Photos (Sorry that they're disorganized)

So here is a new round of photos. Sorry for not integrating them into my writing posts. I'm just a little strapped for time nowadays, so I get stuff on the blog whenever, however I can!
Photos from top to bottom: The first six photos are of Martyr's Square. The ones with no people were taken two days before the protests to mark the two year anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri. The ones with people are of the day of the protest. The next photo is of the fishing harbor in Tyre in South Lebanon. The next three mountain photos are of Druze territory in the Chouf Mountains. Below that is the boardwalk in Tyre. The last photo is of the town of Qana, ground zero for a lot of violence between Lebanon and Israel. Sorry this is all a bit of a mess, but this program makes it tough to get photos organized.

Redemption

Yesterday, Tuesday, is a day I wish I could quickly forget.
Blessed with a journalist's working hours, my alarm was still an hour from sounding when I rolled out of bed at nine in the morning. Opening my computer to see that I had no new email and that there was no new news coming out of Lebanon, I crawled back into bed for some more shut eye.
When I got out of bed an hour later, I flicked on CNN, a common trick for helping me come to my senses. I turned it on just in time to see the broadcast's opening segmet. "Twin blasts kill a dozen north of Beirut," the caption at the bottom of the page read. Startled, I hustled through showering and getting dressed before running out the door. As I walked down the street, it seemed just perfect to me that a day like this would be cold and rainy. It wasn't that the rain was that hard, it was that the cloud cover was so thick that the city was eerily dark.
When I bustled into work minutes later, I conferred with the other journalists to get the news. In the middle of my questioning, two other reporters brushed by me towards the door. One of them was in tears because her family was from the mountain town where the bombing had occurred. Hardly saying a word, I grabbed my camera and rushed after them. We were soaked by the time we reached our car just a block away.
What was so terrible about this bombing, we all agreed in the car, was that this was really the first time since the civil war ended that terrorists had targeted civilians at random. Unlike many other terror-prone Middle Eastern countries, terrorism in Lebanon targets important politicians and journalists almost exclusively.
Our route took us about twenty minutes straight up the coastal highway. The clouds kept us from seeing much of the sea. We then made an abrupt turn off the highway and started up the tiny mountain road that would take us to our destination. Small town piled upon small town all rolled out in front of us as we tackled a seemingly endless set of switchbacks that traversed the steep mountainside. Watching the clouds wind their way through the mountains, I could not help but feel some sort of dread for having tagged along.
At last, we saw a poncho-wearing policeman up ahead on the road, diverting all cars off to the left. We drove up to him and showed our press credentials and he immediately, and almost apologetically, waved us through. We drove another fifty yards up the road and parked. As we headed up the rest of the way on foot, we began to see an assembled crowd ahead. There were too many cars, journalists, and policemen to make immediate sense of my surroundings.
As I approached, however, it all laid itself out for me in nightmarish reality. I think what initially surprised me most was, ironically, my momentary lack of shock. For a moment it seemed to me as though I had seen something like this a hundred times before. Then I realized that it was television and movies that were paving that lie, and at that moment I flinched in the understanding that this was the first real act of terrorism I had laid eyes on.
The first bus was only about twenty feet behind the police barricade. I was facing the bus head-on and the damage done to it was frightening. The windows were all either blown out or broken into shards. The back of the bus, where the bomb had been planted, was squeezed like an accordion. I was fortunate that, having arrived exactly three hours after the bombing, all the victims had been taken to hospitals and all blood had been washed away by the rain.
I turned to my left and saw the CNN reporter who had first brought the gruesome images straight from the rainy mountains into my apartment. In front of me was a barrage of policemen and several bomb sniffing dogs. Soaked to the bone with their backs to the buses, the policemen looked something between scared and helpless.
Dignitaries streamed to the site. Members of Parliament, flanked by body guards and led by aides with umbrellas, would duck under the police line and walk right up to the buses, head bowed as they prayed for a moment or two before being hustled back to their cars by concerned guards.
The second bus, about thirty meters behind the first, was even more chilling. Its roof and walls were entirely ripped off. Where they had landed, I have no idea. Soaked and burned, the brownish-orange seats sat in a mangled mess. Devistatingly, local store-keeps told us, the bomb in the second bus went off between five to ten minutes after the first one. By the time the second one went off, people had swarmed the first bus, trying to help the injured. After the second explosion, locals were too afraid to approach the buses and help people for fear of further bombs. This was truly the classic definition of terrorism.
Standing where I was, twenty feet from the first bus, I looked out left of the road into a steep drop-off between mountains. On the right side of the road was a tall wall that had been erected when the road was carved out of the mountain. The distance between the wall and the drop off must have been fifteen yards. As I stood there taking in the scene, the most devastating thing happened. A group of about a dozen ten year-old students came walking up from behind. Ushered by several teachers, they were on their way home after school had been cancelled early. Because of the limited number of roads on the mountain, the kids were forced to walk down this one.
When they arrived at the police barricade, one of the teachers conferred with the head policeman and explained the issue. The policeman looked reluctant since almost nobody, barring dignitaries, were gaining access to the site itself. But he relented. As the students, short enough to not have to duck under the police tape, started heading down the road, their teachers called to them urgently and repeatedly to face the wall. "Look at the wall," they yelled. "Don't look over here." But as ten year olds tend to, several of them stole looks at the buses which lay no more than fifteen feet away. The looks on their faces will be unforgettable to me. They were clearly bewildered and pained and even the curious ten year-olds voluntarily snapped their heads back towards the wall.
I couldn't believe that this is how these kids were growing up—walking through bomb sites on the way home from an early school closure. I could not comprehend this kind of childhood.
As I stood there contemplating all this, one of the other reporters called to me to start heading back to the car. As I turned, I realized that I had been standing right next to something large on the ground. I had never bothered to look down and see what it was. But as I turned to head back, I almost fell over the bumper of the first bus, blown well down the road by the blast. I just shook my head and put up my hood to hide from the rain. Hopeless, I thought.

