Dark days return to city’s streets: [1 All-round Country Edition]
MARTIN CHULOV, BEIRUT, Additional reporting: John Stapleton. The Australian [Canberra, A.C.T] 17 July 2006: 1.
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Abstract
Beirut at its best is a noisy hub of car horns, sub-woofers and Arabic pop songs. Cars of all shapes and sizes usually squeeze into thenarrow roads like shoals of fish, past high-street pedestrians and vibrant street stalls. But stray dogs now roam on city bypasses that usually teem with ramshackle Mercedes taxis and the ritzy four- wheel drives of the new Lebanon.
The explosions convinced many of the 1000-odd Australians still in Beirut to make plans for an exit, though with air, road and sea routes all blocked or dangerous, John Howard yesterday called on them to remain in secure locations indoors.
The Israeli bombardment of south Beirut has wrecked bridges and roads. Huge craters from one-tonne bombs dot the main thoroughfares, and jagged glass lies everywhere. The few motorists who dare take to the streets speed furiously through tunnels, especially the two passing under Beirut airport’s main runways, which have been bombed six times in the past four days.
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THE renaissance jewel of the Middle East was as empty, still and forlorn yesterday as it was during the bleak and bitter days at theend of the civil war in 1990.
Beirut, from the blitzed Hezbollah heartland in the southern suburbs to the Sunni Muslim and Christian areas in the east and west, is a ghost town, its French-style boulevards abandoned, its bustling centre a no-go zone and its hotels rapidly emptying.
Work has even stopped on the new Ivana Trump tower, an icon of the new-age opulence here.
Beirut at its best is a noisy hub of car horns, sub-woofers and Arabic pop songs. Cars of all shapes and sizes usually squeeze into thenarrow roads like shoals of fish, past high-street pedestrians and vibrant street stalls. But stray dogs now roam on city bypasses that usually teem with ramshackle Mercedes taxis and the ritzy four- wheel drives of the new Lebanon.
Gulf Arab tourists who had promised to turn this tourist high season into a bonanza have fled to the Syrian border to face kilometre-long chokeholds of people trying to flee.
On Saturday, the mosque muezzins were still calling both Shia and Sunni, and church bells chimed across town. But next to no one turned up.
Life in the melting-pot city was being conducted behind closed doors, just as it was during Beirut’s darkest years.
The central city has stayed free of the clutches of Hezbollah, but it has not been spared the startling thump of Israeli shells.
At dusk on Saturday, four explosions bracketed the oceanfront — two aimed at a lighthouse and another two at Beirut’s main port.
The shells had targeted the Lebanese military’s radar installations, which Israel says were instrumental in guiding a missile that crippled one of its warships 16km off the coast the day before.
The explosions convinced many of the 1000-odd Australians still in Beirut to make plans for an exit, though with air, road and sea routes all blocked or dangerous, John Howard yesterday called on them to remain in secure locations indoors.
The Prime Minister said the Government was considering an emergency plan to ferry Australian nationals to Cyprus, but not until theexisting dangerous security position eased.
“The judgment has been made by our people on the ground — and this is a judgment shared by the British, the Americans and theCanadians — that this is too dangerous a way of trying to get people out,” Mr Howard said.
“I want to say to Australians
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who are worried about their loved ones in Lebanon, we are doing everything we can 24 hours of the day to arrange an evacuation plan.The most likely way of evacuation on my advice is by ferry to Cyprus, and we are actively exploring all the possibilities in relation to that.”
The commitment was of little comfort to those Lebanese Australians sitting helpless at home as their loved ones were stuck in thewar zone.
Sydney businessman and Maronite Christian Marcel Aouad, like hundreds of other Australians of Lebanese descent, just wants his family back, and he says the Government is not doing enough.
His wife Lynette and 20-year-old son Matthew, a student at Macquarie University, went to Lebanon 10 days ago as part of a religious attempt to cure Matthew of Crohn’s disease, a debilitating infection of the intestines.
Matthew’s grandmother in Lebanon had made a special pledge for him to a shrine near the northern village of Batroun for the beloved Saint Rafqa, hoping this would help, although he has only taken enough medication for a fortnight.
Mr Aouad said he had pulled every string he could to get the family out to Syria yesterday. But at the last minute, after paying out thousands of dollars, the plan fell through. Now he doesn’t know where to turn.
“I just want my family back,” he said. “We are proud Australians. I am the only one who was not born here. We are very muchAustralian citizens and we need our Government’s help.
“I would like to see the Australian Government reacting in a more urgent manner. We deserve better.”
But there is seemingly little respite in store for those in Beirut. An oil fire from an Israeli air raid near the airport late last week is still spewing smoke. The still air and mountains ensure it stays trapped above the city.
The smoke hangs heaviest over the southern suburbs, which were pounded again yesterday in fresh Israeli attempts to annihilate theHezbollah guerrillas who hide there.
As we drove through the core of the Hezbollah heartland, a huge shell thumped into a building to our right. Three more landed within 10 seconds, the concussion waves knocking a motorbike rider to the road and shattering windows.
The Israeli bombardment of south Beirut has wrecked bridges and roads. Huge craters from one-tonne bombs dot the main thoroughfares, and jagged glass lies everywhere. The few motorists who dare take to the streets speed furiously through tunnels, especially the two passing under Beirut airport’s main runways, which have been bombed six times in the past four days.
Circling Israeli warplanes make even a short trip through the empty streets a risk.
Middle Eastern Airlines, Lebanon’s national air fleet, has been allowed to break an air blockade and evacuate some of its Boeings fromthe airport, but only a few have been able to take off from the short space of runway still usable between bomb craters.
Beirut by night is, for now, a thing of the past. Only one tiny bar opened during the past two evenings and the usually pumping nightclub district has been virtually abandoned.
Lebanon still has a strong matriarchal society “and the mothers want their families around them at a time like this”, one man said.
“Even if they wanted to go out, they wouldn’t. Life in Beirut until the Israelis leave will be spent in loungerooms and balconies,” he said.
“But we have all been down this path before. Things will be back to the way they were, God willing.”