Beirut Star Square – Rumeli Observer

This is my favorite routine when arriving in a strange new city: First, store all your luggage at your hotel. Second, take a taxi to the nearest foreign language bookstore. Third, find a nice cafe in the city center and read a bunch of new books about the country. Fourth, take a walk, get lost in the city, take a taxi across the city from one end to the other. Then get to know the people from all walks of life who live here.

Here I am: in the heart of rebuilt Beirut, in an outdoor café on the Etoile, across from the Lebanese Parliament. In front of me is a pile of books: Beirut House: A Practical Guide to Life in Lebanon’s Capital, Lebanese Cinema, A Divided Paradise, Refik Hariri and the Fate of Lebanon, several books on Lebanese history, two books on Hezbollah, and a collection of speeches by Hezbollah leader Nasrallah. There’s also a map of Lebanon, a few policy papers from the Carnegie Middle East Center, and Oliver Roy’s The Politics of the Troublesome Middle East.

The weather was perfect for sitting outside. The city center was quiet: the only sounds to be heard were the chatter of neighbors at other tables in the cafe—a mix of Arabic, English, and French words every other sentence—and some children playing soccer under the bored gaze of soldiers near the clock tower. This peace is also because cars are not allowed into this area. Before reaching the Etoile Square and the city center, guards with machine guns control everyone passing through the checkpoints. The city still has many checkpoints, and soldiers stand in front of small wooden guardhouses, like the ones outside the royal palaces in EU capitals, painted in Lebanon’s colors and hung with cedar flags. On the way here, I also saw two tanks on the side of the road, countless gaps in the town’s buildings, and some houses still riddled with bullet holes. However, considering that this downtown area has been the contested Green Line for nearly 15 years, dividing Muslim-majority West Beirut from predominantly Christian (Arab Christian and Armenian) East Beirut, there are few signs of distant war. The area around the parliament is dotted with gleaming cafes, next to a Christian church with outdoor tables and high-end restaurants, and behind the church is a new Ottoman-style mosque.

I came to Beirut to give a lecture on Turkey’s Muslim Democratic Party at the Carnegie Middle East Center; to conduct interviews to better understand Turkey’s new foreign policy in the Middle East; to satisfy my interest in a country that has been in the news since childhood. A basic curiosity about the country, with reports of wars and assassinations, I began to wonder how it was possible to live peacefully here. I realized that this was also how people in other parts of the world felt about the Balkans, a region that ostensibly had a lot in common with Lebanon: an Ottoman past, different Christian sects living among the Muslims, traditional politics of outsiders interfering in domestic affairs, and Very bad international image. When I explained that I had been working in the Balkans for many years, a Lebanese asked me: “Why are people in the Balkans so badly off? At least the tensions here are at the political level, not at the level of religious groups, or religious groups.” Or less get along well.”

It’s an interesting shift in perspective. Of course, Lebanon’s reputation as still being unstable is not without reason. Just this May, Shia Hezbollah and government forces fought in downtown Beirut. The last real war when Beirut was bombed was in the summer of 2006 (when Israel attacked Lebanon in its fight with Hezbollah). The recent spate of political assassinations, including the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s Mr. and longtime prime minister Rafik Hariri, is worse than anything that has happened in the Balkans recently.

Lebanon is therefore a puzzling example: a deeply imperfect example of a multicultural democracy. But it is a democracy, the freest place in the Arab world, and despite a horrific 15-year civil war that only ended in 1990, it is a veritable patchwork of ethnic and religious identities. As Paul Salem, director of the local Carnegie Center, writes in a yet-to-be-published book, “Lebanon’s Rapid Return to Normalcy” demonstrates that failed states—even, in some sense, failed states—can be A phenomenon that is bound by history and that failed states can succeed again under certain conditions.” This is indeed a very interesting case study for those interested in how to manage ethnic and religious diversity in small countries.

