Beirut stories
Every Sunday, as families from the capital’s poorest outskirts move in mass to stare at the waves, Beirut’s seafront comes to life: colorfully veiled women undo their food bundles, men smoke their narghile and young boys dive from the rocks. On the background, Beirut Central District’s skyscrapers outline a world hardly accessible to them, the realities of a capital on her way to becoming once again a protagonist of financial, cultural and touristic life in Eastern Mediterranean. Not far away, along one of the roads leading downtown from the seafront, the façade of a crumbling building still marks the spot where Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the man who sought to shape post- civil war Beirut into the “Paris of the Middle East”, was killed by a bomb in 2005. Imagination moves man and urges him to realize the images that it imposes, writes J. J. Langendorf in “A Challenge in Kurdistan”: twenty years after the end of the civil war, Beirut epitomizes Lebanese’s wish to forget a bloody past and to build a prosperous future, a wish that is perhaps still far from coming true. The existing gap dividing the hundreds of families who crowd the seafront on Sundays from managers working in downtown’s armored buildings shows how present-day Lebanon is far from having solved the economic clashes and the confessional divisions that paved the way for the civil war. The disparity separating downtown Beirut from its peripheries mirrors a society ever more fragmented into its eighteen different confessions. The 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has further widened the gap; those living in the southern outskirts, the most heavily bombed, live today in a “state within the state” where Hezbollah provides for primary needs. By contrast, Beirut city center has suffered only a temporary setback, and large amounts of Arab and Western tourists are massively flowing again into the country.