As bad as things get here, as bleak and as dark as times can seem, the Lebanese have a way of shocking you with their ability to turn the page. My trip up the mountain had really shaken me pretty hard, and it was with a great deal of suspicion and sadness that I rolled out of bed this morning. Just a day after the bombings, today had all the trappings of a damning day in the history of Lebanon since hundreds of thousands of Sunnis and Christians, hurting from Tuesday's bombings, would be descending on Martyr's Square to commemorate the second anniversary of the assassination of beloved Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In the very same square, Hezbollah has its tent city, created two and a half months ago, where it has been protesting the government. It seemed as though many ominous stars had aligned themselves to bring ruin to any semblance of peace in the country. Indeed, in the past it had taken far less than today's conditions to bring about violence.
To make matters worse in my own head, I was charged with writing the article on any casualties that came from today's rallies. I positioned myself in Martyr's Square early so as to be on hand if anyone got hurt. I periodically talked to the Red Cross who said that nothing had yet happened. In light of the previous day, I felt miserable as I stood there waiting for the fighting to break out.
But what transpired in Martyr's Square was inspiring. Hundreds of people set themselves up around the square, selling sandwiches and sodas and handing out flags and scarves and hats. On top of that, today was a family affair. Thousands of families—men, women, and children—came together in a carnival-like atmosphere to remember the leader they loved. Wearing everything from western dress to full-fledged hijabs and galabayas, they came. Some were dressed in work clothes and others in celebratory outfits. Kids played and laughed and sang. Periodically from one corner or another from the square I could hear the ring of drums as a small group of children had gotten together to do a chant.
About three and a half hours after I arrived, the speeches began. Gibran, Edde, Geagea, Jumblatt, Hariri Jr.—they all came and tried to rouse the crowd. Filled with energy, the crowd responded enthusiastically, hollering in approval, thousands of Lebanese flags fluttering.
In a time of so much despair, the Lebanese really give reason to hope. On a day where all the seeds for violence had been planted, the people rejected that in favor of celebration. Despite so much cause for a fight, the Lebanese people en masse put civil strife on hold to give Hariri the celebration he deserved. It also gives hope for the future. If there ever was a day for the fragile and tentative peace in this country to spiral out of control, this was it. After today, Lebanon looks, just maybe, like a country unwilling to enter the period of violence that looks so imminent.
The speakers throughout the day continually referred to the capital city as Beirutikum, meaning Your Beirut. Today, the people of the Lebanon really took that to heart, embracing the city as their own rather than looking like a group wanting to destroying it. For this reason, getting up in the morning tomorrow will bring a little more hope.

