This article is from: baltimoreravens.com
50 Years On, Lebanon Lacks a Shared Narrative of Its Civil War
During 15 years of bloody conflict, at least 150,000 people died, nearly a million were displaced, and billions of dollars in property damage was incurred
By Taylor Thomas/The Media Line
[Beirut] Ayman’s family moved to the city when he was four years old. In his eyes, he had left behind the “simple life” of a Lebanese village and entered the brutality of Beirut. That event shaped his life. “I grew up in the city, where there were many more difficulties and differences, and when I looked around, I wondered why I couldn’t have a better house, go to school, have a better life,” he told The Media Line.
Then, the Lebanese Communist Party and the Palestinian cause entered his life. “They gave me meaning; they answered my questions,” he said. At 13, Ayman took up arms. That was 50 years ago—half a century since the start of the Lebanese Civil War in April 1975. Now, in the absence of a collective national memory, it is Ayman who answers the questions.
His story is the story of many others. But few dare to tell it. Ayman speaks out because he feels it is his duty—“so that what we did to this country doesn’t happen again,” he said. “I wanted my experience to be a living testimony to prevent, despite the circumstances of war, conflict, and social division that exist in this country, a repetition” of what they experienced for 15 years, the former combatant said.
When the war ended with the signing of the Taif Agreement in 1990, everyone fell silent. “But we had to bear our experiences, the burdens of our homeland,” Ayman admits. For 15 years—“my whole life, my whole youth”—he fought alongside the Palestinian fedayeen, supported by a coalition of Lebanese Muslim leftists called the Lebanese National Movement, allied with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In the opposite trench were the Lebanese Front, led by the Phalangists, who represented the Maronite Christian clans that had long dominated the country’s traditional elite, as well as the Amal Movement, made up of Shia populists. Other participants in the war included Syria, Israel, and splinter factions of the Lebanese Army. American, French, and Italian troops also set foot on Lebanese soil.
On April 13, 1975, the Phalangists attacked a bus transporting Palestinians to a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, following an assassination attempt on the party’s leader, Pierre Gemayel. The killing of 27 Palestinians that day changed the course of the country.
Over the 15 years of civil war that followed, at least 150,000 people died, nearly a million were displaced, and billions of dollars in property were destroyed. Syria occupied Lebanon until 2005, and Israel remained in the south until 2000. During these years of occupation, Hezbollah emerged—a militia then, and a political party now. To this day, 17,000 people remain missing.
The Lebanese capital was divided in two: the Green Line, cutting through the devastated central market area, separated Muslim West Beirut from Christian East Beirut for the duration of the war. When Ameera began attending the Lebanese University—the country’s only public university—she walked the same streets that had once been sniper alleys.
“I noticed that many buildings still had bullet holes from the civil war,” the 28-year-old told The Media Line. These daily walks to class sparked her curiosity. At neither school nor home had she learned what happened during those years. “Not even the Lebanese Ministry of Education has yet authorized the publication of objective narratives about the war in history books, so in school we studied up to the end of the French mandate in 1943 and nothing further,” the young tour guide said.
“We are a generation raised by traumatized people who lived through the war, and we still suffer its effects and consequences,” Ameera said. “Each person is raised in a subjective and different way, based on the narrative told to us by family, friends, the wider neighborhood environment, or the area where we live. But unless we are curious enough to want to know more details and not be guided by what our loved ones have told us, it is really difficult and painful to deconstruct everything we have been raised on.”
The general amnesty law signed at the end of the war pardoned all participants in the conflict. No one was convicted for the thousands of murders or hundreds of kidnappings. On the contrary, the warlords who led militias took up positions of political power. Many are still there.
“No efforts have been made to build bridges, reconcile, and heal the nation’s wounds after the end of the war,” Ameera said. “At least at the government level, what has been done is to turn the page and open a new blank one, while we store all the trauma somewhere, but it always keeps coming back,” she added.
Half a century after the bus attack that ignited the war, it is Lebanese civil society—people like Ameera and Ayman—who are confronting the past in hopes of building a peaceful future. “As members of this homeland, not of a sect or a specific leader, we must build real peace for our people, for humanity—not a peace to live and die,” the former combatant concluded.
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