The Lebanon I love will rise once more

Richard Beeston has known Beirut for five decades, since the days when Kim Philby lived there. Here he recounts a recent visit to the city he loves

I first came to Beirut half a century ago, the year of the Suez War, driving from Amman across the Syrian desert, through the Bekaa Valley and over the mountains of Lebanon. In those days Lebanon, barely a decade after independence from France, was a confident, prosperous nation and Beirut a charming, elegant mix of East and West, Christian and Muslim, with red-tiled Ottoman houses, a delightful coastline of empty beaches and coves, unspoiled mountain villages and a modest ski resort from which you could view the blue Mediterranean.

In no time at all Beirut had become a sophisticated, cosmopolitan centre for the Arab world where most of the inter-national banks, insurance companies and corporations had their regional headquarters, the international press their Middle East bureaux, and the airlines their main offices. It was the crossroads for travellers to Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and the favoured resort for increasingly rich Arabs from the Gulf. It was unique, the wonder of the Arab world, likened by many to Lawrence Durrell’s fictitious Alexandria, but a reality. Today that Beirut is almost unrecognisable, first rising from the ashes of a vicious 15-year civil war and now, in the past week, returning to the abyss.

We foreigners, for the most part, lived in Ras Beirut (which became more widely and notoriously known as West Beirut during the civil war), preferring the easygoing mixture of Christians and Muslims and Westerners to the Christian suburb of Ashrafieh. It was a delightful combination of small cafés and nightclubs, the liberal student atmosphere of the American University of Beirut, French boutiques and probably the most stylish hotel in the Middle East, the St Georges.

The pool at the Hotel St Georges flaunted the best displays of bikinis and brown limbs and the bar provided the best rumour mill for correspondents covering the political upheavals in the Arab world. A short walk along the bay, Kim Philby set up his headquarters at the Hotel Normandie, next to the superb colonial French restaurant Lucullus, and a few doors away from the Grand Hotel Bassoul where all the grand visitors to the Levant stayed at the turn of the century.

Up the road was the British Embassy, always known to the locals as the ‘Spears Mission’ — a reference to Major General Sir Edward Spears who kicked the French out of the Levant. Next to it, a sort of branch office, was Joe’s Bar. There the MI6 station chief Paul Paulson, the battle-scarred Black Watch military attaché Colonel Alec Brody and the Embassy first secretary John Julius Norwich retired for lunchtime drinks, usually joined by the ‘fourth man’, Kim Philby, inevitably nursing his morning hangover, to review Lebanon’s fast-changing political scene.

Today we tend to think of the Middle East as a region gripped by unparalleled crises like those in Iraq and Palestine. Back then it was just as unstable. Only the settings and the characters have changed.

Egypt’s charismatic leader, President Gamal Abdel Nasser was the cloud on the horizon in the mid-1950s. While Lebanon managed to shrug off the upheavals in the Arab world caused by the Suez crisis, the country suffered a brief but bloody sectarian conflict in 1958. It was snuffed out by 40,000 US marines, whose tanks I watched landing on the beach and threading their way through sunbathers and soft-drinks sellers. Within months the marines had left, business was booming and no one imagined that the real civil war would break out 17 years later.

Looking at modern Lebanon it is hard not to mourn the passing of the country I knew and loved. Most people would blame the years of civil conflict for destroying it. But as I toured the country on the eve of the latest blitz by Israel’s air force and navy, construction rather than destruction appeared to be Lebanon’s downfall. Since I last lived here a greedy frenzy of uncontrolled building has changed the landscape for ever. Gone are the elegant Ottoman buildings that gave Beirut its special charm and in their place stand hideous concrete apartment blocks and hotels, jostling with each other for a view of the Mediterranean along the length of the coast road from Beirut to Tripoli. Even in ancient Tyre thousands of years of history have been concreted over, despite the pleas of Unesco, in order to build a tourist resort over the southern Phoenician port.