The muezzin calls prayers from a nearby mosque. I checked out a practical guide to living in Beirut to get a sense of daily life in the city. Page 52, Safety: “Beirut is a relatively safe place. During the day, women walk around wearing gold jewelry and diamonds, and their safety is rarely threatened.” Page 40, Adapting to life: “Few in the world Nowhere else can you encounter such a fascinating mix of cultural identities. It thrives on diversity.” Descriptions of different neighborhoods: Hamra, “a busy shopping street near the American University of Beirut”; Ashrafieh, “European-style inner-city setting”; Rabieh, “luxury apartments and villas set on a wooded hillside”; Khaled, a busy southern suburb with “reasonably priced rents”. There is a 20-page children’s activities section, as well as a long list of international schools. The first impression this guide gives is not that of a city teetering on the edge of inter-communal tensions.

Instead, a few hours later I met a friend who was a diplomat in Beirut and he tried to convince me that this was the best city to live and raise children. Learning that I was hesitant to eventually move from Istanbul to Paris, he retorted: Why Paris? Why not Beirut? Better weather, good schools, a multilingual environment, a city full of entrepreneurial energy, vibrant, fun…

I’m confused. This is not what I expected to find here. It occurred to me that uninformed tourists coming to Tirana for the first time might have had the same experience…

Then, I scratched the surface a bit, turning to my other books. I read: “All Lebanese films seem to be about the civil war in some way.” The author notes that sectarianism continues to run rampant, which has affected all post-war Lebanese films, “consumed by a sense of loss and emptiness, with violence lurking around every corner.” The author continues: “Suddenly I realized that Lebanese cinema’s obsession with war is more than that. It’s as if cinema is warning us that what’s about to happen is inevitable.” The results are in: 10 days in May 2008 saw the worst sectarian fighting since the civil war: “These 10 days in May saw more than 80 people killed, 200 injured, Hezbollah militants and their allies taking over large parts of Beirut, and street fighting between militias of different factions… It was reminiscent of the nightmares of the civil war, when a person’s sect could determine whether he lived or died.”

Yes, my diplomat friend added later that evening, there is a (slight) drawback to settling in Beirut: one should expect brief security crises every year, and there are days when it is better not to leave the apartment with family, There are also armed men who may roam the streets and shoot. But these crises will pass, and even then it all depends on where in the city you have an apartment.

Is this enduring instability simply a byproduct of the complex communal fabric of Lebanese society, with its 18 recognized religious groups, a tense history, and many weapons? Or is it first and foremost an unfortunate product of wider conflicts in the surrounding region, from Sunni-Shia tensions elsewhere to the US confrontations with Iran, Israel, and Syria? A careful reading of the rest of the literature has made me realize that even reading all the books on my desk would not allow me to reach a tentative conclusion. But this is not my ambition, and it would have been a foolish one from the outset.

Instead, I jotted down a few questions that I wanted to learn more about.

1. Given that the country is run along sectarian lines, with all family matters resolved by the religious courts of the 18 recognized denominations, how does this work in practice: What does this mean for women in this society?
2. How does such an economy actually work in a society that is primarily urban, without raw materials, and that received little outside reconstruction assistance after the civil war? (One book notes that “Lebanon’s main asset is its educated, Westernized, and multilingual population.” Another points to the huge influence of the diaspora.)
3. What is the relationship between democracy and a religious system that allocates positions to all 18 groups according to complex rules? What is the reward for good governance when no census has been conducted since the 1930s? How does this religious system work at the local government level, for example in Beirut?
4. Given the complex politics of this society, and the many outsiders trying to shape it, what is the real impact of the EU on events and local actors…if any? My main question then is: what role does Türkiye play?

A person’s first day in a new country is a success if he or she leaves the first day in a new country unraveling, asking a barrage of clear questions about the hot issues that matter most to him or her, and growing eager to learn more. By the time I got back to the hotel that evening, it was a very successful first day.