Coming Back to Life

Beirut rebuilds, but old wounds are slow to heal

The flower shops are open again, with their carnations and birds of paradise spilling out of the open stalls and onto the sidewalks. Fruit and vegetables are once more being hawked on nearly every street corner, and coffee wagons have again sprouted their gaily colored umbrellas along the avenues. The sound of a car backfiring is likely to be exactly that and not the blast of gunfire. And early every morning, joggers of every description--Lebanese and foreigners, students and businessmen, paratroopers and housewives--swarm along the Avenue de Paris, popularly known as the Corniche.

Beirut, slowly, is coming back to life. It is a remarkable feat, considering what the city has endured. For most of the summer Beirut was a bloody battleground for Israeli troops and Palestinian guerrillas. By the time both sides finally withdrew, there was no euphoria, only relief that it was over. No one knows how badly Beirut was damaged, but one Lebanese businessman places the cost of rebuilding the city at more than $10 billion. Though it is possible to drive safely from East to West Beirut, passing only the occasional Lebanese army checkpoint, the years of division have left their wounds. It is as if the people still cannot believe their luck in having survived at all.

Nonetheless, recovery has begun. Aside from the gradual revival of commercial life, an extraordinary transformation has taken place in the shattered western section. Every day dozens of bulldozers clear away rubble, and convoys of trucks cart off debris. Shell craters have been filled, sidewalks repaired. The result: West Beirut is cleaner than at any time since the beginning of the civil war in 1975. The Corniche Mazraa, site of some of the war's heaviest shelling and once littered with broken masonry, is well groomed, and the four-lane high way to the airport has been repaved.

Most of the credit for the cleanup operation belongs to Rafiq Bahaeddine al Hariri, a wealthy Lebanese businessman from Sidon. Owner of a construction firm called Oger, which has headquarters in Paris, Hariri has donated the services of hundreds of workers and a small army of equipment, including 40 bulldozers, 60 trucks, ten garbage trucks, five excavators and a pair of cranes, each able to hoist up to 40 tons. The estimated tab so far: $7.5 million, all of it paid by Hariri.

The siege has also created a chance to rebuild the old city center, which was reduced to rubble during the 1975-76 civil war. By cleaning up this section, Hariri hopes to bring life back to a no man's land that most people in Beirut did not dare visit for seven years. According to the governor of Beirut, Mitri Nammar, work on restoring the heart of the city will begin as soon as officials are satisfied that all land mines have been removed from the area. The estimated cost: as high as $3 billion. "The destruction has opened up new opportunities for us that we never dreamed of before," observes Nammar. "It was probably a blessing in disguise."

That remains to be seen. Beirut has yet to revive dramatically, let alone in a way that will allow it to be dubbed, as it was a decade ago, the Paris of the Middle East. The shock of the war has not worn off, nor has the hostility between the two halves of the city. Steps are being taken to reunite East and West Beirut in spirit as well as in fact; the Lebanese Minister of Education, for example, decreed last week that students in West Beirut schools should take their exams in East Beirut, and vice versa. But the healing will not come quickly. "We are still frozen," explained one well-to-do Beirut woman. "We hope, but we need more time."

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