The Stage

I write this on a rainy winter Tuesday in Beirut. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day for much of the rest of the world, but not for Lebanon. For the Lebanese tomorrow will mark the two year anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and a day of incredible passion and activism across the country.
I look out the windows behind me and the mountains to the north and east are shrouded in low, dark clouds revealing only occasional glimpses of steep slopes plunging into the sea that give Beirut so much of its allure. It is probably a good thing that the mountains are hidden for just inside of them two bombs tore through commuter buses, killing several about three hours ago.
Just down the block, Martyr’s Square is a land divided. Just south of Hariri’s great blue-domed mosque, members of Hezbollah pass the days in their camp talking, drinking tea, and playing soccer as part of their two and a half month long sit-in strike against the government. Next to them is the fence. It is a new fence that runs right into the heart of Hariri’s beloved mosque. Built just last week, this fence is a tool to insure peace tomorrow. It is funny how a tall steel wall and two rows of razor wire can be used as tools of peace.
On the other side of the wall is an empty plaza, stretching almost to the sea. In twenty-four hours time hundreds of thousands are expected to flood it to remember their great slain Prime Minister.
So the stage is set. One plaza with two sides, a Hezbollah camp filled with life, a Hariri camp empty but expectant, an ominous wall down the middle, and now, today, the emotional charge that will set the tone.

More photos

Top to Bottom: Wine barrels in the caves at Ksara winery; a warehouse in Il Marj that was bombed out in the summer war against Israel; me in front of a temple in Baalbek; all that remains of a different temple in Baalbek; a castle in Sidon.

Fire-- Six photos from Beirut

This is the first of three postings I'm doing all at once. To begin, scroll down to the post "Three Stories" and work your way up from there. I keep working on posts and then new things come up, so I get a major backlog. The two posts below this one really combine most of my stories and clear my backlog of things I want to write about.

This post is for photos since my blog has been light on photos so far. I have a bunch of others I've been trying to post of my weekend adventures, but technical difficulties are preventing me. Enjoy these for now.

Smoke rising up from burning tires in Martyr's Square in Central Beirut.

Tires on fire in Central Beirut.

Members of Hezbollah with a container of gasoline.

Bombed out buildings from the summer war with Israel in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

More rubble.

Rubble in the southern suburbs from the summer war with Israel.

