The Northern Echo, UK
Jan 15 2008

A house of many mansions

Comment
As George Bush makes his first visit of his presidency to the Middle
East, pledging to broker a peace deal, Adam Pletts visits a
Palestinian refugee camp to explore the region’s religious and
cultural diversity

THE one thing about Lebanon that is most likely to fascinate is the
diversity of its people and religions, which is both its greatest
strength and biggest weakness. There are arguably more similarities
between some parts of Lebanon and Europe than there are between its
constituent communities.

It is this great diversity and the differences in ideology that give
rise to one of the country’s central problems: what it means to be
Lebanese.

advertisementTo a large extent the answer depends heavily on which
community you come from. As the title of a book by one of the
country’s best known historians, Khalil Salibi, proclaims: Lebanon is
a House of Many Mansions.

By and large, most communities live in happy coexistence, which may
seem strange for a county that fought a 15-year civil war, in which
the opposing alliances were largely built on sectarian basis.
Intermarriages between Christians and Muslims, or other groups for
that matter, are not uncommon. Nonetheless, albeit with plenty of
exceptions, each community lives in its own reasonably well-defined
areas.

Traditionally, Christians and Druze, as minority groups in the region
at large, settled in Lebanon’s rugged mountains as a place of refuge.
To this day the Chouf Mountains south east of Beirut are still a
Druze stronghold. Christians dominate East Beirut, together with the
mountains and coast running north until Tripoli.

WEST Beirut – also the title of the most famous film depicting the
Lebanese civil war – is predominantly Sunni, as are the ancient
coastal towns of Tripoli and Sidon, whose histories stretch back to
the time of the Phoenicians. Shia Muslims are the majority in
southern Beirut, the south of Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

But that’s far from the end of the story. There are whole communities
that only arrived in Lebanon in the last century, fleeing persecution
elsewhere. Firstly the Armenians, who arrived from Eastern Turkey in
1915, escaping what is gradually being accepted as a genocide that
took the lives of as many as 1.5 million. Later the 1948 Arab-Israeli
war, or "the catastrophe" as the Palestinians call it, which resulted
in the humiliating defeat of a joint Arab army and the displacement
of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, some of whom took refuge in
Lebanon.

Nowadays, there are also significant numbers of immigrant workers
from countries such as Egypt, the Philippines and Sri Lanka – one
suburb of Beirut, Dowra, is even popularly known as Dowra Lanka.

It was the French who drew the lines on the map that eventually led
to the creation of an independent Lebanon in 1943, since when the
country has been governed by a complex power sharing constitution.

Key government positions are spread between the different sects based
on the demography at the time when the constitution was written. As a
result, the President must be a Christian, the Prime Minister a
Sunni, the Speaker of the House of Parliament a Shia.

Since then, the relative size of each community has changed
considerably, but it’s such a sensitive issue that there hasn’t been
a consensus since 1933.

Although precise figures are not available, it is Shia Muslims who
now make up the largest group in the country, having displaced
Maronite Christians through higher birth rates and less immigration.

Shias feel they are under-represented by a system that was set up to
reflect the larger populations of Christians and Sunni Muslims as was
the case when the constitution was written.

So Lebanon really is a patchwork of communities, an entity that has
difficulty defining itself and is continually threatened by break up,
with religious identity at the centre of a struggle for power.

Although not Lebanese citizens, Palestinian refugees have played a
central part in Lebanon’s recent history and are one of the poorest
sections of society. There is no better way to understand Lebanon’s
diversity than to journey from the heart of a Palestinian refugee
camp to the smarter suburbs of Beirut, be they Christian in the east
or Sunni in the west. Since two of the 12 Palestinian refugee camps
are located in southern Beirut, you can, traffic permitting, make the
trip from third world poverty to first world chic in 15 minutes.

The Palestinian refugee camps are like micro environments. As you
enter, the atmosphere immediately changes, and you know without a
shadow of a doubt that you really are in the Middle East.

All of a sudden the prices drop, posters of Yasser Arafat are
ubiquitous, a hum of activity takes over with a cacophony of voices
and children seemingly everywhere. The population density rises
rapidly, with breezeblock houses crammed into every space connected
by a labyrinth of winding passages. Infrastructure and social
provisions are scarce and mostly provided by the UN agency in charge
of Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. In short, poverty is prevalent and
opportunities are few.

Together, the poverty and haphazard security arrangements have turned
the camps into potential safe havens for extremists, as was the case
with the rise of Fatah Al Islam, most of whose members were not
Palestinian, but recognised the camps as places where they could
operate unnoticed.

With the exception of aid workers, Lebanese simply don’t spend time
in the Palestinian camps.

At the right time of day, as you leave the Palestinian camp the call
to prayer would be echoing from a dozen mosque minarets, while at the
destination of our journey – a middle class, Francophile, Christian
suburb – you may well be greeted by the sound of chiming church
bells. Here it’s all "bonjour", "ca va?" and stylish cafes. It’s in
areas like this when the saying "Lebanon is poor, but the Lebanese
are rich" comes to mind. But some things don’t change, the taxis here
will still honk at you each and every time they pass, and there are
plenty of them.

There is a TV advertisement running at the moment, funded by a
Lebanese bank, showing Lebanese from different communities, each
stating their religion, until the sound of gunfire erupts and a
voiceover asks "When will we learn to be Lebanese?"

The advertisement is an attempt to diffuse the tensions surrounding
the current political battle between the Western-backed government
and its Hizbullah-led opposition. Thankfully, both sides now seem
likely to agree on a presidential candidate, which would bring an end
to the latest flashpoint in their stand-off.

However, none of the political groups have taken, or are likely to
take, the advertisement’s message on board, with each of the main
parties firmly aligned with sectarian interests. Maybe they need to
take a leaf from my taxi driver’s book, who when asked what his
religion was, simply brushed his hands in the air and stated with
pride: "I’m Lebanese, Khalas – enough."

Adam Pletts is a freelance journalist and photographer based in
Beirut. He grew up in Barnard Castle, County Durham, where he went to
Teesdale School. www. adampletts. com

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