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| careful where you leave YOUR vehicle
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| The news is awful. I just arrived in Doha: I didn't make it out of Damascus yesterday so I went back to Beirut and waited another night. Today I got a taxi at 2 pm to the airport -- the traffic was terrible, and the driver and I had an animated discussion the whole way to the airport, speculating about why, and about how quickly the whole country might go to shit. Finally, on the airport road, we passed two truckloads of young men waving sticks and protesting... a big gathering, which my driver said had something to do with the Beirut Arab University, right there along the freeway. I took a picture out the window.
Just before we took off, an hour later, the woman next to me got a call that the airport road had just been closed. She and I too: we spent the two-hour flight talking about how everyone is leaving Lebanon now. She was older so I really grilled her -- how can people say these last six months have destroyed their optimism?? you survived the 80s, you survived a city divided in two. How can you say you'll leave NOW if you didn't leave THEN? She kept saying, "It is worse now; I have never been this hopeless. At least then we had our neighbors, we had our daily lives. Now neighbors are fighting neighbors, and there is violence in the streets. It's random, you don't know where, you don't know why." I couldn't believe it when she said she has one son left in Lebanon and she is desperately trying to get him to leave. "He'll have kids soon; he can't raise his kids in that country! What will he tell them about who they are? In this atmosphere, they'll only grow up learning to hate... they'll think, they're Sunni so they don't like the other, or they're Christian so they don't like the other.."
People brought out their cell phones and started sharing news almost the minute we landed in Qatar: "there is fighting!" "who??" "It's Future vs. Hizbullah!" "And the roads are closed!"
Once through customs, I had trouble checking into the Movenpick Hotel, where I had a reservation, so I told the hotel guy, fine, I am in transit here and the airline will give me a hotel anyway. "Call them for me." He called them on his phone and explained, "she is coming from Beirut, en route to Nairobi." On the other end, the airline people told him, "That's not possible; the Beirut airport is closed." He cupped his hand over the receiver and said to me, "They say that's not possible; the Beirut airport is closed."
Motioning from my feet to my head, I practically shouted at him: "Well you can tell them I am fricking STANDING HERE so it very clearly WAS possible when I left!"
what madness. the news from there is reducing me almost to tears. WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS?! WHOM DOES THIS BENEFIT?! ghayr al sahyuneen... meen??? | | |
| After a delirious and kleenex-filled night on the couch, I awoke this morning and immediately emailed my mom, "any word?" She is my US-based calling agent, dean of getting in touch with Qatari Airlines in either New York or Doha since here in Beirut they seem to have gone on permanent vacation. Yesterday they said the flight today would be cancelled; after that they weren't sure. They could confirm me on a flight from Damascus in three days -- if I made it off standby on a flight today, Wednesday, then I could make my original Nairobi connection. Damascus seemed like a long way to go with three suitcases for standby... but then around 1 or 2 a.m. they confirmed me. I called her this morning hoping the flights from Beirut would be re-instated but alas -- not to be. The airline agents in Qatar just told her, "We have no idea what is happening with Beirut. But no flights show up on our screens."
So... taxi to Charles Helou, wait to fill a shared taxi, then somehow get my stuff out of Baramke, to the street, and into a cab for the airport? I kind of thought not. Hence the madness I am about to perpetrate: $90 for a straight-up private taxi from here to Damascus.
"Why don't you go to the Beirut airport??" the dispatcher asked me in surprise.
"My flight was cancelled."
"But the road is back open!"
"Right well... I guess the Sayyid didn't tell the airlines in time."
Bad news is I am overweight on luggage and the Damascus airport -- thank you ramy q. ddn -- has kind of a reputation for a) requiring extra baggage charges be paid in US cash, b) skimming serious money off the top of said charges and c) generally being incompetent. they don't accept e-tickets at the Damascus airport, for example. how about paper tickets actually intended for departure from another country entirely... ? we'll see.
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Update is: 6 people were killed today, all of them counter-demonstrators. Pro-government, in other words -- 4 Future party members and 2 LF guys. The opposition called off the strike about an hour ago, so tomorrow things should return to normal, though some of that shit I saw in the roads will take a while to clear (and my flight to Nairobi is already cancelled...). The guys I was out to drinks with tonight in Jeitta couldn't stop talking about a) conspiacy (the army did nothing today... they didn't clear roads, they didn't try to stop the demonstrators. I think, and many people think, this is because the danger of the army splintering along sectarian lines is so great -- so their orders are always "non-interference." but then, people are not totally hair-brained to ask, what does the army do if not keep the roads open??)... and b) Christians were fighting each other today. in Jeitta, for example, supposedly LF kids (Christian) trooped out to battle the Aounis (also Christian) who were striking/road blocking, and several injuries resulted. "Brothers are fighting brothers!" my friend said. "Cousins are fighting cousins!"
