White Baboon

On our second day in Beirut, a bright Sunday morning, long before we knew how long we’d stay, Michael and I wandered on foot into the downtown area. After twenty minutes, we’d been stopped three times by security officers–told to stop taking pictures and asked about where we were headed. All of this happened along landscaped medians, yellow-lined roads, glass-walled banks and track-suited joggers. As Michael had remarked, apart from the tanks, it looked a lot like San Diego.

Taking an unintentional detour past block after block of gnarled barbed wire and barricades, we slowly realized that this must be Hezbollah.

Aha! The occupied warzone amidst a cosmopolitan city that all those travelers had been talking about. Soldiers were everywhere. Below we spied a tiny tent city, but left our cameras safely inside our bags. Cars zoomed by, picking up speed toward a kind of highway. But the sidewalk remained. So carefully, cautiously, we pressed on. Clearly, we were on the fringe of what made Lebanon such a clusterfuck of politics, pride and prejudice.

Finally, as we veered slightly left, a black beret stopped us. We told him we were heading for downtown. After a brief conversation with his officer and a lively discussion with us about Hollywood and George Michael, he sent us directly through what appeared to be an army camp of plywood planks, construction, armed militia and tents. So surreal, it looked a little like a movie set. Condoleeza Rice smiled down from a poster. Officers barely glanced at us. At a final checkpoint, our bags were skim-searched and abruptly, we entered a promenade of dusty shop windows and naked mannequins, boutiques which, since the Summer War of ‘06 no longer attracted enough customers to survive.

Soon a plaza of chrome and wicker chairs emerged. Hagen Daaz smiled with creamy scoops and I could see Virgin Records across a star-shaped burst of urban renewal. But several storefronts were merely glossy ghosts. Only a few strollers and toddlers wobbled across the cobblestone-ringed center while Sri Lankan nannies followed.

A lone roller-blader criss-crossed the clock-tower-centerpiece. But like a Rolex sold on a corner in Soho, the face was a fake facade, the inside dead with dysfunction. Mimicking Beirut, its hands refused to work together. Four coffee drinkers whispered. Armed soldiers—I saw four from where I then stood– paced within their spaces.We realize now that what we crossed through the remains of the opposition’s sit-in. Tents from last spring. Still there.

That’s why the camp had looked abandoned. It was. The guards, with the American Secretary of State watching over, worked for the Lebanese government and were in protection mode. But who did they think would attack? Syria? America? Hezbollah? Al Qaeda? Israel? We learned that depends on who you talk to.It was the strangest Sunday morning we’d had in a long time.We’re now struggling to collect just a coin-purse full of unbiased facts. To figure what the hell is going on, what side we’re supposed to be on and how we should feel as Americans.

Stay tuned.

(Photo by Michael)

Garret and his sister Esther, the Irish backpackers staying across the hall, were planning a trip to Golan Heights. I’d never heard of it—and I apologize. But as Garret ranted on like an action movie trailer about the special permission, bombshelled buildings and sledge-hammered sight of this strange buffer territory, I wasn’t enthused. Hadn’t we seen enough ruins?

Well. .It all started back in the 1967 when Syria lost a bunch of land called Golan Heights to Israel in the Six Day War. This pissed them off. So during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Syria won back 450 sq km of Golan Heights, and a demilitarized, UN-supervised buffer zone began to keep the peace. But now Israel was pissed. Just before giving up Quinetra, a part of Golan Heights just lost back to Syria, they went through and systematically destroyed everything in sight, removing, as Lonely Planet put it “anything that could be unscrewed, unbolted or wrenched from its position.”

(Photo by Michael)

Then they bulldozed what was left. While some say it was revenge, and others claim it served to strengthen the security buffer, it wasn’t pretty. Syria, as you can imagine, now welcomes tourists to witness this act of destruction, just in case there was any doubt about which country was or is in the wrong.Most of Golan Heights–1,200 square kilometres of territory, manned by thousands of troops–is still under dispute. Neither countries seem interested in compromise.

That morning at the bus station, I realized I’d forgotten my passport, which could have been disastrous. But I was optimistic. We made it through two checkpoints where no one seemed to correctly compare the number of heads with the number of documents. And at our final threshhold, after a promise to take photos and patient smiles, we were in.Rain fell freely into the roofless shops of Quinetra’s main street as the five of us shuffled in an unintentionally staggered formation up and down the empty roads, each on our own private walk through the modern ruins of real conflict. Dirt-stained goats grazed in the weeds between garlic-colored stone and gravel. The walls and arches of a stone church appeared like so many we’d paid to see in the past. Climbing the dark, narrow, princess-style spiral of a crumbling minaret, there was a disturbing view of Quinetra’s mine-filled fields and the Israeli territory in the distance. But kilometers of gnarled barbed wire and our Syrian guide kept us on the right path.

Coming upon a kind of checkpoint, our tour was abruptly over. We stood for over an hour in the slanted rain waiting for a ride back to civilization. Soldiers came and went. Gold badged and bereted, some huddled in a small office. Others shot the shit inside a checkpoint station. Another was in charge of lifting the gate for incoming SUVs with “UN” in big, bold and black letters along the side. When encountered, they were timidly friendly, always interested. One little boy, age 10, accompanying his father, practiced his English by shouting to us with a high-toothed, rabbit smile.

Finally, piling into an army jeep with other fatigue-covered men, we rode back to our first interrogator and stood awkwardly in a two by two shelter. Plastic white deck chairs slid on a muddy, public-school tile floor while a red, cable-wrapped, deckless boom box chanted Arabic radio and a small stove dripped propane. An extra-strength candle, which looked a lot like a stick of dynamite had been lit and placed outside the window. Kalushnakavs hung on a row of nails. The guards were nothing but nice.Golan Heights was plenty disturbing, just as anticipated. I kept thinking–all this fighting and destruction over a little piece of land? But Michael reminded me that everything is relative. When your country is this small, a couple hundred kilometers matter more. Who am I to talk, anyway? Had the United States ever permanently lost any sizable land? No, it seemed like we’d had much more experience in taking it away from others.

I am still digesting.