First Adventures out of Beirut

This past weekend, I decided to take my first steps outside the city to explore the rest of Lebanon. I know I will have to go everywhere twice—once now to assuage my curiosity and again in the spring when the weather is warm and the towns are all open. A lot of places, I've learned, really go into hibernation for the winter. Saturday marked the first of four straight days of intense days we'd have. Undeterred, Steve (Groton class of '04, spending the semester traveling throughout the Middle East, in case you missed it from an earlier post) and I made our way down to the Cola bus station to head out to the Bekka Valley for the day.
The Bekka has always been number one on my list of places to go in Lebanon, and rather than wait and build up to it, I just decided to go straight away. The transport system in Lebanon is incredible. When I arrived at the bus terminal in Beirut, several men asked me where I wanted to go. I said I wanted to go to the village of Ksara in the Bekka. I was then shuttled to one of the many, many microbuses waiting at the terminal. Unlike any place I've been, there was no haggling over my business. There was order and reason to it all. I made it to Ksara, roughly an hour and a half ride, for three dollars only. To get to the Bekka Valley, which runs north to south on the eastern edge of Lebanon, we had to drive through the impressive Chouf mountains that made for really steep roads and some pretty intense snow.
By the time we got to Ksara, the snow had turned back to rain, and we were ready for the first stop on our daylong tour. We stopped in Ksara to go to the oldest and most famous winery in Lebanon, which is, surprisingly, supposed to make quite good wine. Of course, we were the only idiots to be visiting the winery on a rainy Saturday in the middle of winter at 9am, but we were excited nonetheless. A smart young Lebanese woman gave us a tour of the winery. The winery, back fifty years ago, had been owned by monks who made and sold wine, the profits form which would benefit the church. It is now owned by four private families. Our guide showed us the natural caves which are two miles in length, and because of their constant year-round temperature, are where the wine is aged. Barrels upon barrels of wine lined the corridors of the caves. Little alcoves on the right and left were used to keep wines from each year for the sake of history.
The tour concluded with a wine tasting in which our guide gave us all the information on the different wines and gave us different kinds of things, including Lebanon's national drink, Arak. When all was said and done, we went to the store in the winery and I bought a bottle of cognac, something I don't even drink, because production of it was stopped when the families bought the winery from the monks. The thought of owning fifty year old cognac made by monks in the heart of Lebanon was too much. Plus, it didn't cost a lot.
From west-central Bekka, we moved on to the south Bekka. The day before, while on assignment, I had met the mayor, named Kamal Harb, of a small city called il-Marjj. He invited me to come visit him anytime, and when I told him I was going to be in the Bekka the next day, he insisted I come by for coffee. To get down to his town, we took a taxi driven by a Palestinian who, when I asked him about his desire to return to the West Bank, got the most glazed over look in his eyes that I have ever seen. It was one of the purest moments of nostalgia I think I'll ever see. I bring it up only because at the mention of Palestine, it was startling how much he was transported to a different time and place.
We ended up staying and chatting with Kamal for almost two hours. We talked only politics, but of a scope that ranged from local to international. One thing we talked a lot about was a meeting he had just come from. He had been meeting with the director of the military in the Bekka region to express his displeasure on the previous week's events. His town, il-Marjj, is a bastion of Sunni authority in a region that is heavily, heavily Shi'a. When the Hezbollah protestors took over the country for a day two weeks ago, they also blocked the main street of his town with tires. He was furious because his town was Sunni and wanted nothing to do with these protests. His message to the military was that they had better take action if Hezbollah takes to the streets again because the alternative would be a violent uprising by the townsmen.
We chatted on and on at length over rotating cups of espressos, lattes, and teas. The trays of drinks kept coming, and I kept taking them as long as my host did. After a couple of hours, Kamal's brother, a dentist, arrived to take us on a driving tour of the town. He showed us everything from the town center to the agricultural fields. We saw farmland owned by the church, an unfinished library that was supposed to be built by the Syrians, and a factory that had been bombed out by the Israelis.
Kamal's brother then dropped us off at the Microbus hub and we caught one heading up to the town of Baalbek in north-central Bekka. Despite its major reputation, the town of Baalbek is actually quite small. It really has one major road with a side road that houses the souqs, or markets. The residential area expands modestly from this center, but it isn't much. What makes Baalbek so incredible are its expansive Roman ruins. When I entered the ruin complex, right next to the town, I saw some free standing wall structures with acres and acres of fallen columns and other giant pieces of marble and granite strewn across yard. The bits of wall still standing have varying degrees of carving and detail left on them.
The site only got really incredible towards the back. Near the end of the walk through the site I saw a giant temple on my left. Showing its age and soaked with rain, the temple now looks like a hollow remnant of its former self, but it still has the ability to amaze. Standing across from it is part of what must once have been a temple—five, or so, columns, standing lonely against the sky, supporting nothing, guarding nothing. Plus, they're on top of a major rise in the earth, so they really stand out in an unnaturally lonely way.
Drenched and tired, Steve and I headed back to Beirut to rest up for the next day. We were supposed to go skiing on Sunday, but I got an email from my friend Alex at 7:30am telling me that the snow had closed the mountain roads so we wouldn't be able to go that day. We slept in instead and got going closer to noon. Steve and I headed back to the bus station because I wanted to fulfill a serious desire I have to visit the Shebba Farms. Very briefly, the Shebba Farms are a group of farms right on the tri-border region between Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. These farms have geo-strategic benefits and are currently occupied by the Israelis. The controversy is that by UN decree, Israel is allowed to occupy parts of Syria, namely the Golan Heights, but it is unable to occupy any territory in Lebanon. Unfortunately, the ownership of the Shebba is in question. The Syrians and Lebanese say its Lebanese territory, therefore forbidden to the Israelis, while Israel claims that it's Syarian territory. Anyways, it's a really important issue in Lebanon right now and I wanted to go see it with my own two eyes.
When we got to the bus terminal, however, we learned that we'd need permission from the Lebanese army to go near the farms. Since it was Sunday, such permission was impossible to come by. Shelving my Shebba ambitions for a day, we decided to go to the port town of Sidon about an hour south of Beirut. The city itself is not much to brag about. It's a dirty collection of shops and markets in the middle of a greater residential area. The seafront is more interesting, though, lined with seafood restaurants and also with a Medieval castle that sits practically in the sea. The best parts of the city, though, are the covered markets. The old city is a collection of ratty old three story buildings. Within them, however, at ground level, are what can best be described as an endless series of tunnels, housing hundreds of small shops. From clothing to sweets to trinkets, this market had it all. Endless covered passageways that twisted and turned and forked held an immense amount of life in what otherwise would have been considered dingy and forgettable. Shopping is difficult for me because, right or wrong, I avoid giving business to any store that sells Hezbollah memorabilia. Because stores selling Nasrallah key chains or Hezbollah flags were so prevalent, my options were quite limited. I did walk out of one store, though, with a little bronze cedar tree on a wood stand that says "Lebanon" on it.
After wandering the tunnels for a while and grabbing a seaside seafood lunch, we boarded a bus and headed back to Beirut.
All the traveling this past weekend was extraordinary and has my mind wandering wildly as I begin to consider this weekend's possibilities. So stay tuned for the next installment.

