Paradise
Lost
By Robert Fisk
20 July, 2006
The Independent
Elegant
buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the
acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified
people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed
to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled
yet again
In the year 551, the magnificent,
wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean
Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath,
the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the
present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken
merchant ships revealed in front of them.
That was when a tidal wall
higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all.
So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent
gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive.
How does this happen to Beirut?
For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave
and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets
they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.
I lived here through 15 years
of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and
years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000
of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed,
bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine,
educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose
gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost
always ignore.
They look like us, the people
of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English
and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their
food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis
- in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding
countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges,
cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started
this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in
all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures
are the same.
And then, most disgraceful
of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and
spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting
about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture
of its soldiers by Hizbollah.
I walked through the deserted
city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a
film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the
ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded
its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was
rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely
a mile away on 14 February last year.
The wreckage of that bomb
blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance
is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean,
waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination
- an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for
the safety of Cyprus.
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited