The City That Will Not Die

As the last Western troops pull out, Beirut gasps and goes on

For the first time in nearly two years, the 1.5 million residents of Beirut were truly on their own again. As France's 1,250-man contingent of the Multi-National Force withdrew from the city last week, the Reagan Administration announced that the U.S. Sixth Fleet, including the battleship New Jersey, would leave the area altogether. With the Italians and British gone, and most remaining U.S. troops aboard the ships, it was the end of Western attempts to help resolve the fratricidal Lebanese conflict.

But even before the pullout was completed, the sound of artillery shells and rockets once again shattered the precarious cease-fire that was negotiated in Lausanne, Switzerland, three weeks ago. The first salvos caught many people in the streets of West Beirut. There was panic as motorists and pedestrians raced to get home or to basement shelters. More than 30 people were killed and scores of others injured, making March 28 the worst single day of violence in seven weeks. The heavy shelling led to urgent consultations among Lebanon's warlords, and President Amin Gemayel convened the first meeting of the security commission created at the Lausanne conference. A tenuous cease-fire seemed to end yet another spurt of chaos.

With all the continuing tragedies of Beirut, the people always managed to go on. Looking away from the world of politics for a moment, TIME Beirut Correspondent John Borrell reported on how the citizens were faring:

"Business as usual," said the sign in Arabic on what remained of a grocery store's door in West Beirut a day after a bomb blast had blown out its windows and reduced much of its merchandise to rubble. Picking his way through cans of peas coated with the contents of broken catsup bottles, the shopkeeper shrugged stoically at the mess.

After a while, the ugly tracks of war seem so commonplace that one no longer takes as much notice of the gutted buildings as of the occasional glimpses of what everyday life must have been like before the bloodshed began. Along the Corniche, the broad, palm-lined boulevard that hugs the Mediterranean, dice clatter across wooden backgammon boards, as groups of men, each with one hand nervously working worry beads, cluster to watch. The clinking of delicate china cups announces the arrival of a coffee vendor proffering thick, black Turkish brew. As Sunday fishermen impatiently flick their lines, a water-skier waves from behind a small boat skimming across the blue-green sea.

Suspending belief is the best way a Beirut resident can stay sane. Peace has broken out so many times, only to be shattered again, that few dared hope that the latest cease-fire would be anything more than a brief respite. "If you had told us ten years ago that we could expect a decade of war, we would have thrown up our hands," says Jana Tamer, publisher of a Middle East newsletter. "Tell us now that it will go on for another ten years, and I guess we would just shrug. We are numb."

The conflicts of the past decade overlap: Christian against Muslim, Christian against Christian, Muslim against Muslim, Syrian against Israeli, sometimes one neighborhood block against the next. Memories blur. Was that building ravaged during February's battle for West Beirut or during one of last summer's ceasefires?

Over the past decade, 250,000 residents have been made homeless, and thousands have died. Some 10,000 children are orphans, many with no last names, only painful memories. "That's Ahmed," says a teacher, pointing to a quiet four-year-old in West Beirut's Islamic Orphanage. "He lost his parents in the Sabra and Shatila massacre two years ago. He's retarded, but we do not know if he was born that way or suffered some unfathomable shock during the killings." Ahmed sits, uncomprehending, his large brown eyes staring up at the visitors.

After each bout of shelling, patients flock to their doctors complaining of stomach pains and headaches, symptoms of stress. Though in some neighborhoods canvas sheets have been hung across streets to block the view of snipers, only the brave venture out at night. Maurice Moyse, 82, proprietor of a French restaurant in West Beirut, shrugs as gunfire outside interrupts his recitation of the day's specials. "They are mad," he says. One wonders, though, who is really crazy: the snipers, Moyse or the reporter sitting by the window with only a gingham curtain between him and the unseen gunmen.

After the Lebanese Army's heavy shelling of the southern suburbs last month, thousands of Shi'ite Muslim refugees fled to Ras Beirut, a largely Sunni Muslim neighborhood of stylish boutiques and comfortable apartments. Shaia Hoaijan and her five children moved into an abandoned flat. The owner had knocked holes in the roof and poured concrete down the toilet to fend off squatters, but within a week the place was habitable. "The owner's wife burst in and cursed us, demanding that we leave," she says. "But I told her we were not leaving because we had nowhere to go."

The Islamic fervor of the Shi'ite newcomers worries the more tolerant Sunnis. Posters of Khomeini now hang incongruously next to credit-card signs on shop windows, while ever growing numbers of women wear head scarves. An edgy rug merchant no longer offers browsers sherry, but instead asks, "Iced tea?" The beverage arrives laced with whisky.

Why do those who are able to leave their lethal city stay on? When asked if he will flee, Moyse responds, "To where?" Many residents have learned to tune out the chaos, though that gift carries its peril. Caught in the middle of a blazing gun battle near the Beirut airport, an old farmer continued to till his tiny plot. Afterward, when asked why he did not seek cover, he replied, "If I waited for the fighting to stop, I would never get the soil ready for planting. The seasons don't stop for wars." In its own weary, puzzling, stubborn way, neither does Beirut.