Blogging from Beirut: Leaflets Out to Sea

We were sitting at the pool when suddenly everyone was pointing at the sky. I turned to look: the air was filled with leaflets, thousands of them, flipping down, catching and losing the sun.
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We went to the pool on Saturday. It's possible that by doing so we broke an unwritten rule of appropriate wartime conduct. At the time the question didn't come up.

Because of the 10,000-15,000 tons of fuel oil that flowed into the Mediterranean when the storage tanks at Jiyye were bombed on July 13 and 15, Beirut's beaches are for now no-go zones, striped in black and smelling of diesel. Some beaches are littered with dead fish with petroleum-coated gills.

Two weeks ago I visited a beach club near the destroyed lighthouse on the northwestern corner of the city; it reeked. The boardwalk was tracked with oily workboot footprints. Men in plastic coveralls were standing on a dock scooping oil from the water bucket by bucket. It looked like it was going to take a while.

The real clean-up will not begin until a cease-fire is secured and it, the clean-up, may not be the top priority for a country without bridges and highways and with diminishing food, medicine and fuel supplies.

The pool we chose abuts the historic, war-ruined St. George Hotel, which for decades has stood vacant, skeletal and haunted, its restoration held up in an epic real-estate dispute. Spent gray curtains with knots in them lift and fall in rows where windows used to be. A large semicircular terrace overlooking the pool and the sea beyond - the setting, one imagines, of countless languid, open-air dinner parties in the hotel's heyday in the sixties - sits conspicuously empty.

[The St. George isn't the only building on the block in need of serious attention. It was here, right out front, that the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others were killed in a massive truck bombing on Hariri's motorcade in February 2005. The bomb took the façade off the building across the street and broke windows in the HSBC office tower a block away. In footage from that day's session of Parliament, which is halfway across town, you see the speaker, Nabih Berri, prattling along when suddenly the whole chamber shakes, the camera almost falling off its tripod.]

So we were sitting at the pool when suddenly everyone was pointing at the sky. I turned to look: the air was filled with leaflets, thousands of them, flipping down, catching and losing the sun, flashing white in a field of otherwise perfect blue. It was like looking up on a perfect upstate-New York fall day and seeing the endless, streaming Vs of Canadian geese making their annual migration.

A south wind was carrying the leaflets out to sea. They had been dropped over West Beirut, it seemed - not over the southern suburbs, kilometers away. Most of the paper scraps fell into the Mediterranean but some kids ran a couple down. The purposeful French reporter in our group marched in her bikini down the boardwalk to get the news.

The leaflets warned Nasrallah to leave Lebanon. The real message, however, seemed aimed at Beirutis not affiliated with or partisan to Hizbullah. The message was that Hizbullah is the source of Lebanon's problems. Some here already subscribe to that line of thinking. Others blame the bombers for the bombing. Others fear civil war and believe that placing all the blame on Hizbullah - and by extension the Shiite community, which comprises 35-40 percent of the population - is to invite the worst.

Earlier today I was hanging out with a friend from the southern suburbs who supports Hizbullah. We were watching footage of the rescue effort in the suburbs following this afternoon's bombardment - 20 raids in two minutes. Her house, my friend said, is a twenty-second walk from the scene of devastation on TV. Her family has moved in with relatives in another part of town but that afternoon her father had returned to their home to collect some belongings and was there when the raids started. He was unhurt.

"So you know that place?" I asked her, pointing at the TV. "Like the back of my hand," she said. She gave me a quick guided tour of the damaged buildings on the periphery of the camera shot, including a mosque and several residential structures with room-sized holes in their concrete facades. I asked her what had been hit. She said it was a (presumably evacuated) orphanage and school "for the children of martyrs," meaning slain Hizbullah fighters. "The school is free," she said, all paid for by Hizbullah. She said the school has a reputation for its students' high scores on standardized tests.

I told her that I couldn't conceive of how loud the strikes must have been where her father was. A few nights earlier I had been to a nearby neighborhood, Tariq al-Jadide, on the other side of the Palestinian refugee camps from Haret Hreik, which has borne the brunt of the bombardment. I told her how at one point in the evening - three of us were hanging out playing chess and watching TV - my friend had shyly told me that we were closer than usual to where they'd been hitting and that I shouldn't, uh, be afraid if the strikes started because they would be, uh, really loud. (As it turned out the bombing that night didn't start until nearly dawn, hours after we had returned to East Beirut.)

"Tariq al-Jadide?" she said. On her face I could read what she didn't say: You have no idea.

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