Three Stories

I've just finished week three of this five month adventure at The Daily Star. I've just had my seventh article published, and just at the end of last week I got a permanent desk in the office. So things are looking good here on the east coast of the Mediterranean. On top of that, a week of very measured speeches given by the country's top politicians has made for a quiet week here on the civil-strife front. All in all, a pretty damn good week.
In light of the lack of drama around here, let me tell you about the three stories I wrote this week, and the three interesting lessons I learned from writing them. I'll go in reverse chronological order.

Lesson 1: Never Underestimate a Topic
Thursday night my boss told me to attend a press conference in the morning and write an article about it. The press conference was being held to formalize the donation by the European Union of seventeen "waste management trucks" to the Lebanese government. At first, I thought this article was going to be a total snooze-fest—the kind of thing I'd do to make the bosses happy, but one with no real substance that was only getting attention because it was a slow news day.
On Friday morning, I sleepily made my way over to the Starco building in downtown where the government has many of its offices. After asking around a bit, I found the room with the press conference. To my amazement, the room was far bigger, had far more people, and had far more cameras set up than any press conference I had yet been to. Within minutes, one of the cabinet ministers and the representative from the EU strolled in. They began talking in Arabic as I began reviewing the press material, and it was then that I learned my lesson.
While waste management may not be the most fascinating topic, the story turned out to have far deeper roots. You should read the article, but I'll summarize by saying that in 1999, a commission from Europe traveled Lebanon to see how it could help Lebanon recover from the civil war, and it found that one of the most important civil elements that town leader after town leader said was lacking was the ability to manage solid waste. So, the EU gave Lebanon a multi-million dollar grant, of which an important part was set to handle waste management. Essentially, this story was, on the surface, about seventeen garbage trucks. It was, in reality, about a deep and meaningful partnership between Lebanon and a strong ally that is committed to helping Lebanon overcome setbacks from the civil war and avoid future conflict.

