Report from the Mideast: A human drama
Beirut
Guns are silent, but still felt
BEIRUT – The Syrian soldiers get edgy when the light starts to fail.
They stand next to their tin shack in the middle of the road that divides East and West Beirut, the road that separates Muslims and Christians. They wave traffic into single file and, with worried faces, they peer into each car as it stops.
Sunshine still lights up Beit Mery, the mountain that towers at the end of the road. But dusk is settling on the city below and that means it is time to start checking, time to send drivers scurrying home, time to be wary in Beirut.
A year has passed since the big guns stopped ripping scars across this city. But the cannons, rockets, mortars and bombs are still here, locked up in cellars as tightly as hatred is locked up in hearts.
It is such an ugly time in such a beautiful place. The snowy caps of the mountains give way in folds of forest to a soft green valley that ends at the blue Mediterranean Sea. Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, French – all were drawn here to rule and build. Libyans, Kuwaitis, Iraqis, Egyptians, Saudis, English, Germans, Americans – all came to exchange goods and thoughts.
Now the Syrians are here, not in search of territory or trade but as a peace-keeping force watching over a Beirut that is having difficulty picking its way through the rubble of a once-rich past.
In East Beirut, stronghold of the right-wing Christians, a car has been thrown onto its roof. It lies like a dead bug atop a low platform of cement. Children play atop the car and shinny down some pipes that jut crazily out of the cement.
The pipes used to be the plumbing of a house, the house where one of the children lived. But the house is gone now.
From a burned-out shell next door to a companion piece across the street, wires are strung to hold a giant portrait of Pierre Gemayel, leader of the Phalangists. With an iron-jawed calm, the face seems to be surveying the wreckage of his party members' homes and the next generation of followers as they play amid the rubble.
A pile of cement, plasterboard and tile is all that remains of the eight-story apartment building that used to stand near the corner. A block away, Michel Karam, 25, whose family owned the building, tinkers under the hood of his car.
Along with an auto-parts business downtown that was looted and bombed in the two years of bitter civil war that preceded the last year of sullen peace, the apartment building represented the family fortune. At this point, there is no thought of rebuilding.
"We have the land still, but now we have no money," Karam says.
And what has he done since he laid down his weapons?
Michel Karam thought for a minute, then shrugged.
"Nothing."
In West Beirut, the center of left-wing Muslim strength, shacks of corrugated tin and plywood huddle along the Korniche – the coastal drive – blocking the view of the Mediterranean.
This is a new "shopping center" in Beirut, new "stores" for merchants bombed and shelled out of the downtown.
Farther along the beach are similar shacks that house some of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who were ejected from East Beirut.
