Checkpoint etiquette

Zahlé, Lebanon - Monday, Nov. 3, 2008

A snippet of conversation from a military checkpoint that my car was stopped at:

Lebanese soldier: Documents, please. (He has a black M-16 assault rifle slung around his shoulder. With him standing and me sitting, the business end of the gun is pointed right at my face. I hand over my passport.)

Me: Can I ask a question?

LS: Go ahead.

Me: I've heard that in the Arab world it's very impolite to point the sole of your foot at someone. Is this true? (Arabs do indeed hate this. The bottom of your foot is considered unclean. Hence all the slapping of Saddam Hussein's fallen statues with sandals back in 2003.)

LS: Yes. It's very bad. (He smiles, and seems pleased by my interest in the local culture.)

Me: I understand. In Canada we consider it very rude to point your rifle at someone.

(The soldier understands and swings his rifle behind his back. He returns my passport with a sharp salute. Perhaps a small victory for civility has been won this fine day in Lebanon.)

Middle East Electoral College: Lebanon results

Zahlé, Lebanon – Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008

Barrack Obama's sweep of the real battleground states continues.

In Lebanon, as in Turkey, George W. Bush achieved the rare feat of unifying the country's quarrelling political factions around their disdain for him and his policies of the past eight years.

The militant Shia Hezbollah movement and its allies hate Bush for his open and unblinking support of Israel, particularly during the 2006 war during which the Israeli military laid waste to much of South Lebanon. When the war was over, Hezbollah supporters hung "Made in the USA" banners over destroyed apartment blocks and mocked claims by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the war had been part of process to bring about a "new Middle East."

That Hassan Nasrallah's followers aren't fans of the Bush Administration is hardly surprising. Far more damning is the hurt disappointment of the country's pro-Western groups, who feel the U.S. abandoned them during and after the war, even though the White House had initially held up the 2005 Cedar Revolution here as proof that "freedom" was indeed spreading in the region.

Here's a sampling of what I heard during my journeys from Tripoli to Byblos to Beirut to Baalbek:

"Obama hates war. Bush wants war against the Muslims and the Arabs and I think McCain will be like Bush."

– Bilal Ramadan, 21-year-old science student. An Allawite Shiite, he lives in the northern city of Tripoli.

"I don't think Obama will be racist in his policies. Black people are not biased towards Israel."

– Khodor Kamaleddin, taxi driver. Works outside the Commodore Hotel in Hamra, a Sunni Muslim neighbourhood of Beirut.

"I like the black one. I like what he is saying. The other one is like Bush, his policies are very bad."

– Wafa Darwish, a 40-year-old schoolteacher from the northern town of Qalmoun.

"Obama is better because he will sympathize with the Arab people and our causes. We hope that this is not just advertising."

– Bilal Bayan, 36-year-old shopkeeper in the Hezbollah-dominated tourist city of Baalbek.

"I am disappointed in both candidates. They are avoiding the big issue, which is the question of Palestine."

– Ahmed Fatfat, MP and former cabinet minister in the pro-Western Future Party.

Out of nearly two dozen Lebanese that I asked about the U.S. elections, only two said they favoured John McCain. So Obama sweeps Lebanon and its 21 electors, widening his already impressive lead in the race:

Barack Obama (Dem.) – 343 votes

John McCain (Rep.) – 65 votes

Obama already clinched the Middle East Electoral College back when he won Turkey, but Jordan and Syria still haven't had their say. Results from both countries should be in by the time polls close in the United States on Tuesday, so stay tuned.

From Hamra to Hezbollahland

By taxi from Beirut to Baalbek, Lebanon - Sunday, Nov. 2

Heading east from the Lebanese capital of Beirut, perched on the Mediterranean Sea, to the Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border is not only a great way to this physically striking country, but also to get a sense of why Lebanon, a great idea in theory, has never worked in practice.

Some days it feels like the most open and tolerant place on earth, with Christian women wearing giant crosses that dangle in their out-there cleavage sharing the sidewalks with Shia women sporting headscarves so tight that not a single hair is visible. Lebanon, as the Lebanese are so fond of saying, sometimes feels like the answer to the so-called "clash of civilizations." (The nightlife is also superb – Beirutis are famous for partying even as the bombs fall. These days, with the country experiencing a rare stretch of relative peace and stability, it's entry by-reservation-only at most of the city's top clubs.)

