MIDDLE EAST : Scars of Survivors Mark Years of War in Pacified Beirut

The streets of Beirut, once torn by civil war, are peaceful again. But the civilians scarred by the war are tragically visible almost everywhere.

Leila Saab is one of them. On July 29, 1986, the 42-year-old pharmacist was returning from her parents’ home in East Beirut to her job at the American University Hospital in the city’s western sector.

Just the day before, a car rigged with 440 pounds of explosives had gone off not far from the Saabs’ apartment, killing 33 people and wounding 126.

Knowing full well the tit-for-tat pattern of violence that characterized that period, Saab was taking a chance crossing to the west.

That day, her luck turned bad.

A car rigged with what police determined to be 165 pounds of explosives attached to four mortar shells exploded next to the taxi in which Saab was riding. Twenty-two people were killed, 180 wounded.

“Whispering, black,” were her first impressions upon regaining consciousness, then the question, “Why did I get into this bobby-trapped car?”

Although seriously injured, Saab kept her wits. “I opened the door and started running, ran to a shop to ask for water and begged a driver to take me to the hospital,” she recalled.

Her injuries--second- and third-degree burns on the face, left arm and shoulder, fractured feet, perforated eardrums and wood, metal and glass shrapnel and splinters embedded in her face and arms--kept her in the hospital for 41 days and out of work for 5 1/2 months.

As for souvenirs, Saab once had a yellow, half-inch-square piece of metal that the surgeons had removed from her upper arm. At some point over the years, it disappeared.

Now, more than five years later, her main reminder of what she calls “the accident” is her mother’s insistence on celebrating her daughter’s birthday not on March 21, when she was born, but on July 29, when she was “reborn.”

Over the 16 years of Lebanon’s civil war--only now at an apparent end with the imposition of Syrian military control over Beirut--many civilians paid a much higher price than Saab. Dr. Hicham Baroudy sees several of them. Director of the Physical Medicine Unit at the American University Hospital, he deals with amputees and the paralyzed.

One of these is Amin Saliba. Last November, Saliba and his family returned to their village after staying away for four years because of the fighting. Soldiers stationed nearby told Saliba that the area was clear of anti-personnel mines.

It wasn’t. The 43-year-old librarian’s leg was severed above the knee.

Most of those maimed by Lebanon’s factional fighting, both uniformed and civilian, “are men in their 20s and 30s, in the productive group,” said the Danish- and U.S.-trained Dr. Baroudy. “Many feel frustrated because they are victims.”

Psychiatric help for their emotional problems is limited. And the vocational future of these men is bleak. Many never held a steady job.

Baroudy says some have organized into groups and call themselves “consumers.” They want more say in how funds earmarked for the handicapped are spent.

Little aid is available through the Lebanese government beyond immediate surgical expenses. Only one-third of the victims receive good care, Baroudy said.

The various militias involved in the fighting often paid the bills for their own wounded. But with Lebanon now a country nominally at peace, the militias say they are broke. And an artificial limb costs $1,000, or 10 times the monthly minimum wage.

The number of handicapped in Lebanon, in Baroudy’s estimation, is in the tens of thousands. The worst cases, he says, are those who lost both arms and are blind. With no institutions to care for them, they live with their families.

But recently, the university hospital received a $335,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to train technicians in prosthetic and orthotic services. The two-year program will begin in January with 10 students.

The expertise acquired by the hospital’s medical staff in dealing with such cases is now recognized by the world. But Gladys Mouro, director of nursing services at the hospital, who has recruited nurses in India, Bulgaria and the Philippines, says U.S. recruiters lure the hospital’s nurses to the United States with $40,000-a-year salaries and other benefits.

“This is unethical when a country is just coming out of war,” Mouro said.