Back to Tripoli

The few weeks I spent in the Lebanon in 2006 were mostly spent in Tripoli. Home was a wonderful hotel in a mainly Christian part of the Mina district. In the evening I would sit outside and sup my beer and it was all more reminiscent of the Turkish or Greek Adriatic coast than it was of a conflict zone. Even with the indiscriminate Israeli bombing of the country there was still, at least superficially, a strange normality. That was probably because the Lebanese themselves are used to living with this "normality" until it becomes no longer possible to do so. When does that happen? When your neighbour's house is bombed or when your house is bombed? Last year the camp I worked at north of Tripoli was bombed by the Lebanese Army and I wonder sometimes if it was possible for Omar, Khalid, Mohammad, Adel and the rest just to get on with their lives. Today there is fighting in the streets of Tripoli and strangely this is the city where I walked around for hours without feel remotely threatened. The guy who owned the hotel I was staying at was a Shiite who lived in London at least some of the time and who had a British passport. Both he and I drank in a bar in the Mina that was owned by a Christian. It is no exaggeration to say that the Christian and he were good friends as were Mohammad and Khalid, supporters of the Hammas and Fatah respectively. They were trying to get on with some sort of normality. Part of that "normality" for Mohammad would be jumping into Khalid's car along with their other friend Ali, who was neither a Hammas or Fatah supporter, but who spent his time dreaming of emigrating to the United States, and driving to a disco on the coast where they would have a few beers. When that "normality" breaks down at what point do the friends kill one another? Standing in that bar after the Israelis started their indiscriminate bombing of the country I remember the bar owner's stories about the Civil War that raged for some fifteen years after 1975. He said, "someone would just burst into the bar and let off a stream of machine gun fire. You might recognise who it was as somebody you had played football with."
The picture above is of the clock tower in Tripoli.