October 13th 1990

My family and I seem destined to witness our country’s most critical and terrifying historical junctures. I was not in Lebanon on October 13, 1990, but I was most certainly there on September 22, 1988. That was the day when the outgoing President Amin Gemayel, whose term ended that day, was left with no choice except one of three: constitutional vacuum, accepting a government dominated by Syrian allies, or appointing the military council headed by General Michel Aoun, the army commander, as interim government. He chose the third option.

 

I remember that year, it was my final year of high school, or should have been at least. I was a student at Eastwood College, Mansourieh, I was living in Lebanon with my mother while my father lived and worked in the UAE and visited occasionally. That year’s Independence Day celebrations at our school was unlike any other. Red and white flags were everywhere. In the assembly hall we all gathered for a speech by our school principle followed by students dressed in army uniforms marching on stage and singing patriotic army songs while the music blared from giant speakers. It made your whole body vibrate. 

 

There was a lump in my throat. I had never felt that way before, I had never felt Lebanese before that day. Lebanon was always home and family, but never country, never nation. It was always a sad place, always a damaged, bullet riddled place, backward and slow. Suddenly, the music moved us all, we were filled with a feeling of pride at belonging to the Lebanese nation, and we WERE one after all, how could we not be a nation when we had a leader in uniform pounding his fist on the table and saying it will be so! 

 

“No rifle but the army’s rifle…” That was the battle cry that shook the stolen thrones of so many Lebanese warlords and militia commanders, only Michel Aoun could have made such a declaration. The warlords rushed to consult their foreign backers, embassies and liaison officers all, then returned with the roar of a lion. Aoun was he enemy now and he had to go. After initial enthusiastic if cautious approval and recognition of his interim government shortly after his appointment, from the newly elected George H W Bush, to the Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, Aoun became almost a pariah. Only Aoun could have achieved this. And why you would ask, for the simple reason that he wasn’t in the business of pleasing foreign governments, he was the head of a government of a bleeding and wounded Lebanon that needed to heal and bring its various parts together. But that did not suit the political players on the international stage.

 

People forget, as they often do, memories are short. It’s fashionable today for bourgeois Christian intellectuals and commentators to disparage Aoun, as an aging failure, to attack his political party and parliamentary bloc, “Strong Lebanon”. How easy it is to hit such a large target, any amateur can do it, and everyone at some point has. Those bigger than life present a large target, and they often attract envious and traitorous hearts that present themselves as honest honorable men and even as friends. 

 

But I digress. 

 

A little over a year after that bright sunny November morning at school, two weeks before my 18^thbirthday in fact, January 31, 1989, the general declared a war of liberation from Syrian occupation, as he should have, what else could a proud army officer do. That’s why Stalin had the cream of the Polish army officer corps murdered when he and Hitler agreed to carve up Poland like a Christmas Turkey. One bullet behind the head, so no one would remain who was proud enough to say “out occupier be you brother or foreigner!”

 

Yes, war was hell, and my mother and I finally decided to leave and return to the UAE. It was a long and convoluted process to procure tickets on the Jounieh to Larnaca Ferry, a tougher job to physically get to the boat. My uncle decided we should do it in stages, first come down from our Metn mountain home to his flat in Jdeideh, it was safer and closer to the sea. We did that. Two nights after our arrival the Syrian artillery in West Beirut decided to shell Jdeideh and rocket it with salvoes of Katyushas. Funny how the diminutive of such a beautiful name as Kate could be so terror inducing. You barely had time to gather yourself and your loved ones and throw yourself down the stairwell amidst a crush of human traffic while explosions went off all around you, not knowing if the next rocket would land on top of you before you made it to the shelter, an airless humid basement that smelled of wood and glue.

 

But, we finally made it to the ferry, we were herded on board in a rush while artillery shells fell all around us from the Syrian positions high above in the mountains. I said my final goodbyes to the country that at the end gave us some glimmer of hope before it was extinguished with such brutal finality. I went atop the vessel on its upper rear deck, and looked back at a burning country, the Dora fuel depot was aflame. I couldn’t bring myself to muster a salute, I just stood there.

 

By the end of the following year, October 13, 1990, the heady dream so many of us shared briefly, finally ended, Aoun was trapped inside the French Embassy and his troops ordered to ceasefire were rounded up by advancing Syrian forces. Many years later mass graves would be found around the ministry of defense near the Baabda Palace, 73 skeletons with their hands tied behind their backs, each had a bullet hole in the back of the base of their skulls.

 

My people have suffered too much, its time all hands were of Lebanon.

-End-