On 25th Anniversary of Civil War, Lebanese Rally for Account of Missing

Twenty-five years ago Thursday, an ambush by Lebanese Christian fighters on a bus crowded with Palestinians marked the first blow in a long civil war. Before the conflict ended in 1990, an estimated 150,000 people--5% of the population--had been killed, this capital city lay in ruins and Lebanon had, for all intents, lost its independence.

Even though a decade has passed since a Syrian-imposed peace was implemented, the legacy of a civil war that divided Christians and Muslims remains so sensitive that the country still lacks an official day of remembrance.

Thursday night, however, on the anniversary of the war’s outbreak, hundreds of mostly young Lebanese activists gathered on Martyrs’ Square in the newly rebuilt heart of Beirut for an unofficial ceremony to try to get Lebanon’s leaders to confront their country’s recent past of terrible sectarian violence.

Wearing blue ribbons and carrying candles and white flowers for the war’s victims, the demonstrators called on the rulers to mount a comprehensive investigation into the fate of an estimated 17,000 people--Muslims and Christians--who were kidnapped or disappeared during the war.

They also asked that April 13 be declared an annual memorial day.

“There is a well-known saying in Arabic: ‘Speak about it, so that it does not happen again,’ ” said Paul Ashkar, one of the demonstration organizers. “But the policy of our state is, ‘Don’t speak about it, even if it means it might happen again.’ ”

In recent years, a grass-roots movement led by the families of those who disappeared during the war has been arguing that Lebanon needs some kind of truth and reconciliation process if it is to recover from the war. “Ten years of civil peace did not heal the open wounds of the parents of kidnap victims,” said Wadad Halwani, one of the leaders of the movement.

Among the demonstrators were relatives of the disappeared who sat or stood silently on the cobblestone pavement holding up faded black-and-white photographs of the young men who were abducted and, in most cases, presumably executed. Other participants held the Lebanese flag or carried placards in Arabic that said, “We have the right to know.”

Banker Majdi Gadaa, 30, said he, like other family members, deserves some official word about the fate of his father, who was one of 38 people, mainly Christians, who disappeared in Muslim-held West Beirut one day in August 1985.

“If he was killed, I need to know where he is buried,” Gadaa said. “I need to know the details.”

He rejected as inadequate a 1995 law that allows families of the disappeared to come forward and have their loved ones certified as dead. It is the state’s responsibility to look into the actual cases, he argued.

“The government has security forces. There are many former militiamen in parliament,” he said. “Let them ask them what happened.”

But looking too closely into Lebanon’s past remains an unofficial taboo, in part because so many people now in positions of power shared in the bloodletting.

“We have to pass over these things,” plastic surgeon Ziad Sleiman said as he sat at a stylish new cafe in the downtown development area. “If we talked about everything, very soon we could find ourselves in a very difficult situation, because anything here can cause a war.”

Where he sat was an eerie ghost neighborhood only four years ago, its abandoned buildings reduced to Swiss-cheese-like shells, pocked and perforated by years of shooting and artillery duels along the Green Line that once divided the city’s Muslim and Christian halves.

Thanks to a massive building and restoration effort launched by billionaire former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the old downtown is coming to life again.

Other parts of Beirut are recovering physically as well. Yet politically and economically, the country is still under the war’s shadow.

Lebanon may never regain its prewar status as the banking and tourism center of the Middle East. Nor has political life returned to normal. It is an open secret that the president, prime minister and other top officials are appointed by--and beholden to--Syria, which maintains 30,000 troops in Lebanon.

In addition, about 10% of Lebanese land remains under the control of Israel and its proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army. Israel first entered Lebanon in 1978 on grounds that it needed to protect its northern border areas against attacks by Palestinian guerrillas. Now it has announced plans to withdraw in July, ending its 22-year presence.

Although the outside world usually remembers the Lebanese civil war as a terrible example of sectarian hatred, with Christians fighting Sunni Muslims fighting Shiite Muslims and Druze militias for profit and political control, many Lebanese accuse external forces of prolonging the fighting.

Under their theory, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Israelis, the Iranians and even the Americans and the Russians had competing interests in Lebanon that prevented the Lebanese from reconciling with one another.

“The so-called civil war among the Lebanese ended by 1976,” newspaper editor Gebran Tueini of the Nahar daily asserted in an interview. After that, he contended, it was all the fault of outside forces.