Leaving Lebanon

Beirut is usually a party town, capital of the Middle East’s most glamorous country where people from all over the region come to kick back — but this year’s been a little different. Kidnappings, bank robberies, roadblocks and gun battles — no wonder the free-spending and normally blasé Gulf Arabs have stayed at home, leaving us Lebanese to consider not only a decimated economy, but also the very real prospect of a descent into another civil conflict.

Which is why finally, after 20 years, I’m leaving. My Lebanese adventure, during which I married, had children, lived through three wars, a popular revolution and an attempted coup, has come to an end.

I moved to Lebanon from London in 1992, two years after my Lebanese father died in a helicopter crash in Sierra Leone. I was 27 and still wondering what to do with my life. Lebanon seemed a good place to start looking. The 15-year civil war had ended a year earlier and the country was rolling up its collective sleeves to start picking up the pieces. I figured we would grow together, Lebanon and I.

Less than 20 years later, you couldn’t move without bumping into fawning travel features about how Beirut was once again the party town for the bling-fuelled Arab jet set (think a million Kardashians) inhabited by a cast of edgy designers, restaurateurs and architects (think Arab Hoxtonites, if you can) ably supported by photogenic bankers, ad executives and politicians. They all told us that Lebanon was a beacon of tolerance, creativity and entrepreneurship.

This was the truth — but not the whole truth. Lebanon could also be a total nightmare, a country where prosperity and fun was punctuated by periods of uncertainty, fear and brutality. In 1996, while my wife was pregnant with our son, we watched from our balcony as the Lebanese army, positioned on the Beirut seafront, fired heavy machine-guns on Israeli helicopter gunships during Operation Grapes of Wrath.