From The Holy Mountain (37 page)

'Everyone is very frightened by the spread of fundamentalism,' said the Professor. 'And of course it is unsettling to read about what is happening in Algeria and Upper Egypt. But this is not the end of history.'

He smiled. 'The battle,' he said, 'is not over yet.'

It was raining heavily when I left the university, and Beirut's streets were suddenly awash. The water sluiced down the steep incline of the roads and the cars slewed through the streets, horns blowing, up to their gunwales in water.

'It's the fault of the Syrians,' explained the taxi driver. 'When they resurfaced the roads after the war they covered over the drains by mistake.'

Now the only drain was the sea, and the water - in some places nearly a foot deep - was flowing fast downhill towards the corniche. Getting from the car to the door of the restaurant was an operation that really required fishing waders.

Fisk was already at his table, an unexpectedly boyish figure with a coif of springy hair swept back over his high forehead; only the odd grey strand betrayed the fact that he was actually in his late forties.

'See out there?' he said by way of introduction. 'During the siege Israeli shells used to land all the way along that stretch of road.'

'So you had to forgo the pleasures of pasta during the siege?'

'No, no,' replied Fisk. 'They kept the place open and I used to come here regularly. Always have. Its got a wonderful view -though of course during the hostage crisis I tended to keep my back to the window so I wouldn't be seen by the kidnappers.'

For all his slightly self-conscious bravado, Fisk proved an unexpectedly kind and avuncular figure. Throughout lunch he freely offered advice and was generous with his contacts, flicking through his address book to pass on the phone numbers of warlords and archbishops, patriarchs, torturers and mass murderers. Nevertheless no amount of kindness could disguise the fact that Fisk was clearly a chronic war junkie, suffering from all the usual side-effects of an addiction to bombs, kidnapping, loud explosions and unhealthy quantities of adrenalin. This first became obvious when, at the end of the
antipasto,
I asked about the possibility of interviewing one of the Phalangist commanders.

'Well,' he said, puffing at a huge cigar he had just ordered at my expense from the
maitre d’.  
'It's not easy. Most are dead: assassinated. The rest are in jail, or in Geagea's case about to go there.'

'Who's Geagea?'

'One of the Phalangist leaders implicated in the massacres at Sabra and Chatila. He's going on trial after Christmas.' 'For the massacres?' 'No, no. For blowing up a church.' 'But I thought the Phalangists were all Christian.' 'They are.'

'So why would they blow up a church?'

'It was Geagea's way of warning the Pope not to visit Lebanon. He thought it would be too dangerous for His Holiness.'

'So there are no senior Maronite militia leaders left for me to talk to?'

'Well, I suppose there's still General Lahad of the SLA.' 'The SLA?'

'The South Lebanon Army: the Israelis' puppet Maronite militia in the zone they've occupied in the south of Lebanon.'

'And you think I could get to see him?'

'Piece of cake,' said Fisk, embarking on a lengthy explanation on how I could make contact with the SLA. This involved going to some obscure scrapyard in the suburbs of Beirut and asking for a man called Haddad.

'Don't talk to anyone else. Leave your name and details. Three days later go back. If Haddad gives you the go-ahead - fine. Have you got a map?'

I nodded and reached in my bag for the map of Lebanon I'd bought in the hotel. It was a simplified tourist chart dotted here and there with optimistic little pictures of the country's principal archaeological monuments.

'Well,' said Fisk, wrinkling his nose as he examined my chart, 'for a start you'll need a better map than this. But this will have to do for the time being. Drive south along this road through the Chouf. Then take a left along this little road here. Leave your car there, at that spot: you see? I'll mark it with an X. Get out - very slowly, no sudden movement, they'll have their snipers trained on you already - and walk the final five hundred yards to the SLA checkpoint with your hands on your head. You'll be all right. As long as your name is on the list, that is.'

'It doesn't sound very safe.'

'I would do it - no problem. I went to the SLA headquarters in Marjayoun last month, as a matter of fact. There are Hezbollah all round, of course. They might take a potshot at you, but they generally don't shoot unmarked cars. At least not normally. It's not as if you'd be travelling in an Israeli army convoy, ha ha.'

'Ha ha.' I shuddered at Fisk's idea of an easy assignment and privately made up my mind to forget interviewing Lahad, and to keep well away from the SLA.

Over coffee (for me) and vintage cognac (for Fisk) I mentioned that I had just been to see Salibi and that we had talked about the problems of the Arab Christians.

'The Arab Christians' principal problem is that the West is Christian,' said Fisk, 'and in one way or another since 1948 the West has humiliated the Muslims of the Middle East over and over again. The Christians simply cannot divorce themselves from the West, however many times they tell their Muslim neighbours that Christianity is really an Eastern religion.'

According to Fisk it was nevertheless a myth that the Lebanese civil war was in essence a clash of civilisations, Christian against Muslim. It was, he said, more a case of the Maronites against everyone else.

