From Syria With Love: The Children of Ghabey

From Syria With Love: The Children of Ghabey

Gone are the shabby checkpoints and the haggard Syrian soldiers manning them. Gone are the green arches made from pine and palm trees downed to raise the portraits of the Assad dynasty: from Hafez to Basel and Bashar. Gone are the statues of the dictators erected “in your face” of the Lebanese people, for nowhere at their checkpoints or the office buildings they confiscated or the dungeons they ran did Syria's men – over thirty years in their host country – have the decency to raise a Lebanese flag next to the Syrian flag. What more did the Lebanese people need to understand that Syria was in Lebanon not to liberate, protect or defend, but only to subdue, erase, and eliminate by repression and oppression?

Gone are the drab green Soviet-vintage trucks. Gone are the civilian-dressed Mukhabaraat men lounging at Beirut Airport and casually checking their registers for the names of the “wanted” Lebanese who dared a homecoming. Gone are the cars with shaded windows, the vulgar and sadistic killers, murderers, kidnappers, hoodlums, vengeful men who hated Lebanon and its people to the bone. Gone are all these men who were trucked in from remote desert villages of the Syrian interior, after being brainwashed to hate Lebanon as a renegade and decadent province that needed to be “re-educated” into the fold of true Arabism. A strayed province of a once glorious Arab Syria that, truth be told, never really existed except inside the megalomaniacal minds of the Baathist criminals whose only source of pride in this world in which they utterly failed is their delusional nostalgia for a antiquated fantasy. For the Syrian reality remains a terribly miserable one, and the only escape from the Syrian Gulag is to feed off the illusions of a past that has been mythified and exaggerated in logarithmic proportion to the misery of 20th century Syria. They are all finally going home, to that land beyond the green Lebanon mountain range and the barren hills of the Anti-Lebanon range where the Syrian desert begins.

To those of my generation, however, the departure of the Syrian men from Lebanon will never erase the pain, the fear and the hurt of three decades. From the jewel of the Middle East, resplendent in the glimmer of its joie-de-vivre by the Mediterranean, where East met West around every street corner and in the myriad of cafes and restaurants, clubs and theaters, beaches and mountain retreats, Lebanon was brought down like a calf to the slaughter by the Arabs – every one of them, the Palestinians, the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, the Libyans and the Egyptians, the Somalis and the Sudanese, and most of all the Syrians – because it stood as a thorn in the side of the totalitarian drab of the Arab World. Lebanon violated every taboo and every norm of that Arab World. It had Christians, Druze, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Armenians, Shiites who intermarried and lived as equals side by side next to Sunnis. Worse yet, it had Westerners living with all those people – not in walled compounds – but anywhere they wished. It had church bells that tolled next to the Muezzin at the mosque. It had mini-skirts in the streets and bikinis on the beaches. It had Arak-drinking Zajal poets dueling with words on television. It had a free press that poked fun at kings and queens, presidents, sultans and Emirs alike, often with the pens of the same Arab writers and intellectuals who had escaped from their home countries to the refuge of Lebanon.

This was too much decadence and diversity to handle for the pan-Arab Baathist nationalists who preferred homogenized compliant societies to diverse and rebellious free people. Lebanon had too many colors. It had Arab, French, American and Lebanese universities. It had a British High School, an American International College, a secular Lyçée Français and a religious French Jesuit school, and German, Italian and other schools, all coexisting next to a plethora of Lebanese private religious and secular schools, as well as a full-fledged Lebanese public school system. It had veiled women who watched streakers cross Hamra Street in the early 1970s. It had a red light district where wealthy Arabs – from the kingdoms and emirates of the Gulf – mingled with equally drunken sailors from around the world to defuse their repressed libidos. In the words of a young Kuwaiti student I met once at Brown University, when Saddam occupied and was brutalizing Kuwait, as I tried to compare his Kuwait under Saddam to my Lebanon under Hafez, “We went to Lebanon to f--- your sisters and your mothers...You deserve to be occupied by Syria, but we do not deserve to be occupied by Iraq”. Such was the gratitude of the Arabs for a country that they claimed as one of them, often against its own wishes, a country to which they escaped from the boredom and repression of their own countries, and then only to turn around and spit at it in hatred.

And so, thirty years ago, as Lebanon was moving forward into the modern world by keeping its doors open to the world, money, mercenaries, and weapons began flowing in from Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab World. A rabid Arab media turned against small Lebanon because it dared to say no to Arafat and his PLO. Never mind that the Palestinians had been muzzled, massacred, and locked up in their camps in every other Arab country, and all the Arab rulers wanted was to contain the Palestinians inside Lebanon for fear of a revolution at home. And never mind that the Palestinian Cause was merely a commodity in the market of Arab principles for the dictators to maintain their grip on power and their boots over their people.

