Lebanon Finally Facing Its War

There was nothing outwardly remarkable about the middle-aged engineer with the bald head, corduroy trousers and a tendency to blush when it was his turn to talk. But as he told his story Wednesday to a crowd of university students too young to remember Lebanon’s civil war, an intense hush fell over the crammed hall.

“The first bullets I fired in self-defense, but after my friends started dying, I didn’t care what happened to the other side,” said Assaad Chaftari, who fought as a Christian militia leader during Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war. “I counted my first kills, but then the numbers became too large. I considered every person in front of me the enemy. Palestinians, Muslims, it didn’t matter. They were the enemy.”

A few months ago, such frank talk was unwelcome or even silenced in a nation eager to forget the 15 years of bloodshed. But Wednesday was the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of fighting, and a rattled, rejuvenated Lebanon did something it had never done before: It commemorated its war.

The day was part carnival, part blood-tinged catharsis -- a frenzy of pop concerts and prayer sessions with heavy political overtones. Ebullient young couples slurped ice cream cones and used their cellphones to snap pictures of themselves posing in Martyrs’ Square, a former battlefield at the heart of Beirut, the capital. There were pony rides and a poetry circle. Koranic verses and folk music spilled from loudspeakers. It was often hard to tell whether people were mourning, celebrating, or both.

But it was a remarkable sign of change in this shellshocked nation, which has spent more than a decade trying to bleach the war and its 150,000 deaths out of the collective memory.

Bringing up the war has, until recently, been a social faux pas. Lebanese history texts do not give a thorough telling of the battles, and there has never been an agreement over exactly what happened or who was to blame. Many schools simply ignore the war.

“Discussing the civil war is a taboo,” said Maysam Ali, 18, who is majoring in political studies at the American University of Beirut. A Shiite Muslim, she says she prefers to identify herself simply as “Lebanese,” a common refrain in this country where a history of sectarian bloodshed has created painful religious sensitivities.

“The older generation doesn’t want to discuss it because they’ve been through so much, so our generation knows almost nothing,” she said. “We don’t have a history and we can’t agree on what happened.”

But Lebanon has been deeply shaken in recent months. The assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February stunned the nation and provoked a powerful outpouring of anti-Syria sentiment.

Syria has kept soldiers in Lebanon since the civil war and has quietly gained a chokehold on Lebanese politics through years of military and intelligence domination. Many Lebanese blamed Hariri’s assassination on the regime in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Syrian denials have done little to quell the pressure to withdraw its soldiers from Lebanon. Forced to retreat, the Syrian army has pledged to quit Lebanon by the end of the month.

Hariri’s slaying generated a rash of new alliances as sects that once warred found common ground in their distaste for Syria. Many Lebanese are giddy over the prospect of independence from Syrian domination, but frightened that it could lead to instability and a return to political violence.

In grieving for Hariri, many Lebanese seem to have finally found a way to grieve for themselves -- to mourn the years and lives lost to a war whose purpose few can remember, and to air the dread that political upheaval may lead to renewed fighting.

“It’s not necessarily that the civil war took something from me personally, it’s that it took something from all of Lebanon,” said Noha Adi, a 35-year-old Sunni Muslim and mother of three. She had driven to the capital from her home in the Bekaa Valley near the border with Syria, and stood studying a photographic retrospective of the political disintegration that began with the killing of Hariri.

“I hope the days that passed will not return,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I fear because I have children.”

The pageantry Wednesday played out against a stark background of political stagnation and rising tension. The weeks since Hariri’s death have slipped past; it’s been 59 days, as an electronic signboard reminds visitors to his gravesite. Hariri was buried at the edge of the teeming, flag-draped Martyrs’ Square, which has become the focal point of anti-Syria protesters, Hariri mourners and war commemorators alike.

Lebanon hasn’t had a government since February, when the pro-Syria Cabinet folded under popular pressure and resigned en masse. Attempts to form a new Cabinet have failed repeatedly.

Syrian loyalists spent weeks trying to persuade their foes in the opposition to join the Cabinet, and lately have begun to quarrel among themselves. On Wednesday, Syrian-backed Prime Minister Omar Karami resigned for the second time since Hariri’s death, telling reporters that he again had been unable to form a Cabinet.

With government frozen, analysts say it will soon be impossible to hold parliamentary elections as planned in May, and that a delay could breed further instability.

Amid rising impatience, Bahia Hariri, sister of the slain former prime minister, called for this week’s war commemorations in the spirit of national unity.

Many Lebanese have never come to terms with the violence that racked their nation. The bodies were buried, and some bullet-pocked buildings were patched up. Caches of weapons were tucked away, and warlords rose to prominent posts in the government.

“A lot of these people are now back in government,” said Timur Goksel, a longtime advisor to United Nations troops in southern Lebanon. “They don’t want to bring these old ghosts up again. This is our collective amnesia.”

The topic of the war is so controversial that some Lebanese fervently deny that there was ever a civil war here. They blame the Palestinians, Israel, the United States, Iran and Syria for fighting proxy wars on Lebanese soil. Without foreign meddling, they insist, the people of Lebanon would never have shed one another’s blood.

Scholars bickered so bitterly over whether it could be called a civil war that in the end the only compromise was to call it simply “the Lebanese war.”

In fact, it was many wars in one. Fighting raged among Lebanon’s Christians, Muslims and Druze. In addition, Christians killed Christians and Muslims killed Muslims. To this day, sectarian tensions remain so volatile that the government doesn’t dare take a census.

Asked whether sectarianism was discussed in his class of 13-year-old students from diverse religious backgrounds, teacher Ahmed Hashisho grew agitated.

“Why are you entering into these details? It’s wrong to even speak of these details,” said Hashisho, who had brought his students to the civil war commemoration. “We’re not raising them in this way. They know nothing of these sects.”

Nowadays, the street corner where the civil war erupted on a sunny spring Sunday is just a sleepy urban intersection tucked among dingy apartment blocks. On April 13, 1975, a bus loaded with Palestinians rumbled into the working-class, heavily Christian enclave on the outskirts of Beirut. Christian gunmen opened fire, killing 27 and cracking open festering tensions between Christians and Palestinians. The fighting spread throughout the city, then the country.

Joussef Obeid was a 7-year-old playing in the street with his friends that day. Adults shoved the children out of the way as gunfire crackled. Obeid grew up in the war, playing outside between bursts of shelling. When he was old enough, he took up a gun. “If I say I didn’t, I’m a liar,” said Obeid, 37, now a body-builder.

The site of the bus massacre is marked with a statue of the Virgin Mary and candles in metal troughs. Old men sit in the shade behind the shrine, and women pause to cross themselves on their way home from the market.

“We used to remember the war with a Mass every year,” said Obeid. “But we did it privately, quietly, because it was just us. The Muslims wouldn’t mark it.

“This year it’s special, because everybody is remembering with us.”

Arms folded neatly before him in the lecture hall at the American University, Chaftari, the former Christian militia leader, told the students that, even in childhood, he hurtled unwittingly toward war. He was raised to see Muslims as inferior and as dangerously allied with the Palestinians and the Arab world, he said. Eventually, he came to regard them as a threat to Lebanon.

“I never thought that as a Christian I would carry a gun or plan a suicide car bombing or a political assassination,” he said. “But in 1975 I started because of fear for the Lebanon that I thought was Lebanon.”

Even during the most vicious fighting, he said, “I used to attend church on Sunday for Mass and Communion. I thought my conscience was clean. I was fighting for the cause. I thought of it as another crusade.”