Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (24 page)

“God raise them,” somebody called, and all the grief tamped down under polished skin and polite faces suddenly throbbed in the hall. Women wailed and bent, bodies wilting over the coffin. Men with steely hair and tailored suits thrashed the air with strings of prayer beads, dropped heads into hands, and keened. “If you love him, let us lift him.” Pallbearers tried to peel the women off the box that held whatever pieces remained of Hariri.

Marwan Harmadeh limped through the crowd to the edge of the coffin, swaying heavily between a walking stick and a young nurse in a white coat. Harmadeh had been an early, outspoken critic of Syria and he had been targeted first; that was four months earlier and he still couldn’t walk properly. The bomb killed his driver but he survived. Now another man stepped briskly to Harmadeh’s side, and a look of understanding slid between them. It was Talal Salman, the editor of
As-Safir
newspaper, whose cheek had been trenched by a bullet during the civil war.
We are scarred, just like our city
, Salman had told me a year earlier. All the lions are here, I thought. The two men stood straight and haughty, and stared at Hariri’s coffin. They looked and
looked until tears spilled down their faces, these proud and body-broken men. Then they stood together and cried.

Somebody was reading prayers; the voices rang off the walls:

The people in these rooms had the power to take the country someplace, but they had to decide where. We stood in a dwindling circle of time. Somewhere a cleric prayed; his voice piped through the rooms. The voices turned panicked as private grief swelled into something public and general. Soon they would move into the street, they would put Hariri in the ground and turn to face this new Lebanon.

“May God grant us victory over our enemies and avenge the crimes of the killers,” the cleric said. “The enemies give us no methods to make up for this loss.”

A middle-aged woman turned to her friends and spread her hands. “We’re not going to remain silent anymore,” she wept. “He wouldn’t speak, but we’re going to speak for him now. Speak, and don’t be afraid.”

We were moving then, past the green lawns and the boxwood hedges, into streets that seethed with souls. Steel paddles of news helicopters pounded the day. They waited for miles, in lines that stretched all the way down to the center of town, and everybody was yelling now, spitting out their slogans.

We waded down in the trail of the coffin, pushing against strangers’ skin and breath, and all along the road people cried, people screamed about Syria and Hariri and God, people waved flags, people stepped on one another and collapsed in the arms of strangers. Down at Martyrs’
Square they flooded the pavement, blanketed rooftops, dangled like spiders from the construction crane at the side of Hariri’s mosque. Because, yes, Hariri had been building a mosque, the biggest and most sumptuous Sunni mosque Beirut had ever seen. He died before the mosque was finished, but they laid him to rest in its shadow all the same, with thousands of flowers and candles and drugged white doves blinking dazedly into flashing cameras. Lebanon is stuffed with martyrs, but Hariri would be the most resplendent martyr of all time. They wedged him right into the heart of Beirut. Whatever he did in life would be nothing compared to what his death could achieve. There was nothing Hariri’s followers wouldn’t do in the name of his blood.

There is a chunk of Beirut that stands on a foundation of garbage. Like many of Lebanon’s curiosities, the explanation for it traces back to the civil war. The city cleaved into two during the fighting, split by a no-man’s-land that cut through the middle of town, from the shore past the prime minister’s office and back toward the airport, and everything wound up on one side or the other. The municipal garbage dump was east of the divide. So people in west Beirut threw their trash into the sea, and the toilet paper and broken plastic things and rusting hubcaps piled and fermented and packed and gelled into solid ground. The dump became earth and the size of Beirut grew. Things like that happen during a war; they happen to people and to cities, too. The landscape changes; the ground shifts forever. And then afterward you’ve got a city built on garbage, a place smooth and cured on the surface, but rotten at its roots.

I thought a lot about that garbage the first time I visited Beirut. It was back in 2003, and I came to write about the city’s architectural rebirth. Hariri had razed the shell-chewed skeletons and put in a Tower Records and sidewalk bistros and Häagen-Dazs. New limestone was quarried down out of the mountains and all the destroyed buildings were put back together, pane by pane, stone by stone. The apple smoke of water pipes hung in the streets; Gucci and Rolex opened boutiques where gold watches and alligator shoes never went on sale because the Saudis and Kuwaitis poured in with their bottomless
purses. Few honest Lebanese could afford to shop or eat there, it was true, but the tourists came flocking back and, anyway, there were enough dishonest Lebanese to make up the difference.