Lesson 2: Don't Forget about the "Lebanese Twist"
In the middle of last week, I was told to attend a press conference held by the American University of Beirut Alumni Association where they would be discussing proposed amendments to their constitution. Lesson two is not so dissimilar from the first lesson because this one too began with an assignment that did not look interesting.
After an opening word and the singing of the AUB school hymn, the press conference began with everyone looking over their copies of the new constitution. Everything was going as I'd expected. And then I began to ask questions of the people sitting next to me. With that, what I call the "Lebanese Twist" came into sharp focus. What should have been no more than a typical annual Constitutional review was actually more of a battle to stay alive. What I learned at the press conference was that the Alumni Association had always prided itself on being independent of the university because it gave the group more freedom to do as it pleased. And then, reasonably, the university decided it wanted a group to represent alumni globally, not just in Lebanon as the Alumni Association was doing. So the Alumni Association, determined to stay the only alumni group began to go ahead with a plan to globalize its operations. The university was unsatisfied with the Alumni Association's new effort and it therefore created its own group called something like the Worldwide Alumni Association. Something like that.
By the time I entered the scene—at the press conference—the Alumni Association was pushing to ratify its globalizing propositions so that it could stay relevant, prove its dominance, and eventually return to its position as the only group representing the university's alumni.
The Lebanese Twist, to me, is that no matter what the story, no matter how seemingly mundane or ordinary, there is almost always a dark political twist to it. If you search a story, top to bottom, you'll likely find a little corner of darkness in there somewhere. That's part of what gives Lebanon its appeal, but it's also what makes the country such a sad case.

Lesson 3: You Have to Deal with the War Angle All the Time
By this, I mean that in every single story I've been assigned, war is always a major player. It makes writing an article tough. You can't have a newspaper that everyday that brings war into every story, into every pore of Lebanese life. Sure, war's important, but it isn't everything. Some examples….
My first story involved covering a press conference by the head of a small Christian party who was calling for the return of all Palestinian refugees to the Palestinian Territories. If you study Lebanese history, you would know that the Palestinians played a very tragic and very destructive role during the civil war. But for the past seventeen years, since the end of the war, they have been a faction relegated to one of Lebanon's twelve refugee camps. To say they are second class citizens would be generous. They are an impoverished people with no political rights, no political rights, and no homeland. But still that press conference seeped with implication that ousting Palestinians from their territories and forcing an exodus of almost a half million people was the natural reaction to what their militia did to Lebanon during the civil war. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that the Palestinians, as they've told me many times, would like to return to Palestine too, and the party leader at the press conference could have spun it that way, but instead he brings it back to a reaction of the civil war.
I have a few other examples, but I think I'll skip those and go right to the most potent one. Last week, I was writing a story on the VAT tax which was first implemented in 2002 in Lebanon and will now be raised to fifteen percent over the next three years. I went down to the southern suburbs, Shiite Hezbollah stronghold, to cover the impact of the tax on small business owners. I went south because it is one of the poorest places in the country, and my angle was to see just how much this tax was hurting those in greatest poverty.
I was not prepared in the least for what I was about to encounter. What I saw really knocked me back on my heels and put me into a pretty good funk for about a day. As I approached the neighborhood, I began to notice posters on each lamppost on the road's center divide. After I asked about them, my cabbie told me that on each poster was the face of one of the "martyrs" who'd died this summer in the war against Israel.
The taxi dropped me off right in the middle of the neighborhood called Haret il-Hreik, and I went to work. As I made my way down the street, stopping in stores right and left to chat with workers, I noticed that about two blocks down, the buildings just stopped on the left side of the street. While they began again a little ways later, there was more than a block with no buildings. Curious, I thought. It just seemed very out of place for the most bustling street in the southern suburbs. Since this was my first trip down there, I didn't make the mental leap I should have. Unfortunately, mental leaps were unnecessary. My eyes would take care of everything for me.
When I made my way down the street, I stopped in awe of what stood before me. Lot upon lot of mangled rubble: concrete mixed with wires mixed with lots of assorted debris. The occasional forgotten shoe gave the site its eerie humanity. Some buildings hadn't fallen, they were just gutted. This was ground zero for the summer war against Israel. I was stunned.
My interview subjects, too, seethed over the summer war. When I'd ask how the VAT tax had affected business, people would often reply sharply by saying something like, "Israel has killed my business." It took two full days of intense interviewing to get enough non-war related material to proceed with my story.
That is maybe the starkest example of the way in which war tried to push its way into my story, but it comes up again and again in almost every story I work on. This really is a country that knows war, that is prepared to fight, and that knows how to rebound from a war like no other society.