by Robert Fisk
Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's elegy for Beirut

Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent
of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of
bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere
terrified people are scrambling to get out of a
city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and
destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East'
- is defiled yet again, Robert Fisk, a resident
for 30 years, asks: how much more punishment can
it take?
Published: 19 July 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1185694.ece

In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city
of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East
Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a
massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea
withdrew several miles and the survivors -
ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked
out on the sands
to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed
in front of them.

That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami
returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So
savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the
Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople
as compensation to every family left alive.

Some cities seem forever doomed. When the
Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to
Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered
every man, woman and child in the city. In the
First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a
terrible famine; the Turkish army had
commandeered all the grain and the
Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have
some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years
ago of stick-like children standing in an
orphanage, naked and abandoned.

An American woman living in Beirut in 1916
described how she "passed women and children
lying by the roadside with closed eyes and
ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to
find people searching the garbage heaps for
orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and
eating them greedily when found. Everywhere
women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among
the grass along the roads..."

How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years,
I've watched this place die and then rise from
the grave and then die again, its apartment
blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked
like Irish lace, its people massacring each
other.

I lived here through 15 years of civil war that
took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions
and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the
lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have
seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed,
bombed and splashed across the walls of houses.
Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people
whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose
gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and
whose suffering we almost always ignore.

They look like us, the people of Beirut. They
have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful
English and French. They travel the world. Their
women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But
what are we saying of their fate today as the
Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on
this city and the surrounding countryside - tear
them from their homes, bomb them on river
bridges, cut them off from food and water and
electricity? We say that they started this
latest war, and we compare their appalling
casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night
- with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are
the same.

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the
Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people
and spend our time evacuating our precious
foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's
"disproportionate" response to the capture of
its soldiers by Hizbollah.

I walked through the deserted city centre of
Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever
of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful
to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war
whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it
blinded its own people. This part of the city -
once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq
Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered
scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.

The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful
precursor to the present war in which his
inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis,
still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting
for the last UN investigator to look for clues
to the assassination - an investigator who has
long ago abandoned this besieged city for the
safety of Cyprus.

At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and
cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined
Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and
watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling
the façade of the French-built emporium
that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy.
So many of these streets were built by Parisians
under the French mandate and they have been
exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian
doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns
dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres
away.

Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a
beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a
table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared
and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was
about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you,
Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't
rebuild Beirut!"

And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq
Hariri International Airport has been attacked
three times by the Israelis, its glistening
halls and shopping malls vibrating to the
missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel
depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway
viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most
of his motorway bridges have been destroyed.

The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a
missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this
small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of
Beirut has been spared. So far.

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and
Shiyah that have been levelled and "rubble-ised"
and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a
million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in
schools and abandoned parks across the city.
Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah,
another of those "centres of world terror" which
the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands.

Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of
God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating
man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the
wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of
Hizbollah's top military planners - including,
no doubt, the men who planned over many months
the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last
Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live
here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a
country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy -
a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not
the issue - what does this act of destruction
tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

In a modern building in an undamaged part of
Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well
known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck
white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go
on if we have to for days or weeks or months
or..." And he counts these awful statistics off
on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we
have bigger surprises still to come for the
Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we
will get our prisoners and it will take just a
few small concessions."

I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten
over the head. Over the wall opposite there is
purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a
swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers,
their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in
trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

As for the huddled masses from the powder of the
bombed-out southern slums of Haret Hreik, I
found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under
trees and lying on the parched grass beside an
ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut
by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires
fall.

Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American
helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen,
heading through the mist and smoke towards the
US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate
more citizens of the American Empire. There was
not a word from that same empire to help the
people lying in the park, to offer them food or
medical aid.

And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke
that works its way through the entire city, the
fires of oil terminals and burning buildings
turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that
moves below our doors and through our windows. I
smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the
people of Beirut are coughing in this filth,
breathing their own destruction as they
contemplate their dead.

The anger that any human soul should feel at
such suffering and loss was expressed so well by
Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil
Gibran, when he wrote of the half million
Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of
them residents of Beirut:

My people died of hunger, and he who
Did not perish from starvation was
Butchered with the sword;
They perished from hunger
In a land rich with milk and honey.
They died because the vipers and
Sons of vipers spat out poison into
The space where the Holy Cedars and
The roses and the jasmine breathe
Their fragrance.

And the sword continues to cut its way through
Beirut. When part of an aircraft - perhaps the
wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although
the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of
the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend,
I raced to the scene to find a partly
decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese
soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These
are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar
Chim, who have been mending power and water
lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.

I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick
because I think the Israelis will bomb again but
we'll show you everything we can." And they took
me through the fires to show me what they could
of the wreckage, standing around me to protect
me.

And a few hours later, the Israelis did come
back, as the men of the small logistics unit
were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks
and killed 10 soldiers, including those three
kind men who looked after me amid the fires of
Kfar Chim.

And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they
are hitting. That's why they killed nine
soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the
military radio antennas. But a logistics unit?
Men whose sole job was to mend electricity
lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to
die. It is to be starved of electricity now that
the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is
to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those
poor men had to be liquidated.

Beirutis are tough people and are not easily
moved. But at the end of last week, many of them
were overcome by a photograph in their daily
papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken
flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet
curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue
pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair -
closed, turned away from the camera. She had
been another "terrorist" target of Israel and
several people, myself among them, saw a
frightening similarity between this picture and
the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a
field beside her weeping sister in 1939.

I go home and flick through my files, old
pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There
are more photographs of dead children, of broken
bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut",
says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate".
"Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege".
"Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".

Yes, how easily we forget these earlier
slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were
butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy
Christian militia allies in September of 1982
while Israeli troops - as they later testified
to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the
killings. I was there. I stopped counting the
corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women
had been raped before being knifed or shot.

Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri
with my driver Abed last week, we swept right
past the entrance of the camp, the very spot
where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And
we did not think of them. We did not remember
them. They were dead in Beirut and we were
trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been
trying to stay alive here for 30 years.

I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone
rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from
the United States, the author of a fine novel
about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take
care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what
is being done to the Lebanese. It is
unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people,
and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank
her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful,
generous way she condemned this slaughter.

Then, on my balcony - a glance to check the
location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the
sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from
an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a
great Ottoman city. "Beyrouth" was the dateline.
"Anarchy is now the order of the day, our
properties and personal safety are endangered,
no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are
committed with impunity. Several Europeans have
quitted their houses and suspended their
affairs, in order to find protection in more
peaceable countries."

On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a
hand-painted lithograph of French troops
arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the
Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are
camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later
become the site of the French embassy where,
only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women
registering for their evacuation. And outside
the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli
jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20
miles out to sea.

Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers,
was to have performed at this year's Baalbek
festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's
festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting.
One of her most popular songs is dedicated to
her native city:

To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart
And kisses - to the sea and clouds,
To the rock of a city that looks like an old
sailor's face.
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?

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