Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [83]
“I was born before the war,” he said. “I never got the chance to meet the other Lebanese. I was a Christian and I never knew the Muslims.
“For thirty years they have been lying about the war in Lebanon,” he told me grandly. “They said it was a war among the Lebanese people. That was a lie. That’s what you’re discovering right now, what all Lebanese are discovering now. That we love each other. That we know each other better than ever.”
“Now we have a new face. We are looking to our children and we don’t want them to suffer like we suffered. Both sides paid too much blood. During the war, we were the same age as the people you see here.” That was Sami Abu Gaodi, a Christian militiaman who struck up a conversation one night. His eyes moved fondly over the crowd. “The young generation, they are making us change.”
Those interviews made me nervous, like listening to drunk people gush. It felt wobbly and dangerous, too slick and too easy. The protestors talked all day and all night about how Lebanon was finally united. Sectarianism is dead, they hollered. We are all one.
But—the Shiites weren’t there. And nobody wanted to talk about it.
There were a lot of reasons for their absence, and the first was Hezbollah, the popular Shiite party and militia that held sway over most of Lebanon’s largest sect. Hezbollah depended upon Syria for weapon-smuggling routes and political cover, so the prospect of a Syrian withdrawal scratched nerves. And there was a vaguer, deeper truth: the Shiites, historically shunted aside, impoverished, pushed out into the provinces, were wary of Lebanon without Syria. They had gained prestige and political clout under the tutelage of Damascus, and they were leery of being left alone with the Christians, Sunnis, and Druze. At first they closed their mouths and faded into the background. Hariri’s blood was fresh and there was nothing they could say. Incredibly, nobody paid much attention to their conspicuous absence. Not the politicians, not the journalists, and certainly not the Lebanese themselves. It was treated as an irrelevant aside. But at least a third—as much as half—of the country was Shiite. In the end their distrust—of Israel, of America, of the Christians and Sunnis—was the most devastating corrosion of all.
One morning during those early protests, I visited a Shiite cabinet minister in his office. Syria had kept Lebanon stable for years, he argued over coffee. “The opposition is assuming they have the upper ground and they represent the majority, and this is dangerous. You have to have a dialogue with the majority party in Lebanon.” He meant Hezbollah and the Shiites. “To liberate Lebanon, you don’t want to destroy it.”
In the streets, you could feel the danger, not in spoken words, but in silences. The anti-Syria crowds either pretended the Shiites didn’t exist, or denied their absence. “There are Shiites here!” they said defensively.
“Where?”
“Here among us. I have met many Shiites. The Lebanese are all united.”
“But where?”
“They are here!”
Two weeks of protests passed before Omar Karami, the Syria-backed prime minister, announced that he wouldn’t rule against the wishes of the people. He resigned. The government fell.
The tent city dug in deeper. It wasn’t enough. Faces were fixed toward one slogan: Syria out. Those words had been burning a hole in their tongues for fifteen years of silence, and now they screamed them. They protested and struck and marched. What did it mean, what came after, was it enough—nobody knew and, for the moment, nobody cared.
Washington was there all the while. Faces and neckties glowed on big screens spread behind the crowds, speeches boomed over the vacant lots. President Bush climbed behind podiums and said enormous things about Lebanon. No longer was this a small, forgotten place, a hopeless nest of killers passed off to Syria in