Early one morning in September 1986 three gunmen patrolling Beirut’s scarred Green Line came across what they believed would be easy pickings.
Early one morning in September 1986 three gunmen patrolling Beirut’s scarred Green Line came across what they believed would be easy pickings. David Hirst the diminutive, silver-haired and donnish veteran correspondent was stranded by the side of the road in one of the most notorious areas of the city. Scores of Westerners had already been seized by militant groups allied to Iran and Hirst was pushed at gunpoint into the back of a BMW for what should have been the start of several miserable years handcuffed to a radiator in Beirut’s southern suburbs. To everyone’s surprise, the Guardian correspondent lived to tell the tale that very night back at his home overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. He explained that he had shouted, struggled, and kicked his way out of captivity. The bemused gunmen eventually had enough and let him go.
The story goes a long way to explain Hirst’s tenacity and quiet courage, and why he was admired by so many of us who lived in Beirut at the time. The city may have been torn apart by a decade of civil war but the dwindling expatriate community of journalists, academics and aid workers held on stubbornly. We believed that Beirut, despite its crumbling appearance, was the heart of the Middle East, the best listening post for the region, the most sophisticated city in the Arab world and in spite of the violence the most attractive.
Hirst, a fluent Arabic speaker, is now more Lebanese than British, having lived in Beirut for 50 years. He is better qualified than anyone to write a sweeping modern history of the region from the perspective of this tiny, sliver of coastline that has seduced, infuriated and consumed one foreign invader after another.
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