Diary

Moustafa Bayoumi

It’s late March, and I’m in downtown Beirut, escaping the sun to browse the books on politics in the Virgin Megastore. A stack of Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country is in front of me. Across the street is the tent city that protesters against the Syrian presence in Lebanon pitched soon after the Valentine’s Day assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister. A few steps away, the enormous Muhammad al-Amin mosque soars up. Hariri is buried there, and since it’s less than forty days since his death, Koranic reciters still sit outside underneath a canopy while men and women of every confession continue to pour in to pay their respects. Many take photographs; some men in sharp suits clutch beads in their hands as tears roll down their cheeks. Nothing has united the country more in recent years than his death.

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Vol. 27 No. 9 · 5 May 2005 » Moustafa Bayoumi » Diary (print version)
Pages 34-35 | 3937 words

Letters

From Graham Brown

I visited Beirut some ten days after Mustafa Bayoumi’s return to New York (LRB, 5 May). By then a fourth bomb had exploded in Broumanna, east of Beirut. The Martyrs’ Square tent city was quiet and orderly. Mourning citizens continued to pay their respects at the shrine to the former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Preparations were in train for National Unity Day, the 30th anniversary of the civil war’s ‘official’ beginning in 1975.

Bayoumi’s tone is apprehensive and pessimistic. It is plainly discouraging to hear young Lebanese with relatively limited knowledge, and no direct experience, of the 15-year conflict, talking of doing the same again. But meanwhile everyday life in Beirut feels as ‘normal’ and free from tension as one could hope for anywhere. I was staying in the suburb of Hamra. In the evenings its streets are busy with all the usual trades and services: hot food, shirt-makers, shoe-menders, hairdressers, hooting taxis. Along the Corniche Beirutis promenade, jog, roller-blade, power-walk or stroll, chatting, smoking, eating snacks from street vendors. As for restored downtown Beirut, it is Hariri’s great monument, drawing people back to the city centre, to the new shops and the dozens of restaurants and cafés.

No more bombs were reported during April. By 13 April there were fewer than four thousand Syrian soldiers, and withdrawal was eventually declared complete on 26 April. Of course, the bewildering sectarian fractures in Lebanon run as long and deep as ever. But Lebanon’s chief of Security Services, thought to be a central instrument of Syria’s control, resigned within a day of the farewell ceremony. The elections at the end of May offer more encouraging prospects than the last two generations of Lebanese have dared hope for.

Graham Brown
Shrewsbury