ShareBEIRUT: Near front lines where they once battled each other, former fighters in Lebanon’s civil war now gather to bear the same message, half a century after the devastating conflict erupted: never again.
The war killed 150,000 people, destroyed the country and left an indelible mark on the Lebanese psyche. Years after it ended in 1990, some buildings in the freewheeling capital remain riddled with bullet holes, and 17,000 people who went missing were never found.
“It was a useless war,” said Georges Mazraani, a Christian who took up arms in Beirut’s working-class neighborhood of Ain al-Remmaneh, where the conflict started. The Christian district is separated from the Muslim neighborhood of Shiyah by just one street that went on to become a key front line.
On April 13, 1975, members of the right-wing Christian Phalange militia machine-gunned a bus of Palestinians, leaving 27 dead, hours after assailants opened fire outside a nearby church, killing one of theirs. The incident that ignited the war remains seared in Lebanon’s memory.
The country had been on a knife-edge, with Palestinian fighters, and their Lebanese leftist and Muslim allies preparing for a confrontation against Christian groups, who were doing the same. For 15 years, a country once known as “the Switzerland of the Middle East” was ravaged by war along sectarian lines, with alliances shifting year after year with warlords building and breaking loyalties.
And while the civil war ended in 1990, Lebanon has never recovered its former glory, remaining until 2005 under Syrian control, and with part of the country under Zionist entity occupation for two decades. Now grey, Mazraani was just 21 when he and other young men in his neighborhood took up arms. He later went on to command hundreds of fighters.
“I lost 17 years of my life and 14 family members,” he said, now 71 and ill. Near him plaques commemorating the “martyrs” of the Christian “resistance” adorn street corners.
Today, “some people are encouraging civil war in Lebanon”, Mazraani said. “They should be quiet and open up to reconciliation, so we can be finished with this problem.”
With Mazraani is Nassim Assaad, who fought for the Lebanese Communist Party, a onetime foe. “It’s the poor” on both sides “who paid the price”, not the militia leaders, said Assaad, who was 18 when the war began. He and Mazraani are now part of Fighters for Peace, which brings together former enemies for peace-building activities including community outreach and awareness-raising at schools and universities. Assaad said many people were worried about a possible return to civil war in the country still reeling from a recent conflict between Zionist entity and Hezbollah.
“Today, the circumstances are even more conducive for it than in 1975,” he said. The key issue dividing Lebanon today is the arsenal of Hezbollah, the only group which refused to surrender its weapons to the state after the civil war ended. — AFP