The downtown was perfect except that it was a lie, a shiny facade slapped over a war that had evaporated but never ended, questions that nobody asked, a history too contentious to be taught in school. A new generation was coming of age in a segregated country, in neighborhoods cleansed by their parents’ religious slaughters. The warlords, militia leaders, engineers of kidnappings and torture—those men still ran the country. The armies of Shiites, Christians, and Druze had tucked away their guns and shrunk themselves down to political parties. None of the reasons for fighting had been discussed or resolved or excised. Lebanon had decided to live as if it were all a bad dream, a false thing that could never happen again, as if they had not torn themselves into a thousand pieces, as if they had not spent fifteen years slaughtering one another. Syria had sent in soldiers and intelligence agents after the war, passed out power among the different communities, and squelched dissent. The blank architecture was the face of collective amnesia. Lebanese moved through that city and the war breathed on their necks but nobody talked about it.

I’d ask: Aren’t you afraid you will have more violence? Because it doesn’t seem like anything is resolved.

They all said no. Oh no, never! The Lebanese have learned their lesson. The war was not really our war, not of us. It was America and Israel and Syria and Iran, meddling from outside. Wars take money, and we can’t afford another war. We are too tired to fight. This new generation will be better. War is impossible.

Those were the stories they told themselves in the city built on garbage.

Hariri’s death spun the city like a top, through days that melted into night and then day again, dizzy and sleepless with fever. Rich housewives and students cutting classes and old hardened fighters marched down into the streets by the thousands, the tens of thousands, and on big demonstration days, the hundreds of thousands. They hid away
their militia flags and bought Lebanese flags instead. Suddenly patriotism was fashionable and party politics were gauche—or so the party leaders quietly instructed their flocks.

They took over Martyrs’ Square, the one downtown spot left battle scarred, where bullet holes still showed on the central statue of triumphant gods and fallen fighters. Around the statue stretched vacant lots where large, unanswered questions lurked. It was into that awkward, gaping space that demonstrators surged. The shrine to the civil war would be the rallying ground for a new Lebanon. They pitched tents, threw up a stage and a booming sound system, and announced that they would stay until the Syrians were out of the country.

The crowd melted, the crowd morphed. It was a picnic, a rave, a campfire, a rock concert, a party of Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Druze that rolled through days and nights. A man dressed as a grim reaper carried a coffin through the crowd. Turn around and you saw college girls with the Lebanese flag painted on their faces. The old snipers and guerrillas who had become taxi drivers and shop owners stood quietly with hands in their pockets and unknowable expressions on their faces, roaming the encampments with guns in their pants. The darkness came down from the hills and skimmed over the sea to the sky, and footlights shone from the grass. The girls wore skin-tight jeans and knee-high boots. Babies crawled at their feet. Somebody blew a harmonica. Music throbbed from the speakers, big and sweeping, as if some bygone army were marching off to war. The flag wavers worked in shifts. There was a joke that floated around Lebanon that year, as winter made its long descent into spring. It started as a cartoon, I think: A Filipina maid stands alongside the diamond-draped housewife who imported her as slave labor. The housemaid carries a sign: “Madame says, ‘Syria out!’”

The young people were giddy with it all. The mingling of Christians and Muslims gave them the idea that their generation would lift the country away from the bloodstained claws of their parents. I met a
string of earnest young activists like Marwan Hayed, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer I came across one night among the tents.

“I was born before the war,” he said. “I never got the chance to meet the other Lebanese. I was a Christian and I never knew the Muslims.

“For thirty years they have been lying about the war in Lebanon,” he told me grandly. “They said it was a war among the Lebanese people. That was a lie. That’s what you’re discovering right now, what all Lebanese are discovering now. That we love each other. That we know each other better than ever.”