So... the whole thing is pretty freaking surreal. My own opinion, which many probably share, is that it isn't really good for anyone. just another reason for thousands of talented people to emigrate; businesses to close; stress to build; tempers to flare; politicians to fist-shake. the only time my own anger really sparked all day was when, towards the end of my walk, a guy came started calling out to me with a can of beer in his hand. I was like, yo buddy, I am not one to begrudge anyone their Islamic resistance movements, okay -- but you best not be showing up holding an f*ing beer in yo hand!
I'm headed for either the airport or Damascus in a few hours. we'll see how that goes.
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| General strike today. Hizbullah and its allies have been camping out ("bye boys! have fun storming the castle!") for about two months now and Prime Minister Siniora and his allies show no side of yielding. So: general strike. Block all major roads. Delay Paige's flight to Africa by, it appears, three days.
At the Daily Star, as I said below, word was that the airport road was a smoldering mess. Hamra, Iman reported, is effectively impossible to drive into. so I set out on foot. It was still daylight then: crowds of guys everywhere (guys because they were males, a disconcerting proportion of them wearing masks or kaffiyas to cover their faces -- not really boys, but not really men. probably my age). Lebanese TV was playing footage of enormous fires all morning, but by this time it was mostly smoldering piles of trash. Turns out dumpsters and their contents provided the main fodder for roadblocks.
Overall the effect was pretty gross... trash and debris strewn everywhere...
I was in Hamra for a couple of hours, until after dark. Sure enough, once I had passed all the roadblocks leading there (more pictures to be uploaded soon), the neighborhood was pretty quiet. Beirut became a bit like a ghost town starting last night -- few cars on the streets, lots of stores closing early. I was out with Talia and others and Talia's mom called around 2 a.m. to ask when she'd be home. Talia hung up and goes, "what is this? she never calls me!" But strikes and roadblocks make people worry, I guess.
Right at this intersection I saw an army truck roll up to a row of rocks put across the road -- I thought a confrontation would break out right there but the truck just stopped, waited a minute then reversed back down the hill, towards that billboard with a ticker that keeps track of how many days it's been since Hariri died. I think today is 701. (I always wonder aloud: what will they do when it reaches 1000? they'll need to get a bigger ticker; this one only has three spaces.)
After dark I was a bit unsure how to get home, so I started walking south towards Verdan, cutting west through corniche al-mazra. Rasha took the bus along that road every morning when she was here. It's hard core Hariri-ville: pictures of him everywhere, blue flags flying (for the Future Party). After several blocks, the empty road gave way to tanks and soldiers fully blocking it off -- they were turning cars back. I asked if it was okay to walk and the soldier said, "of course!" so I picked my way through the hundreds of soldiers lazying around on the sidewalk. On the other side of the tanks I saw why they were turning cars back: in the middle of the intersection was a totally burned out shell of a car, flames still leaping out of it ten feet into the air. Actually it was the stack of tires on its roof that were burning. In the distance, a block to the south, I could see another intersection with a car and stack of tires burning. It was dark but this gave everything an orange pall; it smelled like a campfire. Like an enormous trash-and-car marshmellow roast with hundreds of young guys moseying around in the night air, taking it all in.
Every half block or so were more burning dumpsters, smoldering shit... I kept going until the soldiers abruptly disappeared, and the throngs returned to being all regularly-clothed men. I guess the army has staked out which areas it controls and left the others alone.
This mosque appeared shortly after that, as I continued walking east. the call to prayer began just after I took this picture and I saw a girl scamper out her door -- the second girl I saw all day, out and about. It took me another hour to get home and I still haven't seen a third one.
At the intersection between Sodeco and Corniche al-Mazra -- along the highway that was the Green Line, during the war -- there was a barricade that literally stopped me in my tracks. Southbound, it spanned the entire road, like an an enormous dirt-and-trash built edifice... the road I had been walking on, leading east to Sodeco and Monot, was also totally impassable. I had to turn down the hill, towards the water and the demonstration and more scattered groups of men. No cars out: people were strolling down the middle of the road, picking their way around the fires.
In the background are some of Beirut's chicest clubs and scattered "I love life" billboards -- the red ones paid for by the pro-government forces. Losing out today, it seems. Behind this fire, below, you can see Element, a super trendy place we used to *battle* to get into when I was here in 2004. It was always packed with Saudis and other Gulf tourists, who parked their enormous SUVs and beamers out front, and you had to be on the guestlist to even have a hope of getting past the doorman.
no more...
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