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.

A New Year in an Old City.

Damascus hasn't changed particularly in the three weeks that I was away over Christmas and New Year. A housemove and a new resolve to change a rather boring timetable into an opportunity for adventure was spark enough to reignite an interest in being back here though.
Christmas in Dubai was alwasy going to an undefying experience and in the gentle balm of a Gulf Christmas it was easy to see that the UAE could have conducted this rather cynical marketing excercise for its stock of Western businessmen and tourists at any time it liked. The unconvincing fairy lights hung from the sides of queue filled motorway tunnels and the 'traditional' roast turkey on offer in all restaurants regardless of their extraction was a rather crushing experience to a grown child weened on mince pies, brusk walks and big, homely Christmas lunches spent avoiding the circling brussel sprouts and waiting for the BBC to declare it a white one by a whisker. Nonetheless the hefty spiritual price of an Emarati Christmas was well compensated for by being with family and moving on to Tash's for New Year.
On my last morning in Dubai, the eve of New Year's Eve, the Iraqi Government announced that it had executed Saddam Hussein in the middle of the night. Though the story of the taunting and the camera phone footage of his hanging was yet to break, I felt nothing but sadness at the manner of his passing. It is not a comfortable argument that reads that the manner of his death was far more just and righteous than those of his victims. No doubt it was. But if we are to judge our actions relatively against those that have offended against us then we have already lowered our moral status beyond reprehension. The footage tarred the 'legal enaction of justice' with the air of a lynching and certainly this kind of 'justice' does not equate to a safe night's sleep on the road map to peace in the Middle East. An opportunity to make an example of the archetypal dictator through the due processes of the freshest democracy was fumbled badly by all concerned, and as a result his death appears to have martyred Saddam in some people's eyes and endorsed the violent principles of vengeance that are such an obstacle to democratic progress in the region for others. I would not say that I felt much for Saddam, a torturer and a murderer, as he faced his fate at the gallows, but I did for the families of his 'victims'. For those whose cases will never be heard, family members not recovered and lives left changed it must have been very difficult to watch their hopes for justice die at the hands of, what now looks to have been, something of a mob. Ruth Kelly announced rather grandly the next day that Saddam had "been called to account." Unfortunately the courts had yet to finish doing the sums, and now, it seems, they will not have the chance. Perhaps if we had been so keen for him to be "called to account" it would have been less messy to finish him off as the tanks rolled into Baghdad or when he was discovered in his priest-hole in Tikrit rather than hoisting him up on a political gallows at three in the morning in a kangaroo-esque, and ritualistic execution. Perhaps also the hangmen should not have worn black balaclavas, now an international symbol of the terrorist. Perhaps in Baghdad there are already too many uncertainties.
A week or so of gentle consideration has led me to realise what I was already aware of. The key to understanding the Middle East is not the newspapers and it is not textbooks or literature, although all these contribute to an overall picture. The main aim of a year abroad is not just immersion in language, but culture. A short while ago Manal asked us (when we complained that we wanted to travel at weekends) whether we were in Syria for study, or tourism. At the time I wasn't sure. My answer now is that I am here to learn things and understand them in a way that I could not from a book in England. Study is a huge part of it, but so is travel and interaction. So Damascus is unlikely to see too much of me at the weekends of the next few months.
Already Guy, Clem, Ed and I have made it to Faraya for a three day skiing 'fact finding' mission. (Start with an easy one..) The snow was crisp and deep enough, the weather (at least on Friday) stunning as we looked over our shoulders on the chair lift back down the mountains to Beirut and its bay below us and the apres-ski, if not bounteous, inviting and cheap. The journey from Damascus was easy enough, with an overnight stop in Beirut for a square meal and a few beers, followed by a quick hop up the hill in a service taxi to the mountains. Finding somewhere to stay at 8:30 in the morning caused a few initial problems - the chef that we woke up in the first hotel decided that he was not willing to make life easy, speaking tongue twistingly fast in a strong colloquial, quoting massively overinflated prices and demanding money that we didn't have upfront to avoid a hike in prices the following day. Nonetheless we struck a rich vein of luck in flagging down an empty minibus that passed us on the road, whose driver Ragib became our personal guide and chauffeur for the next three days for minimal fees, and we were suited, booted and on the slopes by eleven in the morning. Sadly on Saturday the weather didn't quite hold out and a large front of low pressure that descended on the entire region resulted in horizontal snow showers driving, stingingly into our faces and closing all the lifts on the mountain by lunchtime. At that point the army closed the road a bit further down and Ragib was unable to make it up to collect us, so we had to find a lift with a chap working in the last open cafe in the resort. His price was high, and his manner unappealing but since his was amongst the last three cars in the car park, our choices were equally unattractive. He had the air of someone selling a vital organ on your behalf so as to be able to consider you in his debt for the rest of eternity. As a result he was little impressed by Clem's retort of "nothing?" to his question, "how much would you like to pay me?"
By the time we left we had amassed three taxi drivers, three chalet owners vying for our custom and an invitation to some illicit hunting in the hills around Ba'albek, as well as some cracking goggle marks and some nearly spectacular footage of Ed skiing off a large precipice-like 'jump' (it would have been perfect if Guy had not been looking the wrong way when it happened).
All in all an extremely succesful weekend and one to be repeated. Plans are already afoot for Palmyra or possibly Aleppo this weekend. No rest for the wicked, and hopefully no work either.