But Beirut also wears the gruesome scars of all those times that the tolerance faded away and Christian fought Muslim and Sunni fought Shiite. Many buildings in the city centre remain uninhabitable shells of their former selves, torn to shreds by human anger expressed through lead.

I left my hotel in Beirut's Hamra neighbourhood today and headed east with my friend Jamal Jarbouh, a Palestinian refugee (his family is from Haifa) I'd met by chance in a gas lineup during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Our white 1991 Mitsubishi whined as we rose up into the tree-covered Mount Lebanon range and drove through a line of alternatingly Christian and Druze towns, scenic rest spots today that were regularly turned to battlefields during the 1975-1990 civil war. They nearly were again this May as tensions spiked during and after the Shia Hezbollah militia turned its guns inside Lebanon for the first time and carried out a lightning military seizure of West Beirut.

As we follow the winding road through Mount Lebanon, Muslim villages are followed Christian ones less than a kilometre away. Unless you're Lebanese, you can only be sure of which you're in by looking at the political posters taped to telephone poles and the insides of shop windows. Christian towns are lined with billboards advertising the rival factions loyal to Christian leaders Michel Aoun, Samir Geagea and Amin Gemayel. Druze villages are dominated by the red flags of Walid Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party. All are leaders from the civil war era who are still revered by their followers today.

We're stopped in the Christian town of Zahle by an intelligence officer who takes issue with Jamal's Palestinian ID papers (Lebanon's Christians and Palestinian groups were worst of enemies during the civil war year and suspicions still linger). We're allowed to pass only when I explain to the officer in French that I'm Canadian and Jamal is with me.

Eventually, our car descends out of the mountains and we pass through a series of Lebanese army checkpoint on the edge of the Bekaa Valley.

The army checkpoints are the last sign we see of the Lebanese state for some time. Around Baalbek, the ancient Phonecian city that more recently was the birthplace of Hezbollah, the militant Shia movement's yellow banner here takes precedence over the red-and-white Lebanese flag. Giant photographs of the Hezbollah "martyrs" who died fighting Israel hang from nearly every post. There's Samir Qantar, the murderer who was just released from Israeli prison after 29 years as part of a macabre prisoners-for-body parts swap between Hezbollah and Israel. Imad Mugniyeh, the Hezbollah military commander killed this year in a mysterious explosion in Damascus that was blamed on Israel, is the most honoured of the dead.

Though just 85 kilometres away from Beirut and the bright lights of Hamra Street, Baalbek feels like a different country altogether, and in many ways it is. Here the power cuts on and off through the night (our Mitsubishi's headlights even got into the act, leaving us driving in complete darkness for a long stretch) and the mosques, not the nightclubs, are the centres of social activity. This is Hezbollahland.

Jamal and I spend part of the evening drinking tea with the locals at a coffeehouse not far from the Roman ruins that draw the steady stream of tourists that are the city's main source of income. The tea-drinkers are poor and middle class Shiites who speak of Beirut - and the government led by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a Sunni - as something far away that is the source of all their problems. Few are willing to bet that the peace that currently prevails in the country will last through next year's elections.

The trip from Beirut to Zahle to Baalbek makes me think of my travels in Iraq, where Sunni, Shiite and Kurd unwillingly live together for the arbitrary reason that British colonialists thought it was a good idea to draw the borders where they are today. Lebanon feels like a similarly false construct, two or more countries pressed together into one by their former French rulers who paid little attention to the demographic makeup of the state they were creating. As in Iraq, the errors of that time resonate still.

Guns and Buns

Beirut - Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008

Tragically, the Guns and Buns restaurant in Beirut's Dahiyeh area was closed today when I went to go have lunch. I'd been thrilled by reports of a restaurant in the heart of the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital that served such delicacies as a “Magnum Pistol” (grilled chicken sandwich) or the “M-16 Carbine” (lamb on a toasted bun) both of which can be served with a side of “Grenades” (otherwise known as potato wedges).