'The Maronites brought the war down on their own heads. The first event of the civil war was a massacre of Palestinians by a group of Phalangists trying to win power. The Greek Orthodox always realised that the different communities in Lebanon would have to learn to coexist, but the Maronites never came to terms with this. They are a very immature community politically, very stupid, and always letting themselves be used - first by the French, then by the Israelis, now by the Syrians. The Maronites have always really wanted a francophone Lebanon that they can dominate, totally separated from the Arab world, with the Muslims reduced to some sort of folkloric survival tolerated to please the tourists. Is it any wonder that the Hezbollah headbangers now want to kill them all?'

'But all the same, quite a lot of the war did seem to have a Christian-Muslim clash behind it, didn't it?'

'In the course of the war the Phalange attacked the local Armenians and the Greek Orthodox - who themselves quite often fought with the Druze against the Maronites - as well as the Christian Palestinians and other Maronites. Then, at other points, the fighting was almost entirely Muslim against Muslim: in the Camp Wars from 1985 to 1988 it was Shiites against Sunni Palestinians. It's a ridiculous oversimplification - in fact a total misunderstanding - to see the war as a simple Christian-Muslim struggle.'

It had stopped raining as suddenly as it had started and the sun was now shining brightly. So after I had paid the bill, Fisk offered to take me on a tour of his favourite ruins. This didn't turn out to be the sightseeing trip around the archaeological remains of ancient Beirut that I had been expecting. Instead it was a nostalgia tour through the scenes of Fisk's civil war glory days, carefully avoiding any part of the city which still had a house with its roof intact, a window
in situ,
or whose facade was not thoroughly honeycombed with shrapnel holes.

'Look,' said Fisk, nodding excitedly from the back seat of our taxi at a ruinous building opposite. 'Classic sniper's nest.'

'There?' I asked, pointing to a window on the third floor.

'Never
ever
point in Lebanon,' hissed Fisk. 'You'll get yourself killed
very
quickly if you break basic rules like that.'

'What
...'

'People will think you're an informer, and shoot you. And me too if I'm with you.' 'I'm so sorry
...'

'But you had the right window. Look again. What do you see?' 'A pile of old sacks?'

'Sandbags, with a crate in between.' Fisk was in his element now, like an overexcited trainspotter let loose in the sidings at Crewe. 'That crate is where the sniper would have rested his rifle. During the war that line of buildings would have had corridors knocked through the houses so snipers could move from one house to another without venturing onto the street. Of course, all that is over now,' he added, with what seemed a touch of sadness.

We drove on, Fisk pointing out sites of interest: 'See that spot? That's where a mine went off, killing a Lebanese journalist. Friend of mine. Horrible business. Blood everywhere. Couldn't even identify the body afterwards
...
And over there, see? That's where Terry Anderson was kidnapped. He was taken off screaming down that road. Didn't get released for years . . . And there: that was the French Embassy. '

'God. What happened to it?'

'Car bomb, shells and everything else. But it's still there, sort of. Which is more than you can say about the American Embassy. It used to stand there.' Fisk nodded at a huge empty lot. 'It was bombed by Islamic Jihad. They finally pulled down what was left last week.'

We drove on, and soon came to a warren of narrow streets. Garbage lay uncollected all around, and every building was badly peppered with shrapnel. It looked as if pretty well everything had gone off here: small-arms fire, mortars, howitzers, aerial bombardment, suction bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, car bombs, the lot.

'Gives you an idea what Beirut used to be like,' sighed Fisk, 'before they started messing around trying to clean it all up.'

'Why are there so many pin-ups of the Ayatollah Khomeni everywhere?'

'This used to be the Jewish area of Beirut. That was the synagogue. But the Shiites have taken it over now. You don't want to come here on your own.'

'What happened to the Jews?'

'After the creation of Israel they stayed on. But after the 1982 Israeli invasion and the siege of Beirut, Jews came to be seen as legitimate targets, so they had to, er
...
leave.'

From the opposite direction a huge armoured personnel carrier rumbled toward us. It was followed by an army truck full of heavily armed Lebanese troops in their camouflage jumpsuits. We pulled in behind the charred carcass of an old Citroen to let them through.

'These patrols go through to make sure there are no armed militia men around,' said Fisk. 'There are, of course, hundreds of them, but they keep out of sight. In fact there's not a family here without a stash of Kalashnikovs and couple of mortars hidden away in their back yard. But they keep them tucked away and the army don't poke around too much. It's an unspoken agreement.'

Fisk gave instructions to the driver and we headed into a great wide square, desolate and empty but for a bronze statue at its centre.

'This was the Place des Martyrs. It was like Dresden until they pulled it all down. Shame, really. In the old days there was almost total silence in this area. No traffic. No people. Just the gentle
crack, crack
of snipers. Wonderful'