“Now we have a new face. We are looking to our children and we don’t want them to suffer like we suffered. Both sides paid too much blood. During the war, we were the same age as the people you see here.” That was Sami Abu Gaodi, a Christian militiaman who struck up a conversation one night. His eyes moved fondly over the crowd. “The young generation, they are making us change.”

Those interviews made me nervous, like listening to drunk people gush. It felt wobbly and dangerous, too slick and too easy. The protestors talked all day and all night about how Lebanon was finally united. Sectarianism is dead, they hollered. We are all one.

But—the Shiites weren’t there. And nobody wanted to talk about it.

There were a lot of reasons for their absence, and the first was Hezbollah, the popular Shiite party and militia that held sway over most of Lebanon’s largest sect. Hezbollah depended upon Syria for weapon-smuggling routes and political cover, so the prospect of a Syrian withdrawal scratched nerves. And there was a vaguer, deeper truth: the Shiites, historically shunted aside, impoverished, pushed out into the provinces, were wary of Lebanon without Syria. They had gained prestige and political clout under the tutelage of Damascus, and they were leery of being left alone with the Christians, Sunnis, and Druze. At first they closed their mouths and faded into the background. Hariri’s blood was fresh and there was nothing they could say. Incredibly, nobody paid much attention to their conspicuous absence. Not the politicians, not the journalists, and certainly not the Lebanese themselves. It was treated as an irrelevant aside. But at least a third—as much as half—of the country was Shiite. In the end their distrust—of Israel, of America, of the Christians and Sunnis—was the most devastating corrosion of all.

One morning during those early protests, I visited a Shiite cabinet minister in his office. Syria had kept Lebanon stable for years, he argued over coffee. “The opposition is assuming they have the upper ground and they represent the majority, and this is dangerous. You have to have a dialogue with the majority party in Lebanon.” He meant Hezbollah and the Shiites. “To liberate Lebanon, you don’t want to destroy it.”

In the streets, you could feel the danger, not in spoken words, but in silences. The anti-Syria crowds either pretended the Shiites didn’t exist, or denied their absence. “There are Shiites here!” they said defensively.

“Where?”

“Here among us. I have met many Shiites. The Lebanese are all united.”

“But where?”

“They are here!”

Two weeks of protests passed before Omar Karami, the Syria-backed prime minister, announced that he wouldn’t rule against the wishes of the people. He resigned. The government fell.

The tent city dug in deeper. It wasn’t enough. Faces were fixed toward one slogan: Syria out. Those words had been burning a hole in their tongues for fifteen years of silence, and now they screamed them. They protested and struck and marched. What did it mean, what came after, was it enough—nobody knew and, for the moment, nobody cared.

Washington was there all the while. Faces and neckties glowed on big screens spread behind the crowds, speeches boomed over the vacant lots. President Bush climbed behind podiums and said enormous things about Lebanon. No longer was this a small, forgotten place, a hopeless nest of killers passed off to Syria in desperation. Now, Bush proclaimed, Lebanon was the soul of the war on terror:

“All the world is witnessing your great movement of conscience. Lebanon’s future belongs in your hands and, by your courage, Lebanon’s future will be in your hands. The American people are on your side. Millions
across the earth are on your side. The momentum of freedom is on your side, and freedom will prevail in Lebanon.”

His enthusiasm was understandable. It was a hard winter, and getting harder. Close to 1,500 U.S. soldiers were dead in Iraq; insurgents beheaded their hostages on television and the United States had recently acknowledged losing track of almost $9 billion intended for the Iraqi government. There was no hope of peace talks in Jerusalem. The Taliban was rearing back to life in Afghanistan.

And then came sleepy little Lebanon, like manna from some neoconservative heaven. There were beautiful Muslims and Christians who lived in cosmopolitan seaside towns and spoke plausible English, so committed to their independence, to
democracy
, that they slept out under the stars. Here was the villain: Syria, irascible outlaw among a field of compliant Arab dictators. The American ambassador in Damascus went stomping back to Washington in protest the day after Hariri died. Democracy was on the march.