LA Weekly

Photos by Michael J. Totten

Beirut, Lebanon — Just as the last Syrian troops were ending their 30-year occupation, I traveled with three young leaders of the Cedar Revolution on their campaign up the coast to the ancient Christian stronghold of Mount Lebanon.

As we got to the gates of the Lebanese American University, in the hills above Byblos, we were met with a scene that suggested democracy was, nevertheless, still not quite at hand.

We came upon not only photo murals and monuments to Christian war criminals Samir Geagea and Bashir Gemayel but a surly mob of students — all of them men — arranged before us in a phalanx. All wore the same brown shirts with a picture of Geagea on the front and a black Christian cross on the back. They loudly chanted Christian war songs, raised their right hands and aped the Nazi salute. Others, behind the phalanx, banged drums. Someone rang the church bells furiously and violently. Far from a celebration in the new Lebanon, it looked more like a political pep rally in General Franco’s Spain.

The three activists from the democracy movement I was traveling with — Ribal, Michel and Alaa — ran up to the mob of radical Christians and hugged them. I felt sick to my stomach. What on earth were so-called democracy activists doing buddying up with sectarian ethnic chauvinists? I snapped some digital pictures because I didn’t know what else to do.

...cozy cafes - and dreams of unity.

Just then a bald university administrator wearing a suit and a tie got in my face. “Where are you from?” he screamed. It was the first and only time anyone yelled at me in Lebanon. “You erase those pictures,” he said. “And you erase them right now.”

I pushed some buttons at random, pretending to comply. The angry administrator went off to yell at some students as one of the brown-shirted radical Christian nut jobs ran up to me. I braced myself for whatever nonsense was coming next.

“I’m the campus president of the Lebanese Armed Forces — the Christian resistance party that is staging this rally,” he said. “This university is oppressing us. It’s dominated by the opposition, and they are kicking our asses.”

Good, I thought. These guys needed to have their asses kicked. But I still couldn’t understand why the democracy activists — who were also supposed to stand for national unity — greeted them warmly.

“That man who just told you to erase the pictures,” he said. “He belongs to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.”

The SSNP was modeled after Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy. Its emblem — a spinning red swastika — can be found bolted to telephone poles in towns around the region.

“He and the rest of the thugs at the school are trying to prevent us from building a new Lebanon, a Lebanon without bloodshed,” said a brown shirt.

Suddenly I had no idea what was happening or who I was dealing with. Was the young man in front of me who had been flipping off the straight-arm salute a moment ago just one more face of Lebanon’s ancient tribal hate fest — or was he one of the good guys in the Cedar Revolution?

In my pocket was a necklace with a Christian cross and a Muslim crescent moon fused together as one. It was Lebanon’s unofficial new symbol of national unity. I fished it out and showed it to him. A real Christian extremist would want to spit on it or knock it out of my hand.

“That is exactly what we are fighting for,” he said, pointing to the necklace.

It was? Never in my life have I so severely misjudged what I was looking at. I would have initially better understood what was happening if I were literally blind.

A black Mercedes rumbled up to us. The young man I was interviewing said “intelligence agents” and ran behind a building. I slowly walked away in the other direction and snapped some innocent photos of mountains.

My three activist traveling companions came up behind me. “Let’s get out of here,” Alaa said as they led me back to the car.

“What happened back there?” I said. “Who were those guys at the rally?”

“They are our friends,” Ribal said.

“Are they part of the democracy movement?” I said. “Are they in favor of Christian and Muslim unity?”

“Yessss,” he said, as if I were some kind of idiot.

Those kids back at the college weren’t fascists. They were national-unity democrats. The outward trappings of their rally were simply holdovers from another era. They went through the motions of tribalism because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves. Their minds were racing far ahead of their habits. That’s what happens in a country when history swings on its hinges.



But a darkness lurks in the heart of this place that’s impossible to dismiss or ignore. The entire city is riddled with bullet holes. A war-ravaged Holiday Inn with gaping 15-foot holes blasted into the side of it rises above brand-new construction on the shore of the Mediterranean. A crescent of shattered buildings encircles downtown on the western, Muslim side.

From 1975 to 1990 an inferno of hate and sectarian violence burned Lebanon down. The formerly cosmopolitan metropolis of Beirut was dismembered into besieged ethnic cantons. The city center was pulverized into powder. Eerie swaths of empty space still remain. The civil war made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict look like the Summer of Love by comparison. A Muslim from West Beirut caught in Christian East Beirut could be summarily shot in the head for nothing more than