Beirut

And so the day after I eulogised about an easy weekend skiing in Feraya the soft concrete of Lebanon's new foundations are already cracking. Fisk, writing in the Indepent, described it as "a sectarian battleground" and the Times ran the headline "Beirut burns as national strike explodes into sectarian violence." Suddenly plans for the weekends are changing, to the west the chastened silence of Beirut has cracked into a gritty street fight. So many memories of war rekindled as stones and insults were traded back and forth in the streets, many of them blocked by burning tyres. The road to Damascus is now closed and unlikely to reopen for some time. On Saturday, from the chairlift in Feraya we gazed lazily over our shoulders at the greyish fug rising up from the city lining the shorefront, amazed at how much we could see. Yesterday that same view would have yielded the black, drifting smoke of burning rubber and perhaps the thumping explosions of a physical repression of a most physical demonstration. The religious touch paper that has underpinned Lebanese stability for so long is burning once again.

To the north the peace of Istanbul has been rocked by the murder of the outspoken Armenian journalist Hrant Dink and now there are reports of threats to the novelist Orhan Pamuk, most famous amongst Westerners for his English language books, I am Red and Snow. The most beautiful of the ancient metropoli of the East is now reaping the crop of its Armenian policy, many of whom - Armenians - now live in Syria and, of course, Beirut. Perhaps a new chapter of trouble is opening for Turkey, post PKK, as the Islamism was for Britain post-IRA.
Now where Damascus once felt somewhat cramped and backward in the relief of its neighbours it has become a rock of stability where Iraq, Lebanon and now it would appear, Turkey are falling toward violence. The American Embassy bombing of early October in Damascus has faded and peace reigns through the streets. Life has not been hushed as it has been in Lebanon for so many months now.

It seems unlikely that the Lebanese unrest will end of its own accord. It has brewed for years, if not decades, fomented under the confessional governements that represent its unhappy, sectarian make up. As a new generation, less aware of the horrors of the previous civil war, take the positions of their fathers on the streets of its capital, so beautiful and so flawed, there is ever diminishing hope for a peaceful resumption of the status quo. The Shia, the poor bulk of the population and the supporters of Hizbollah, have been downtrodden for so long. The Sunni and Christian supporters of the government stand to loose from the rebalancing of power. A government ad campaign for peace that reads, "I love life, in all its colours" recently - hastily - plastered across the pictures of Hariri and Gemayal's bomb and bullet riddled cars do not appear to have been enough to quell the surging wave of illcontent. They must have made empty reading amidst the shouts, and shots of Beiruti streets yesterday as sect clashed with sect and government with militia.

The Arabic for dawn, fajar, is the root of the word explosion, infijar. As the days begin to lengthen again, out of the depths of winter, so the political dawn reddens by the day. The shepherds of Feraya will be looking on with great concern.