The signature weapon of the Hezbollah fighter, the “AK-47 Kalashnikov,” is apparently beefsteak sandwich served in long baguette-style bread. No wonder the restaurant's advertising slogan is “a sandwich can kill you.”

“When you live by the beach, people make cafes that reflect that beach atmosphere,” owner Yousef Ibrahim once explained to a reporter. “So when you live in a war zone, I think you should make the most of that too.”

The restaurant, which opened this summer, isn't directly affiliated with Hezbollah, but the Shiite militia controls everything that happens in the Dahiyeh and gave Guns and Buns its seal of approval by running a story about it on the movement's al-Manar television network.

Pity the restaurant doesn't open on Sundays. I was left to peer forlornly through the window from its sandbag-protected patio, denied my chance to sample such delicacies as the “Tactical Meal” and the “Terrorist Meal.”

No word on whether there are toys for the kids with those.

The truth

Beirut – Saturday, Nov. 1

The digital sign looming over the entrance to Beirut's Hamra neighbourhood is persistent, forlorn and accusing. Day 1,357 it says – three years, eight months and 17 days since the massive truck bomb blast that killed Lebanon's popular former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and 21 others.

It was Feb. 14, 2005, a day that sent Lebanon on a long, downward spiral. Underneath the day counter is a simple plea written in Arabic: "al-haqiqa," it asks. "The truth."

I remember the bombing well. My wife and I were living in Beirut at the time, studying Arabic at the Lebanese American University. We on our lunch break between classes when the explosion shook the walls and windows of our apartment in Hamra. We ran out onto the balcony to see a thick, black pillar of smoke rising into the sky. We soon discovered that our Valentine's Day plans were among the casualties – the blast destroyed the restaurant where we had reserved a table for dinner that evening.

Until that moment, Hariri had been Mr. Lebanon, the man most responsible for bringing an end to the 1975-1990 civil war. He hosted the peace conference that produced the 1989 Taif Accords and rebuilt the country's shattered capital city (Hariri controlled the Solidere company that reconstructed, at great profit, the central district of Beirut that had been the front line during the civil war years).

The Valentine's Day bombing set Lebanon sliding back into the morass of violence and instability that Hariri had almost managed to pull the country out of before his death. His death was blamed by many Lebanese on neighbouring Syria, and the murder sparked the "Cedar Revolution" uprising that eventually forced Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon after a 29-year stay.

But the feel-good people-power moment wasn't meant to last. The militant Shia movement Hezbollah never signed on to the pro-Western Cedar Revolution (in fact, it organized its own counter demonstrations that were similar in size) and maintained its close links with both Damascus and Tehran. A year after the Cedar Revolution, Hezbollah staged a cross-border attack on an Israeli patrol that prompted a 34-day war that left an estimated 1,200 Lebanese dead and brought the bad old days back to Lebanon for good.

The country, already deeply divided over the Hariri murder and its fallout, was even further split by the war, with the pro-Western "Cedar" camp on one side, and Hezbollah and it allies on the other. The political standoff escalated later that year into Hezbollah-led street protests against the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and then exploded into open warfare on the streets of Beirut this May when Hezbollah seized the western half of the capital to back its demands for a larger say in government.

The streets of Beirut are calm again now – Rafik Hariri's son Saad recently met with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an effort to resolve some of their many differences – but the murder still hangs over Lebanon's future. Canadian prosecutor Daniel Bellemare, appointed last year by the United Nations to investigate and prosecute the Hariri killing as well as a succession of political assassinations that followed, is due to deliver his final report and prosecutions are expected to follow.

Bellemare's findings – and the potential of high-profile and highly politicized trials at The Hague – will rock the political system here one more time if, as expected, he moves to indict senior figures in Lebanon's former Syrian-friendly government and perhaps in Damascus itself. That could lead to more instability and even more fighting. But it needs to happen nonetheless. This country won't be healed until the Lebanese know who killed Rafik Hariri, and why.

To Beirut, with a changing cast of characters

By shared taxis from Tripoli, Lebanon to Beirut - Friday, Oct. 30

The best, and cheapest, way to travel around Lebanon is by what the locals call a servees, taxi cabs that fill up gradually with people heading (roughly) in the same direction. A few thousand Lebanese pounds buys you a seat in an overcrowded car (there were six people crammed in our beaten, brown Mercedes) and off you go.

