Emotional Scars Remain as Beirut Tries to Rebound : Mideast: Five years of peace have brought a veneer of normalcy. But city’s glory is just a distant memory.

It has been five years since the guns of the Middle East’s longest and deadliest civil war fell silent. Five years to mourn, to heal, to lay the nightmares to rest. Time enough to rescue this once-glorious city from the death throes of destruction.

And true, peace has restored a veneer of normalcy to this shattered capital.

The wild-eyed militiamen for whom an AK-47 was the very symbol of manhood have turned their tanks and artillery over to the army. Side arms have been hidden under mattresses or coated with grease, wrapped in plastic and buried in back yards. No longer can you have a man killed for $100 or someone’s kneecap shot off for the price of lunch at Speghateria.

Freed from fear, Beirut’s residents once again stroll the corniche along the Mediterranean each evening and on the weekends crowd the swimming pool at the St. Georges Yacht Club, which stands as a relic of the golden days on a moonscape of crumbling, bombed-out hotels. Restaurants offering delicacies flown in daily from France are packed, and the last revelers don’t stagger home from the nightclubs until dawn.

But beneath the calm, a generation of warfare, from 1975 to 1990--involving Israel, Syria, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas and Lebanese Christian and Muslim forces--has changed almost everything: the people, the city, the society.

It has left emotional scars as deep as the gaping artillery holes that pockmark the abandoned buildings of downtown Beirut.

“Even after five years, I can’t stand any kind of loud noise, and the sound of, say, someone screaming sends shivers down my back, drives me crazy,” Dr. Usama Mugharbil said. He lighted another cigarette and looked out the window of his shabby sixth-floor office in Berbir Hospital, across the “green line” that once divided the Muslim and Christian quarters of this reunited city.

The view was that of Berlin, circa 1945.

“Guns,” he went on, “still make me nervous. Even army checkpoints make me nervous. My hands shake. The funny thing is, my children, who grew up with guns around, don’t seem bothered at all.”

For much of the war, Berbir Hospital was a target for competing gunners. Mugharbil stuck it out at the hospital day after day, refusing to seek shelter in the mountains or abroad. Shells crashed into crowded wards, and patients were lugged down darkened stairwells to safer rooms below. Gunmen stormed into operating rooms during surgery to threaten doctors. Snipers took up positions on the hospital’s roof. On the worst days, the morgue filled up, and the dead and dying were laid head to foot on the sidewalk outside the hospital.

“I stayed because I had a responsibility,” Mugharbil said. “But I can tell you this: I have seen my last war. If I hear one more bullet fired in Beirut, it’s bye-bye. I’m packing up and gone.”

Many Lebanese--and most major foreign investors--are taking that wait-and-see attitude. Their confidence in the future remains shaken, and though few expect renewed warfare between the Christians and Muslims, the ability of various Muslim groups to coexist is less certain in a country where militias are banned but the militia mentality of intimidation has never gone away.

At various times in recent months, the Shiite Muslims and Druze have been at odds. So have the Sunnis and Shiites, and the Shiites’ moderate (Amal) and radical (Hezbollah) wings. Lebanon is also home to 300,000 Palestinians. Southern Lebanon is the last active battlefield of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The country has 35,000 Syrian soldiers within its borders, and it must defer to Syrian President Hafez Assad in Damascus on all important government decisions.

“Does anyone really think we’re masters of our sovereignty?” one Lebanese scholar asked.

At American University--once known as the Harvard of the Middle East--the assassination of school President Malcolm Kerr in 1984, intermittent shelling that made the campus part of a war zone and the 1991 leveling of College Hall in a terrorist bomb attack altered the composition and character of the venerable 129-year-old institution.

Before the war, the student body and faculty consisted of 108 nationalities. Foreigners made up 40% of the student enrollment. Today, 58 nationalities are represented, and the percentage of foreigners has been cut in half.

“Our tolerance and patience are at a very low level these days, and I suppose that’s a byproduct of the war,” university sociologist Mohammed Faour said. “People had to be pushy, aggressive to survive, and you see that behavior in the chaos on the streets now, with drivers not yielding an inch, cutting each other off, constantly honking.

“There’s also been a breakdown in discipline,” he added. “During the war, students got used to not finishing the curriculum because of bombings, having to run away during exams because of security problems. What you find now as a result is a sort of sluggishness, a lack of concern about doing things right and on time. There’s always an excuse for not doing something. For those of us who care about performance and punctuality, this can be very annoying.”

A few miles from the campus, Mohammed Salam turned his 1984 Ford sedan up a narrow road where cars with blaring horns fought for the right of way and vehicles were parked bumper to bumper on the sidewalk. He passed a house with a small garden that stood miraculously unscathed among ravaged buildings.

