Postwar Beirut Now Beckons Americans

For a city brought to its knees in the 1980s by car bombs, gun battles and kidnappings, the few sticks of dynamite that were tossed into the American University of Beirut compound recently did not qualify as a serious attack.

But with the university’s next president in town, the blast did strike many Beirut residents as a serious warning.

“Someone wanted to scare the Americans,” said Adnan Iskander, an AUB political science professor. “We don’t know who did it. Whoever it is, they are not happy with the opening of Lebanon to Americans.”

Since Secretary of State Madeleine Albright lifted a 10-year ban on travel to Lebanon in July, hundreds of U.S. citizens have visited this scarred city that is undergoing a stunning rebirth. They are Lebanese Americans returning to their roots, business executives bidding for a piece of the reconstruction pie and onetime residents seeking old haunts.

John Waterbury, who takes over as president of AUB in January, was on a scouting mission to Beirut when the dynamite blew out windows at the university in October. While concerned, Waterbury said the blast did not derail his plan to be the first AUB chief living on the banyan-shaded campus since 1984, when then-President Malcolm Kerr was gunned down there amid Lebanon’s 15-year civil war and a wave of anti-American violence.

“For the time being, unless there is a repetition or escalation, I don’t anticipate any change in my plans,” Waterbury said in a telephone interview from New Jersey.

Just how safe Beirut may be for Americans such as Waterbury is a question for which no one seems to have a simple answer. In part, that is the nature of Beirut itself, a city with a violent past and promising future but no clearly defined present.

Part Sarajevo, part reunited Berlin, Beirut appears through a veil of construction dust. The past, a civil war that claimed about 150,000 lives, is embedded in the pocked shells of apartment buildings and hotel carcasses along the Green Line that once divided the city’s Muslim and Christian halves.

The future is on display in cardboard models of a 445-acre commercial and financial center that is to be raised on the ruins of this ancient Phoenician city--one of the most-ambitious urban renewal projects attempted.

But for now, downtown Beirut looks like an unfinished movie set, with wrecking balls and cranes rising from empty lots where 500 buildings have been leveled to remake a city once known as the Paris of the Middle East. A few patrician facades stand over the rubble, surrounded by scaffolding and mesh drapes to contain the debris. Like the former East Berlin, it is in a state of transition.

Camouflaged tanks, with tarpaulins over their guns, are parked discreetly off to the side. The threat today seems to come from bulldozers, jackhammers and reckless, honking cars.

In spite of this chaos, the city is open and eager to please. It beckons tourists into glistening shopping centers with Armani and Donna Karan fashions. By day, the Mediterranean Sea is an alluring blue, and by night the city woos visitors with stylish restaurants and exotic clubs.

The Lebanese say they like Americans and want U.S. tourism to restore their economy. Most seem to have family in the United States or have lived there themselves. They see the arrival of American franchises such as Pizza Hut and the Hard Rock Cafe as confirmation that life is returning to normal seven years after the war.

“Look,” boasted an official in the Ministry of Tourism, “we have Thanks God, It’s Friday.”

But the reconstruction of Lebanon’s political life is as incomplete as Beirut’s downtown. About 35,000 Syrian troops are stationed in much of the country, and Israeli forces occupy a stretch of southern Lebanon. Despite the Lebanese tanks and sentries in the capital, the government remains weak, its control over the country limited.

“If Syria is at peace with the Americans, it is safe for Americans,” said Lebanese restaurateur Bechara Nammour. “If Syria wants to create problems, they will create problems. Today, it is very safe.”

Some Lebanese still carry a grudge against the United States for its support of Christian factions during the civil war. Many resent what they see as unquestioning U.S. support for Israel, whose soldiers Hezbollah guerrillas are fighting to oust from the south.

U.S. officials recall the 1983 terrorist attack on a Marine Corps compound near Beirut that killed 241 Americans, the assault on the U.S. Embassy the same year, the killing of Kerr, the kidnapping of journalist Terry Anderson and other attacks. In lifting the travel ban, Albright said she still considered the country dangerous for U.S. citizens but had decided that travel should no longer be illegal.

The State Department then issued a warning that only Americans with “compelling reasons” should consider visiting Lebanon. Those who do, the advisory says, should avoid the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon--strongholds of Hezbollah.

“Americans have in the past been targets of numerous terrorist attacks in Lebanon. The perpetrators of these attacks are still present in Lebanon and retain the ability to act,” it says.