Maggie Abou-Jaoudeh's death in the Spring of 1976 epitomizes what the Arabs did to Lebanon. I personally witnessed this one of many untold atrocities during the so-called “civil” war between the Syro-Palestinians and the Lebanese people, when the war moved from the streets of Beirut along the fortified PLO camps to the Mountain. Maggie was a 5-year old with curly blond hair who was killed by a single shell fired by the Syrian paramilitary Al-Saika organization from the other side of the mountain facing Broumana on a glorious Spring day of 1976. A single shell. Not a volley. Not a battle. Not an artillery exchange. Just one mortar shell. There had been no clashes for weeks, and Spring on the hills was erasing the memory of the misery of that cold winter we spent in Ghabey near Broumana as refugees from Beirut. It was not hot enough yet for the cycads to begin their daytime rap on the trunks of the pine trees, but the air was light and sweet. The war had followed us from Beirut, and the Battle of the Mountain was underway. But we were enjoying a lull in the fighting. The children of Ghabey, a small village down the road from Broumana going south towards Salima and Qornayel, were playing in the village square up the hill from our house, and I could hear them from my room as I lay on my bed reading. My mother was having coffee with Sayydeh, Maggie's mother, in the living room. The voices of the children filled the village.

Then, there was a thud. One mortar thud in the distance. The echo quickly reverberated across the valley beneath the Knaisseh peak and I knew the mortar was launched from the other side, as we had grown accustomed to instinctively listen and gauge the origin and direction of shells. It took several seconds for the shell to fly overhead, with the nervous roar of its tail vrrrooming over the house. And it took us a split second to realize that the shell was going to strike near us. And then the blast. Fifty yards from the house, up the hill in the middle of the village square where the children were playing. The children's voices went silent, like a school of sparrows on a tree when their singing frenzy is disturbed. From the living room, Sayydeh's scream rose in a fast crescendo, the primal scream of a mother's heart who knew her child had been harmed...MAAAAGGGIIIEE.... and my hair stood on my neck before I could jump out of the bed. We all ran up the hill. Everyone was converging on the square. Maggie's sisters were there. I was one of the first people on the scene...The crater, and the little grey bodies melded with the blackened rubble and pavement...the colors of their clothes muted...mixed into the monotone shade of burned explosives and ravaged asphalt...motionless...just lying there...I don't recall seeing the faces...just these still little bodies...like Guernica's children, about whom the song says, “and God filled their bullet holes with candy”... A single shell fired by the heroes of the Arab Cause on the children of Ghabey on a Spring afternoon...for no other reason but to kill the children...for no other reason but to inflict deep pain...For the road to Palestine and the Golan and all the lost Arab causes, as Syria still wants the world to believe even today, had to go through every Lebanese village, all the way from Beit Mellat in the north, through Damour and on to the Shebaa Farms in the south, and over the dead bodies of Lebanon's children. The death of Maggie and the children of Ghabey sums up the agony of Lebanon at the hands of the Arabs. Wanton and barbaric, driven by hatred, jealousy and the frustration at Arab impotence. And so they chose Lebanon as the substitute enemy because on the scale of their racist view of the world, Lebanon ranks pretty high in the degree of its “otherness”. Lebanon was the proxy “Crusader”, the isolationist, the Arab who does not want to be an Arab, the renegade, the whore who went astray.

What purpose, I ask today, as we near the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the Lebanese War in April 13, 1975, has the Lebanese War served the Arabs and the Palestinian Cause? How can anyone find a shred of credibility in Hezbollah's claims to resistance and liberation when that organization's objective has been, and still is, to fight a war that the majority of the Palestinians themselves abandoned more than 13 years ago in Oslo and Madrid? I say to Hezbollah, Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, and the Lebanese should no longer die for Palestine. Like Jordan, the Lebanese people have chosen a “Lebanon first” policy. The Lebanese of the South have been led like sheep to the slaughter, first by the PLO between 1970 and 1982 and, after the PLO was evicted from Lebanon in 1982, by Hezbollah which was created, armed and financed by Syria and Iran specifically to replace the PLO as the instrument of destabilization in the hands of the Assad regime. Hezbollah has never served Lebanon. It has served Iran and Syria, and like these two countries, Hezbollah has spilled Lebanese blood for the sake of other causes except the cause of Lebanon. And to disguise its objectives, Hezbollah has assumed the cloak of a social welfare organization after hijacking those functions from the Lebanese State to whom it continues to deny access to the land of the Lebanese south. The Lebanese people have to wake up to the truth and understand the Big Lie and the sham liberation ideology of Hezbollah that has been shoved down their throats for close to two decades. Why, I ask Hezbollah, isn't there a Syrian Hezbollah fighting the Israeli occupation – worse, the annexation – of the Syrian Golan Heights?

And now, as another April 13, 2005 comes to remind us of when, thirty years ago, that “Civil War” between the Lebanese and the Palestinians broke out, now that Lebanon is ending that era of its history, I will never forget Maggie and the children of Ghabey, and will remind myself that their death, in its inhumanity, was also the death of my country. If Lebanon is becoming alive again, it is because all the children of Lebanon who were made to die for many years, like Maggie and the children of Ghabey, have finally decided to come out and play on all the village squares of Lebanon, including that big square in downtown Beirut. They no longer fear that their voices will ever again be silenced by the shells of hatred or the drab totalitarian regimes of the Arab World.


Joseph Hitti
Boston, Massachusetts
April 10, 2005