Beirut .. the city of beauty, wars and blood

As if Beirut was destined to remain a city of contradictions and calamities, the city that was known in the 1960s as the “Paris of the East” and its pearl, formed a unique painting of the beauty of nature and the radiating of thought pigmented in blood, since Lebanon's independence in 1943 until today.

In the middle of the last century, Beirut attracted the diversity of its terrain, which distinguished it from other eastern cities, the various tourists who were enchanted by the sea meeting with the mountain, the highlands that cover the green in summer and replaced it with snow white in winter, and its beauty attracted artists and poets, so she sang for her "the guitar of the sky" "turquoise" from My heart is peace to Beirut and accepted to the sea and homes. "Her beauties, the poet Gibran Khalil, described her as" the female who conferring fertility. "

The beauty of nature is not only what distinguishes Beirut, but the succession of civilizations dating back more than 5,000 years as estimated by some historical references. The Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Ottomans had their historical traces and evidence that made them a cultural center that was reflected on their archaeological sites and the way of their historical construction, as well as making them their location The Mediterranean Sea is the meeting point of different cultures, which has enriched the cultural, intellectual and literary movement.

Beirut knew its golden era in the sixties of the twentieth century, when it became a shelter for thinkers, poets and writers because of the absolute freedom of the press and the ideas that characterized it, and it embraced thinkers, writers and politicians of all stripes and ideologies.

And the city that linked Western culture with Arab culture became a capital for publishing and printing due to the multiplicity of publishing houses in it, and the first book fair in the Arab world was held at the American University in 1956, and that university, along with other universities, made Beirut a beacon of science and knowledge that attracted elites from various Arab countries .

While he spent an era of gold, he started after that era of fatigue, as described by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, "Beirut, from fatigue and from gold."

Civil war

The Lebanese civil war has over 15 years guaranteed to change the face of Beirut and Lebanon as a whole, and its most serious consequences were displacement and religious and territorial separation. Its number was estimated at 150,000 dead, 300,000 wounded and disabled, and 17,000 missing.

Because of the war, which was described as "the war of others on the land of Lebanon," more than one million people were displaced in a country of 3 million, and about 600,000 people were displaced from 189 Christian and Muslim towns and villages, equivalent to 21.8% of the total population.

The direct losses to the construction and processing capital in the public and private sectors were estimated at approximately $ 25 billion.

As if Beirut was not satisfied with the killing of its people, Israel took advantage of the Lebanese preoccupation with each other, and the Arabs were busy with the 1982 World Cup in Spain, and it besieged Beirut after it invaded southern Lebanon in 1982 with the aim of expelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which had taken Lebanon as a starting point for its armed resistance against Israel.

The siege continued for several weeks, during which the city attacked by sea, air and land, the indiscriminate shelling killed thousands of civilians, cut off food, water and electricity supplies, during which President Bashir Al-Jamil, who was accused of his relationship with Israel and facilitating the invasion of its forces, was assassinated.

Israel ended its siege on Beirut and withdrew from Lebanon, but the Lebanese have not yet finished their internal fighting, so the civil war continued and ignited what is known as the camp war between 1985 and 1986.

On September 22, 1988 the term of President Amin Gemayel - who signed an agreement with Israel stipulating the withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian forces from Lebanon - ended to show the sectarian divide in Lebanon in the most prominent manifestations of the existence of two governments: the first headed by Prime Minister Salim al-Hoss, and the second headed by Michel Aoun ( Then army chief).

As a result, political negotiations began with Arab sponsorship culminating in the signing by the Lebanese parties of the Taif Agreement document that ended the Lebanese civil war.

Reconstruction of Beirut

Beirut breathed a sigh of relief after the agreement, and then passed a period of relative peace in the nineties, and the godfather of this period was the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri who took it upon himself to rebuild what was destroyed by the civil war, especially in the center of the capital Beirut.

Al-Hariri established the Council for Development and Reconstruction under the slogan "developing stone and people", and started with a huge workshop to restore infrastructure in order to restore Lebanon's economic role in the region.

However, the agreement insofar as it ended the war and enshrined a new political system, insofar as it maintained the sectarian quota system between sect leaders, which made the civil war fire burn under the ashes of that system, especially in light of the intimidation of each sect with a regional or international party.

The result of this was the assassination of Hariri in February 2005, which sparked the Cedar Revolution, in protest of the Syrian presence and influence in Lebanon, and under international and popular pressure, Syria withdrew its forces in April of that year, and the shape of Lebanon and its political alliances changed, but one thing did not. It is changing and it is the smell of blood that continued to flow in the streets of Beirut in the form of political assassinations of ministers, representatives and journalists.

After that, the economic situation deteriorated and reached a stage with which Beirut no longer inhaled the sea and mountain breezes. Rather, it smelled in its roads the smell of waste that piled up with the leaders of the political sects in power, and popular protests in the name of “I smell you” came out in August 2015, denouncing the politicians ’inability On tackling the crisis, and condemning the corruption of the ruling political class.

Beirut continued to suffer with it as a whole of Lebanon, and large demonstrations took place on October 17, 2019, which lasted for months, after the government announced imposing more taxes on gasoline and tobacco and introducing a tax on some Internet phone calling programs, and once again Peretus - as the Greeks called it - with A new wave of ruin, banditry and blood smell.

Not only did these massive events distort the wilted "flower of the East" until a huge explosion surprised it yesterday, Tuesday, at its seaport, in an incident that shocked those outside Lebanon as well as its people, after the victims of the explosion reached more than 100 dead and 4 thousand wounded in an unlimited outcome, in addition to 300 thousand people have been displaced in the capital.

The explosion caused extensive damage to public and private property in the vicinity of the site of the explosion, whose features have changed almost completely, as was the central building of the Electricity Corporation, which mainly suffers from Lebanon.

While the Supreme Defense Council in Lebanon declared Beirut a "disaster city", calling on friendly countries to stand by his country and send aid, it is not the first catastrophe and it does not appear to be the last in a country that suffers from a severe economic crisis and severe political polarization, in a scene in which regional and international ambitions overlap .

Was Beirut required to pay in all that it suffered a "good tax" as Nizar Qabbani said when he described it as "the best of the world"?