Bitter Divisions Lurk in Recovering Beirut

At 23, Dania Saadi looks the very picture of the new Beirut, a city struggling to rise from its 15-year civil war. She wears jeans and a sleeveless blouse and knows her way around the Web.

She has come a long way from her school days dodging sniper bullets, but she says she still confronts almost daily the bitter sectarian divide and desperately wants to leave it behind.

“It is still there, just below the surface,” Saadi said. “Even in the Internet chat rooms, the first thing they want to know is where you are from in Beirut so they can tell whether you are a Muslim or a Christian. I just say I come from downtown.”

Saadi, a translator and graduate of the American University of Beirut, is a Muslim from West Beirut. East Beirut is Christian. Downtown straddles the two.

Saadi’s perception is shared by many of the city’s 1.2 million people even 11 years after the civil war ended.

In fact, population shifts after the 1975-90 war have reinforced divisions. In villages where two sects lived together, one or the other has taken over. Beirut’s southern fringe and the country’s south and east are now overwhelmingly Muslim Shiite; Beirut and most of the northern city of Tripoli are Sunni Muslim; and the Mt. Lebanon region and parts of the Bekaa Valley in the east are Christian.

Many people still look for each other’s telltale signals: their hometown, their name--Mohammed is Muslim, George is Christian--and such displays of piety as crucifixes or necklaces bearing verses from the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

“Even the liberals amongst the different sects still talk in terms of ‘you’ and ‘us,’ ” said Pascal Kouyoumdjian, a 40-year-old Christian from East Beirut. “Even among my generation, there are many fanatics.”

The divisions surface in elections, choosing a new Cabinet and distributing government jobs.

The spoils are divided by a power-sharing formula dating back to the 1940s that stipulates the president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni and the Parliament speaker a Shiite.

Even something as simple as watching TV is a giveaway; separate Sunni, Shiite and Christian stations operate alongside state television. In basketball, Lebanon’s most popular sport, the most hotly contested games pit Muslim and Christian clubs.

Bitterness arises, too, with memories of the war that keep coming up in conversation.

Saadi remembers the gunfire, and being trapped at home for days without water or electricity.

“I was basically robbed of my childhood,” she says. “You could not just go out and play like children everywhere do.”

Mohammed al-Husseini, a 21-year-old law school graduate, says his worst memory is of a kind, elderly neighbor who left the basement shelter of their apartment building during fighting and never returned.

“I was 9 at the time, and I knew the man well. His mutilated body was found later. It taught me about death for the first time,” al-Husseini said.

People like Saadi, al-Husseini and Kouyoumdjian have decided to stay and deal with the ghosts of war. One million others--one-third of the population--have left since 1990, and the exodus continues, fed by high unemployment, an economic slowdown and an unwillingness to live in a country whose neighbor, Syria, has the final word on how it is run.

But there may now be something to return to, although it is prohibitively expensive.

A multibillion-dollar project to rebuild the downtown is near completion, turning the war’s main killing field into a chic financial district with popular restaurants and cafes--places where waiters greet diners with “bonjour” and can explain the menu in French, English or Arabic.

Beirut also is reviving its past status as the cultural capital of the Arab world. Many of its residents rejoice in the books, art galleries, relatively free press, concerts, theater, cinema and fine dining of post-civil war Beirut.

El-Hamra Street has lost its status as the heart of the city’s night life. That has moved to East Beirut and the northern Christian district of Jounieh.

El-Hamra’s cinemas have closed. Its bars are mostly seedy, the food mediocre.

Al-Sharqiyah, or East Beirut, comes to life after nightfall. Revelers fill its bars, clubs and restaurants. It’s where Lebanese women prove themselves the most fashion conscious in the Arab world. Lebanon was once part of the French empire, and conversations in French enhance the cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Even during the war, people were proud to call themselves Beirutis. It meant being able to survive anything. They remember Lebanon’s history of being more tolerant than other Arab countries, and dream of recapturing the days when their city was known as “the Paris of the Middle East.”