Beirut – Around ‘Lunchtime.’ I need an Internet Connection, a number I have to call is waiting in my inbox. The Armenian Taxi driver coughs violently. I’m indifferent, he’s driven me way out of where I wanted to go, right into a dilapidated and run-down district that slides steeply down a hill. Flags of the Lebanese Forces ‘ex’-militia dangle from balconies, children are running around in little packs through the street, old men are sitting on plastic chairs outside their apartment blocs in silence watching the day go by. Small shrines to the Virgin Mary mark out which sect’s territory this is. “There’s your Net-Café Habibi.” A small grey and dimly-lit hole crammed full of kids and six computers from the early nineties. “Thanks.”
Achrafiye and those nice bars in East Beirut may not look like misery, but you only have to turn round the corner to find it right there waiting for you. The photographer I’m travelling with lights up, as a car blaring out the speeches of the Christian war-lord Bashir Gemayel swerves round the corner. The recordings echo through the roads that cut through the concrete towers, but there’s only grey sky above. The kids start to mob my friend, asking him repeatedly, “You Lebaneeeese – Lebaneeeese?” He nods, explains he works from London and that he’s keen to move back to Beirut. Then one of the bigger boys comes up to him, at most he’s 14, and says very seriously to him. “Take your family to London. There is war here.” Inside, the dial-up connection hisses and when my email finally opens, the number is there.
“Nayla Tueni. Will meet you in the Downtown in three hours. Call 08-90-90-78. Martyrs’ Square.”
Martyrs’ Square is the heart of Beirut and is the old dividing line between the mostly Muslim western districts and Christian East Beirut. Today it has taken on a different significance. In 2005 street protestors amassed in the square, eventually coming to such a crunch-point that on March 14th the decades long Syrian occupation was forced out of Lebanon. March 14th was just one day, but it has come to mean a Western-orientated political coalition of parties committed to keeping Syrian influence in Lebanon to a minimum.
The square is empty in the late afternoon, but it is filled with symbolism. On the side of the Headquarters of the Christian Ketaeb, also known as the Phalangists, there is a large mural of the assassinated leader Pierre Gemayel. Further up rises the large, modern Rafik Hariri mosque. This is where Lebanon’s assassinated March 14th Prime Minister is laid to rest. I stand underneath the An Nahar building, a modern glass-construction, with a large hanging bearing the face of the murdered journalist and MP Gibran Tueni. All were leaders in the coalition and paid with their lives for anything they achieved.
Gibran Teuni’s daughter – Nayla Tueni, is now the deputy managing editor of the An Nahar newspaper where her father worked. She’s in her early-twenties, I’m caught off guard – not just by how beautiful she is, but by how seriously she speaks.
I expected Nayla to talk rapturously about her father’s movement that freed the country from an occupation. But there is a tone of great dissatisfaction in her voice when she talks about politics. Nayla is often tipped for a bright future in this field, but she has no desire to be a politician for the moment. She explains, “We need a new kind of politics in the country, one that is no longer made up of blind followers, corrupt self-serving leaders and is actually interested in getting to grips with the social and infra-structural problems that make up real change.” It’s then I begin to understand, that politics in Lebanon is more mafia than party-political.
Nayla is young. And you can tell from experience that something terrible happened to her. I try and imagine what it must be like to lose a father in such a public, international-media-CNN sort of way. I can’t really comprehend what it would be like to Google my own name and see pictures of me weeping at my Dad’s funeral.
“I am worried about Lebanon,” she continues. “We do not have good neighbours. Syria, Israel, Iran. They all see us a political play thing. Not as a place. And this means people die.”
