Lebanon’s capital is coping with a million refugees, a corrupt political system and the unhealed wounds of a 15-year civil war. But as Wendell Steavenson discovered on her return to the city she once called home, the people’s spirit offers hope that Beirut could again become a cultural centre of the Arab world, and its recovery a model for the Middle East. There is building everywhere—though nothing like a working government.
I lived in Beirut 10 years ago. When I returned this spring, I went on long walks through the city to reorient myself. What is going on here? What is happening? What phase of history am I looking at? I tried to feel the pulse of the city, throbbing through the honking traffi c, to measure the hopes of the construction cranes on the skyline against the number of army checkpoints. How is it possible, I kept asking my friends, that you guys are apparently—pause for an ironic eyebrow lift—well, a bit, relatively, stable? The horror of the civil war next door in Syria shows no sign of abating; refugees are still coming over the border to join over one million of their displaced compatriots. Beirutis shrugged, laconic. Somehow, they would say, it’s in everyone’s interest (Syrians, Saudis, Iranians, Turks: those powerpushing regimes who play with the country as geopolitical leverage) to keep Lebanon a safe space this week. To invest and recycle cash, buy things and sell things, eat and drink, make deals and negotiate… For the Lebanese I think, sometimes, peace just feels like a period of uncertainty between wars.
“The centre was badly bashed up by the fighting—but it was post-war development that bulldozed the place”