Things In Beirut Were Getting Back To Normal
This blog is concerned with the experience of the "global city". Does this include cities that have been destroyed? After all, living in destroyed, and partially destroyed, cities has been a common part of the urban experience in the last century.
The events of September 11, 2001 confronted everyone with the destruction of a part of a city, and what it means. It became clear what pitch of emotion could be attached to sites of destruction, and what accumulation of trauma there must be in the world just from the devastation of city infrastructure.
The destruction in February this year of the thousand year-old Al Askari mosque in Samarra near Baghdad presumably caused far more despair than the loss of the World Trade Center, since it contained the shrines of two of the twelve Imams and was among the holiest of Shia sites - as well as being of extraordinary beauty.
The pianist Sviatoslav Ricther, speaking in 1993 when nearly eighty, remembered the horror he felt at Stalin's destruction of the churches in Odessa in the early 1930s , as one as the formative emotions of his teens.
I give these notes just as a way into the experience of destruction currently going on in Beirut. The "Paris of the Middle East" (every region needs a Paris) was of course destroyed during the 80s, and the reconstruction since 1989 has been gruelling, and acheived at great personal cost to the people of the city. At the end of this post I'd like to quote from a letter from Rasha Salti, a writer and curator in Beirut who gives eloquent testimony to what the recent destruction of all that work of rebuilding means to her and to many of her co-citizens.
For more insights, you could have a look at this old, cheerful from Beirut, or watch these from citizens of Beirut talking about what the bombing of the city means to them.
One way of understanding what all these people are living through right now is that it is an aberration from a normal, peaceful reality. Another is to see Beirut as only the most recent casualty of a series of ongoing global processes, in which concerns about security, resources, and the sustainability of the vast supply networks on which today's national economies are based, erupt regularly into shows of terrifying military force. If you are one of the people who sees things in the latter way, you have to acknowledge that the experiences described below are not external to our considerations of the world's cities, but entirely representative of contemporary urban experience - like gated communities, surveillance cameras and new retail environments.
An extract from Rasha's letter from July 14 (I have edited it for length):
"I am writing nowfrom a cafe, in West Beirut's Hamra district. It is filled with people who are trying to escape the pull of 24-hour news reporting. Like me. The electricity has been cut off for a while now, and the city has been surviving on generators. The old system that was so familiar at the time of the war, where generators were allowed a lull to rest is back. The cafe is dark, hot and humid. Espresso machines and blenders are silenced. Conversations, rumors, frustrations waft through the room.
"I am better off here than at home, following the news, live, on-the-spot documentation of our plight in sound bites.
"The sound of Israeli warplanes overwhelms the air on occasion. They drop leaflets to conduct a "psychological" war. Yesterday, their sensitivity training urged them to advise inhabitants of the southern suburbs to flee because the night promised to be "hot". Today, the leaflets warn that they plan to bomb all other bridges and tunnels in Beirut. People are flocking to supermarkets to stock up on food.
"Until a few hours ago, they had only bombed the runways of the airport, as if to "limit" the damage. A few hours ago, four shells were dropped on the buildings of our brand new shining airport.
"The night was harrowing. The southern suburbs and the airport were bombed, from air and sea. The apartment where I am living has a magnificient view of the bay of Beirut. I could see the Israeli warships firing at their leisure.
"Although I am unable to see it, I am told left, right and center that there is a rhyme and reason, grand design, and strategy. The short-term military strategy seems to be to cripple transport and communications. And power stations. The southern region has now been reconfigured into small enclaves that cannot communicate between one another. Most have enough fuel, food and supplies to last them until tomorrow, but after that the isolation of each enclave will lead to tragedy. Mayors and governors have been screaming for help on the TV.
"I am pissed off because no one knows how hard the postwar reconstruction was to all of us. Hariri did not make miracles. People work hard and sacrifice a lot and things get done. No one knows except us how expensive, how arduous that reconstruction was. Every single bridge and tunnel and highway, the runways of that airport, all of these things were built from our sweat and brow, at 3 times the real cost of their construction because every member of government, because everycharacter in the ruling Syrian junta, because the big players in the Hariri administration and beyond, were all thieves.
"We accepted the thievery and banditry just to get things done and get it over with. Everyone one of us had two jobs (I am not referring to the ruling elite, obviously), paid backbreaking taxes and wages to feed the "social covenant". We fought and fought that neoliberal onslaught, the arrogance of economic consultants and the greed of creditors just to have a nice country that functioned at a minimum,where things got done, that stood on its feet, more or less. A thriving Arab civil society.
"Public schools were sacrificed for roads to service neglected rural areas and a couple Syrian officers to get richer, and we accepted, that road was desperately needed, and there was the "precarious national consensus" to protect. Social safety nets were given up, healthcare for all, unions were broken and co-opted, public spaces taken over, and we bowed our heads and agreed. Palestinian refugees were pushed deeper and deeper into forgetting,hidden from sight and consciousness, "for the preservation of their identity" we were told, and we accepted.
"In exchange we had a secular country where the Hezbollah and the Lebanese Forces could co-exist and fight their fights in parliament not with bullets. We bit hard on our tongues and stiffened our upper lip, we protested and were defeated, we took the streets, defied army-imposed curfews, time after time, to protect that modicum of civil rights, that semblance of democracy, and it takes one air raid for all our sacrifices and tolls to be blown to smithereens. It's not about the airport, it's what we built during that postwar."
I feel for Rasha. I think the politicians should do the rebuilding of Beirut.