For many American citizens visiting Beirut, this view seems out of sync with reality. They say they feel safe, and the U.S. government is stuck in the past.

Haifa Hammami, a recent graduate of Columbia University’s architecture school, arrived in Beirut in October to look into a job with a British agency building low-cost housing. One of her first stops was at the U.S. Embassy to inquire about security.

To get there, she drove north along a coastal road lined with banana plants and interrupted by army checkpoints, then climbed to a hillside compound encased in razor wire and cement. She passed through two metal gates before boarding an armored car with flak jackets hanging from the seat backs.

Hammami rode through two more gates before arriving at a once-elegant villa, now outfitted in bulletproof glass.

“Their reading of the situation really hasn’t changed at all,” Hammami said one evening at the Duke of Wellington bar. “They have these huge maps with the Muslim areas in crimson red and Christian areas in green. They as much as said, ‘What are you doing here? Go home.’

“I said, ‘Well, you guys lifted the travel ban.’ And they basically said, ‘That is because no one has been taken hostage lately. But no one has been here to be taken hostage.’ ”

In fact, there were opportunities to attack Americans if extremists had wanted to. Thousands of U.S. citizens have circumvented the ban and traveled to Lebanon in the past few years by asking Lebanese officials to issue them visas on loose paper instead of with telltale stamps in their passports. Some businesspeople, working through front companies, and journalists were in the country, as well as diplomats and a few rebellious tourists.

Hezbollah, or the Party of God, which is believed to have been responsible for many of the suicide attacks and kidnappings of the 1980s, has evolved into a legal political party that has members in the National Assembly and a militia fighting Israeli soldiers. Hezbollah leaders deny any connection with past attacks and insist that they have no intention of targeting Americans now.

“We have a certain position against the American administration, but we have nothing against the American people,” said Sheik Attallah Ibrahim, a Hezbollah spokesman. “We support anything that would develop Lebanon from an economic point of view.”

Most Americans are skeptical, however, and those who do make the journey to Lebanon generally feel that they have a compelling reason for doing so.

Hammami, 32, was born in Lebanon to a British mother and Palestinian father. Ignoring the advice of embassy officials that she change hotels every week or so, Hammami began searching for an apartment to rent and looking for her past.

She grew up in the United States on her parents’ memories of Beirut as a seaside paradise with chic cafes and genteel living. They told her that after her birth they buried her umbilical cord beneath a tree to ensure that she would always be surrounded by the vitality of Beirut. Hammami hunted for the tree.

“It was gone. There was this modern high-rise, a big, brand-new apartment building that was empty,” she said.

Dr. Anees Razzouk, a heart surgeon in Loma Linda, Calif., is another native who returned to Beirut last month for the first time in 22 years, traveling with a group of Lebanese Americans on a trip arranged by the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

“I think Americans who do not come here are missing out. This is safer than the streets of Los Angeles. The Lebanese mentality is one of hospitality, openness to all people,” he said.

Razzouk, who left when the war broke out, walked gingerly through the demolished downtown and along frayed Hamra Street--once the Rodeo Drive of Beirut--recalling the freewheeling and prosperous city of his youth.

“It was a city of culture and beauty, where you could live any type of life. It used to be the financial center of the Middle East, a center of education and arts. You wanted to have a wonderful life, you came to Beirut. You wanted to hear music, see a play, go to the ocean, go shopping, you came to Beirut. You wanted higher education in any discipline, you came to Beirut,” Razzouk said.

The reconstruction, he said, “is a good beginning . . . but the scars are not only on the buildings. There are emotional and mental scars and hard feelings in the hearts of people whose dreams were shattered.”

Lebanese American businessman Nasri Maloof, meanwhile, is looking into anything that he might be able to build. An executive with Rosser International construction company in Atlanta, Maloof is interested in airports, sports arenas, criminal detention facilities or any other project that seems financially promising.

“We’ve been wanting to come here for years,” Maloof said in a Georgian drawl while fielding phone calls in the posh suite of his seafront hotel.

“Once the war was truly over, everyone knew this was going to be a gigantic reconstruction project, and our government wouldn’t let us come and participate,” he said. “Here we are, six years late and everyone got a piece of the action but us, and I’m burned up. The Italians are here, the French are here, the Koreans are here.”

And now, the Americans are back in Beirut too.