“That’s my home,” he said. “Shells landed in the garden from time to time, but the house was spared. I try not to think about the war anymore. I block it out. When you ask questions, things come back, but otherwise I try to forget those 15 years and remember what Beirut was in the old days.”

And what an extraordinary place it was--the intellectual heart of the Arab world, its banking and publishing center, a French-speaking city of beauty and charm and sophistication favored by journalists, diplomats, spies and tourists.

Beirutis could ski in the mountains in the morning and sunbathe on Mediterranean beaches in the afternoon. This, they said, was the Paris of the Middle East, and, until gunmen and kidnapers turned it into the most evil city on Earth, no one could dispute the moniker.

For the first years of the war, the city and its economy held up surprisingly well. If we can just get rid of the Palestinians, everyone said, our problems are over. But the PLO was driven out of Lebanon by Israel in 1982, and the war continued. By the mid-1980s, the economy had collapsed, the middle class had started shrinking, and Beirut had taken on all the trappings of a decaying Third World city.

What unites the Lebanese more than nationhood or ethnicity is the ideology of money, for Lebanon’s heart is that of a rug merchant; as the value of the Lebanese pound was hammered down, from two for $1 before the war to 2,700 for $1 in 1989, the middle class saw its stability disappear. Homes and businesses were lost, the real value of salaries plummeted, the intelligentsia moved abroad, educational institutions faltered, world-class medical research ended.

The void was filled by a new class of Lebanese: the ultra-rich who had cashed in as war profiteers and smugglers of drugs and arms. Their symbols of success were a cellular phone, a Sri Lankan maid and an after-dinner cigar.

Increasingly Beirut became a city with two classes: the nouveaux riches and the impoverished, long-oppressed Shiites who moved from the war-battered south to become squatters in the capital’s wasteland of ravaged buildings.

“I can remember when I’d walk down Hamra,” said journalist Tewfic Mishlawi of Beirut’s main commercial boulevard, “and every few steps it was mahkaba, mahkaba [hello]. You knew everyone. People were dressed up. The shops were elegant. It was a very nice scene.

“Now, I don’t pass anyone I know on Hamra. The street looks run-down, and you certainly don’t find people dressing up to spend an afternoon on Hamra.”

The Americans are gone too, chased away by kidnapers and kept away by a State Department ban on travel to Lebanon.

U.S. companies have been offered a major role rebuilding Beirut--war damage in Lebanon has been estimated at $35 billion--but none have shown interest. Though kidnaping and anarchy may be over, thanks to an Arab-brokered agreement that ended the war, images linger, and Beirut is finding that repairing its reputation is no less trying than reclaiming its prominence.

“You cannot go through what we did and not be changed,” said Ibrahim Khoury, a university administrator who spent countless days huddled with his family in a stairwell while the war swirled through his neighborhood. “For instance, I find I’m much more emotional, open with my feelings, than I used to be. I go to a movie now and if it’s sad, I cry. I never did that before.

“In a way it’s amazing Lebanon survived at all,” he noted, adding: “But there’s a resilience here, an inherent optimism, and we were able to adapt to war. The electricity went out and we used candles. Then we moved up to gas lamps, then generators. Being adaptable kept us alive, but maybe it’s a problem too, because it means we will accept great extremes as the norm.”

For now, in a city still suffering power blackouts and faulty phone service, the Lebanese are looking to one man to create the miracle of rebirth: Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a widely respected figure who became a billionaire in the Saudi Arabian construction business. He is seen as a healer of sectarian divisions and, as the largest shareholder (6% ownership) of Solidere, the privately financed firm created to rebuild the capital over the next 25 years, the key to Beirut’s future.

Solidere has moved out the squatters, paying some families as much as $25,000 to relocate. It has brought in an army of bulldozers to start clearing acre upon war-torn acre of Beirut’s downtown core.

The effort is said to be the largest privately financed urban renewal project ever. With 70,000 shareholders, Solidere provides an excellent barometer of Lebanon’s mood: Its shares were first offered with a par value of $100 in 1994; they peaked at $170 a share a few months ago and now have settled back to $126.

“The project has tremendous cultural importance,” said Nasser Chammaa, Solidere’s chairman. “We’re coming out of a war, and we have to eradicate the physical scars. But just as important, we have to create a space where communities that have become polarized can coexist together.”

Even the most fervent believers doubt that Beirut ever again can be what it once was. The golden days belong to history.

But with 80 radio stations, 45 television stations, 18 daily newspapers and more lively, open discussion than is heard anywhere in the Arab world, perhaps, some say, Lebanon can eventually reclaim its place as a center of literature, research and intellectual debate.

“If we can just get back to where we were 25 years ago, when the phones worked and the middle class had a future, it’ll be an accomplishment,” a Beirut lawyer said. “I’ve heard friends say, only half-jokingly: ‘Let’s go back to the good old days of the war. At least we had money then.’ ”