One part of Beirut was saved. At vast expense, and entirely thanks to the efforts of the then prime minister Rafik Hariri, the small central section of the city was restored to its original beauty, creating an oasis of nostalgia, even though it is surrounded by war-damaged buildings and towering office blocks. Hariri became a hero to many Lebanese both for his restoration of downtown Beirut and for his efforts to free Lebanon from the Syrian occupation that resulted from the civil war. Last year, for his stand against Syria, he paid with his life.

A year since his assassination, outside the entrance to the Hotel St Georges, nothing has changed. All five floors of the hotel’s frontage have been destroyed by a massive bomb, as well as the surrounding buildings, leaving a huge crater in the road. More than 20 people died in the terrorist attack launched to eliminate one man.

The legacy of that brutal murder lives on today. Several anti-Syrian Lebanese figures have been killed in similar fashion. One possible target is the French ambassador, whose country supported Hariri. When I visited his residence, the grandest of all France’s ambassadorial homes, the threat of more violence was still evident. The building was hugely damaged and evacuated during the civil war and restored by France at a cost rumoured to be about E120 million. It is now an exquisite palatial prison for the ambassador. The building is guarded by two tanks outside the twin metal gate, snipers on the roof and 40 armed bodyguards as bombs once more fall on Beirut.

A deep hatred of Syria is now felt by most Lebanese Christians and a good number of Sunni Muslims following the long Syrian occupation, but Damascus can still count on the support of Lebanese Shias whom they have long armed against Israel. Fifty years ago the Shias, mainly from southern Lebanon, were the poorest of the nation’s minorities, largely ignored by Christians and Sunnis, and they had no political clout.

In those days Lebanon maintained the fiction that the Christians accounted for 50 per cent of the population, and they were by far the richest community. Today the Shias, with a prolific birth rate, are by far the largest minority in the country and are rapidly ‘islamising’ the nation as their military wing, Hezbollah, once more calls down the wrath of Israel. One of my old flats, on a cliff-edge overlooking the sea, is now populated by Shia refugees who have taken over Beirut’s wealthy beach clubs and the once fashionable areas of Ras Beirut. An ever increasing number of women are choosing, or being induced, to wear the hijab (headscarf) and once smart shops have been transformed into shabby souks.

During what the Lebanese call ‘The War’, thousands of Christians — Maronites, Orthodox and Armenians — fled to Europe and America never to return, followed this week by a new flood. Fifty years ago they ran the country. Today they are holed up in Ashrafieh and Jounieh, along the coast. Meanwhile throughout the country more and more mosques are being built, including a gigantic one right in the middle of Beirut as the nation begins increasingly to resemble its Muslim neighbour Syria.

Whereas 50 years ago Christians and Muslims rubbed along together reasonably well, I spoke to many Christians on my recent visit who publicly express their dislike and even detestation of their Muslim fellow-citizens. When I first arrived in Lebanon the Maronites had everything going for them. Today they are a dwindling minority in a rising sea of Islam, much to blame for their fate but in a state of denial that they were ever in the wrong. At the height of their power, after independence, they treated the Muslims as second-class citizens and, during the long civil war, they not only failed to stay united but even turned on each other in some of the most savage fighting of the era. Today a ravaged Lebanon has lost much of its charm. It now has little to offer the Western tourist in terms of beaches, scenic beauty and atmosphere compared, say, with Greece or the Croatian coast. And it has to share its Arab visitors from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia with the shopping-mall delights of Dubai.

I still can’t help liking the place, though. The food is great and the country produces extremely good wine. The Lebanese remain the most hospitable, amusing and smartest people in the Middle East, constantly able to pick themselves up and start over again — characteristics which should help them overcome their latest disaster.

Richard Beeston was the Daily Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent until 1969. His account of 30 years as a foreign reporter, Looking for Trouble, is published in paperback by IB Tauris in September.