Beirut Stories

About 500 yards from my Beirut home is a petrol station. Most mornings when I drive past, I wave cheerfully to a man we shall have to call Faisal; slim, with a pencil moustache and good English, Faisal works for a hire-car company but during the civil war he was a spotter. His job ­ along with hiring cars to me at extortionate prices ­ was to watch for car bombers; and one morning, in his little Druze area of Beirut, he saw two Christians parking a car on the Corniche.

During the war, he told me the story several times. He noticed how the two men walked away from the car just a little too quickly. He called the Druze militia who found a bomb in the car, grabbed the men and took them up to the beautiful mountain town of Beiteddine. There was a building in the town where the Druze tortured their enemies to death. "It was quite simple," Faisal would say. "They took the two men to the house and told them what they always told their prisoners: that they were going to die ­ so better to tell all now and get a bullet in the head than endure torture. They were asked who'd planned the car bomb. They wouldn't talk. So the 'boys' pushed boiling eggs into their anuses until they died. Stupid guys."

These days, I enjoy the music festival at Beiteddine, listening to Puccini in the courtyard of the Emir Bashir the Second's Ottoman palace. The "house of screams" is only a few blocks away but no one speaks of it now. Like Faisal, its identity has changed, its occupants a farming family rather than a bunch of torturers.

There are no courts of justice for the killers of Lebanon, no war crimes trials, no truth and reconciliation commission. Like the bodies, the collective memory of the war has disappeared. So I wave to Faisal and he waves back and we keep our secret. Like the mass graves. There are perhaps 1,000 murdered Palestinian civilians under the golf course near Beirut airport, dumped there by Israel's Phalangist allies after the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres ­ for which Ariel Sharon was held personally responsible by an Israeli enquiry ­ but no one will dig them up. Golfers play without reflecting upon what lies beneath the verdant 18th hole.

Not long ago, I was at a cocktail party in an elegant Ottoman house when one of the guests realised that the militia leader who ordered her husband's murder 10 years earlier ­ whose thugs had him "disappeared" ­ was sipping a beer in the same room. She walked straight up to the man and demanded to know her husband's fate. Two middle-classes ladies gently but immediately touched her on the arm and led her away. She had broken the rules. The crime was no longer murder. The crime was now to mention murder.

Only once has the curtain of complicity shivered; when Qatar's extraordinary Gezira satellite television channel aired a 16-part series on the Lebanese war. My landlord Mustapha sat mesmerised each Thursday night. "Did you hear what Bashir (Gemayel, the murdered president elect) said in the extract from that 1982 newsreel?" he asked me one morning. "Did you see how Sharon looked after the massacre?"

Before the Sabra and Chatila episode, Gezira issued a warning to viewers that they might be shocked by the pictures. And, oddly, they were. Lebanese friends who participated in the war, who killed and knifed and bribed and corrupted and wounded and wept, watched in horror. "I couldn't believe it!" Faisal told me after the series ended. And so inured was I to a society in which history has been erased, that I scarcely pondered the absurdity of his remark.

After the death of humans, it seems, comes the death of memory. Or the death of reality. I have lost count of how many times ­ at Beirut dinner parties or Arab family gatherings ­ I have heard educated, otherwise decent Lebanese insist that a Jewish "plot" has convinced the world to hate the Arabs, that journalists who offend Israel are the target of Jewish groups who attempt to destroy the reporters' reputations and careers by calling them racists and Nazis, who demand that any such reporter be fired. Nonsense, I always say, the "plot" is an anti-semitic myth; there is no "campaign" against journalists, least of all to hound them from their jobs.

So you can imagine the collective roar of laughter in Beirut when "honestreporting.com", an American Jewish group which has for months been misquoting and distorting my articles ­ and those of my Jerusalem colleague Phil Reeves ­ asked its "supporters" to write to the Editor of the Independent to complain about Robert Fisk.

Not since my most favourite e-mail ("Why I Know Robert Fisk Is a NATO Disinformation Agent") have I received anything like this. By the hundred, the e-mails ­ with childish mispellings and often appalling grammar ­ have been arriving at our London office. I am, according to these letters, "a coward", "sick", "inflammatory", "anti-semitic", "shameful", "grotesque", "a poor, bitter, raging lunatic", a "falsifier, "twisted", "perverted", "virulent", a "vicious anti-Semite" (thank you, "Professor BH Stone"), "fanatical" and a man who "steals a march from Goebbels and Streicher in his rape of the truth".

Most of the writers say they are Jewish. Rickey Lomey of South Africa asks the Independent to consider "stopping him (Fisk) from writing". Another e-mail asks the paper to "reign (sic) in Robert Fisk". Charles Benson King asks the paper "to fire this man", another demands that Israel "throw Fisk out".

Of course, it's easy to ignore an outfit that peddles such trash about journalists. More difficult to explain, is how a supposedly Jewish organisation does so much to help the Arabs in their campaign to libel Jews. Now let's move to the death of facts.

"If the Syrians weren't here, my son would have a job," a Lebanese friend complained the other day. And I knew what was coming next. "There are more than a million Syrian workers in Lebanon," my friend whined. Actually, I suspect there are nearly 1.5 million Syrians here, among a Lebanese population of just 4 million. The Syrians themselves say the figure is 1.3 million. But the Lebanese government, ever anxious to appease anti-Syrian feelings, has now officially announced that only 530 work permits have been issued to Syrians. Which means that the thousands of Syrian workers I see sweeping the streets, repairing the war-ruined buildings of Beirut, picking fruit, selling vegetables and digging roads ­ all jobs that my friend's son would refuse to do ­ simply do not exist.

And then there's the death of happy motoring. First came last week's discovery of the very first working traffic light. I have so far discovered four of them in Beirut and my driver Abed now makes vast detours to avoid them. In a chauvinist country where road rules are regarded as a form of emasculation, Abed now willingly endures massive traffic jams rather than sit in a well-ordered line waiting for a light to go green.

But now the police have added a new torture: the compulsory wearing of seat-belts. On the first day, I strapped myself into Abed's ancient Mercedes, only to find that the hitherto unused and long-unwashed belt left a thick brown stain on my shirt.

A cop actually saw me fastening the belt ­ and burst into laughter. So Abed and I are back to our old ways: no seat-belts and vast, sweating traffic jams to avoid the lights. That's why we always drive past Faisal's petrol station. It's a road without lights.

If the invisible scars of war remain the most painful, it has taken a great artist to find beauty in the physical wreckage. For much of the conflict, German-born Martin Giesen lived in Beirut. One of my first experiences of the war was a visit to Damour, the Christian town captured by Palestinians ­ they massacred all but one of the civilians. Giesen pictured the ruins above a sea of waving corn ­ the original now hangs in my living-room. I'm uncertain whether the dark clouds foreshadow another war or the corn represents a rebirth. But Giesen has done what few Lebanese have dared: he has provided Lebanon with the memory of what it would like to forget.

Next week, Paris Stories by John Lichfield