another building in east Beirut, a group of young teachers struggled with yet another classroom of unruly children.

“They fight each other with fists as I try to teach them some things that require concentration,” said Roula Abi Khattar, 25. “They show a spirit of arrogance that surprises me.

“I make some success when I start telling a story,” she said. “But usually they keep talking about the war, about shells, cannons and tanks.”