I caught one today at sundown in the northern city of Tripoli that was heading in my direction, the Lebanese capital of Beirut. Passengers jumped in and out of our car — which was older than I was and sounded like a Cessna when it maxed out at 80 kilometres an hour — as we headed south down the coastal road that traces Lebanon's long border with the Mediterranean Sea.

Since I'm here — and Lebanon finally has Blackberry service — let me introduce you to some of the changing cast of characters sharing the car with me:

- Yehia Darwish, 28. The chatty driver of our whinging Mercedes and a resident of the troubled city of Tripoli. Thin and dark-featured, he chain-smokes Winston cigarettes and leaves the radio off as we drive. Biggest concern: rising costs on basic goods (though gasoline is falling in price) and an economic crisis that makes people stingy about taxi fares.

- Wafa Darwish, 40 (no direct relation to Yehia). Schoolteacher in the Sunni Muslim town of Qalmoun in north Lebanon. Short and animated, she covers her head with a flowered scarf. Biggest concern: the end of the era of George W. Bush — whom she blames for many of Lebanon's internal problems — can't come soon enough.

- Ramieh al-Hindi, 23-year-old Palestinian refugee and stay-at-home mother of two. Petite and outgoing, she wears tight jeans and stylish Western clothes despite her conservative surroundings. Biggest concern: more than a year after the Lebanese army's siege of the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, she and her family still have no house to go home to.

- Milad Abed, 39, waiter at a fish restaurant in the ancient Christian city of Byblos. Round-faced and sleepy-looking, it appears he may have sampled the table wine this afternoon. Biggest concern: the political fighting inside Lebanon's large Christian community, which many worry could eventually spill over into street violence.

The conversation ebbs and flows as we head towards Beirut, eventually collapsing into silence after a raucous it's-my-turn-to-talk-to-the-foreigner start.

Night falls during our drive and Lebanon buzzes by in the dark. Caught between the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains, and more fatally between Syria and Israel, the scenery and the free-wheeling conversation remind me that Lebanon remains at once the best and worst corner of the Middle East.

Peace, for now

Tripoli, Lebanon - Friday, Oct. 31

War never feels very far away in this bustling coastal city in north Lebanon. The sun-whitened office buildings and apartment blocks are scarred by bullet holes, reminders of the last civil war in this deeply divided country. The streets are thick with soldiers and armoured personnel carriers, trying to prevent the next one.

Lebanon very nearly slid back into internecine conflict six months ago, when fighters from the Shia Hezbollah militia, locked in a political dispute with the country's pro-Western government, briefly seized control of predominantly Sunni West Beirut. The civil war many have been predicting for some time might have begun then and there had there been another armed group capable of challenging Hezbollah.

Since then, Lebanon's myriad factions have come to a political accord that has taken the fighters off the streets, at least until crucial elections next year that will go a long way to deciding whether this country tilts west to Washington and Paris, or east to Damascus and Tehran.

An uneasy peace reigns for the moment, and nowhere is it more uncertain than in deeply religious Tripoli, where clashes between the city's Sunni majority and its Allawite minority remain a near-daily occurrence.

"(The Sunnis), they throw grenades here and the Lebanese army tells us not to retaliate. We are preparing ourselves for a bigger attack," said Daniel Dayeh, a 25-year-old Allawite living in the tense Jebel Mohsen neighbourhood of Tripoli. He was sitting with a dozen other Allawite men, all unemployed, outside a coffee shop plastered with photographs of Syrian leader Bashar Assad, who is also Allawite.

Downhill from Jebel Mohsen, Mustafa Alloush splits his time between tending to his duties as chief surgeon at the city's Nini hospital and heading up the local branch of the predominantly Sunni Future Movement. Future fighters were routed by Hezbollah in Beirut back in May, and some in Tripoli sought revenge against the Syrian-backed Allawis in this city.

"It's stable for now. The problem is that people do not believe it will stay as such," Alloush told me between patients at the Nini hospital. "People are waiting for something to happen."