Amy’s Journal

Yesterday was the 31st anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War. The above photo is of one of the still-bombed-out buildings that remain. It’s the Holiday Inn, which was held by Christian Phalangists in 1975, until they were defeated there, the last Christian stand in West Beirut.

I went to a “photo exhibit” yesterday which was meant to honor those still missing from the war. As an art exhibit, it certainly fell short, but I was able to finally go inside “the bubble”, a huge and scarred cement structure near Martyr’s Square.

For now, it’s just a wrecked building inside, but there are supposedly plans to reconstruct it. The famous-in-Lebanon architect, Bernard Khoury, plans to make it look like sort of like a giant metallic fish, you can read about it here , though there is no way it’s going to be finished in 2006, considering no work has been done on it at all.

The exhibit inside consisted of some xerox copies of wallet sized photos of people who are missing, as well as some big balloons with more xeroxed photos sloppily pasted on them. I have heard that the group who organized the “show”, the Committee of the Disappeared, is lobbying the government to have April 13 recognized as a national day of remembrance.

It is interesting that here people seem a lot more focused on forgetting the war than remembering. There are certainly countries that have spent a lot of time going over such tragedies and making a point to remember as a way of making sure to never repeat the past. Lebanon has not done this – they as a people have not addressed the war nor really reconciled. This may not be such a terrible thing, though. I sort of feel like if there was a strong movement to go through such a process at this time, there would be conflict again. As far as I can tell, all of the reasons for that war are still present today, with the only encouraging thing being that people really don’t want to go through it again. That is actually a very encouraging thing, indeed.