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<p class=MsoNormal style='border:none;padding:0pt'><i><font size=2
face=Verdana><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;font-style:italic'>A
batch of Fisk’s latest articles: one on Sayed’s press conference, another
about the Ali Hajj connection and the disappearing car (circulated before), and
the last recollecting war memories from what he now considers his home city, Beirut.<br>
<br>
Enjoy,<br>
L.</span></font></i></p>
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font-family:Verdana'> </span></font></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:18.4pt'><font
size=5 color=black face=Arial><span style='font-size:17.0pt;font-family:Arial;
color:black'><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk"><font color=black><span
style='color:black;text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=279 height=57
src="cid:image001.gif@01C52C3F.9F5F4570" hspace=2 vspace=2
alt="The Independent on Sunday, Independent.co.uk"></span></font></a></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.4pt'><font size=5 color=black
face=Arial><span style='font-size:17.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Security
chief 'sues himself' to clear name over Hariri</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:15.05pt'><b><font size=3 color=black
face=Verdana><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black;
font-weight:bold'>By Robert Fisk in Beirut</span></font></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>18 March 2005 </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In Lebanon, tragedy and farce often go hand in hand. But tragedy turned to vaudeville
yesterday when Syria's top Lebanese intelligence officer called a press
conference to announce that he and his colleagues would "sue
themselves" to clear their names of negligence over the murder of the
former prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Even more incredibly,
Jamil Sayed, the head of the Lebanese General Security Directorate, announced
that he had decided to bring these legal proceedings "without consulting"
his colleagues. "All the heads of security institutions are ready for
trial and accountability," he said. "We have no secrets to be
embarrassed about."</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It appeared that Mr
Sayed, an intelligent man who does not speak without much forethought, was
warning the political opposition to stop their attacks on him, on the
prosecutor general, on the Internal Security Forces head, and other senior
officers. Those who were calling for their resignations, he said, should
"not mix politics with crime ... Let justice decide."</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The honour of the
Lebanese security forces was at stake, Mr Sayed said - the anti-Syrian
opposition would certainly agree with that - and claimed he was starting his
own legal proceedings against himself since no members of the opposition had
filed a lawsuit. This begs a few questions. How can Mr Sayed be interrogated?
Will he question himself? And how can he carry out such an interrogation when
all the Lebanese evidence about Mr Hariri's murder is in the hands of - well,
Mr Sayed.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>"They should stop
under- estimating people's intelligence," was the only comment to come
from Walid Eido, a former judge and a member of Hariri's parliamentary party.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>He might be wise to
treat Mr Sayed less dismissively. The security head is possibly the most
powerful man in Lebanon and controls passports, all border crossings and
censorship.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But what did the
announcement mean? Is Mr Sayed preparing for his resignation if the UN
investigation into Hariri's murder condemns the Lebanese security services?
Or is he telling Lebanese MPs that they will have to sue him before he
resigns?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>His statement followed
only a few hours after Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Hizbollah
guerrilla movement, rejected President Bush's latest demand for the
organisation's disarmament. "We are ready to remain until the end of
time a 'terrorist organisation' in Bush's view, but we are not ready to give
up protection of our country, our people, their blood and their honour,"
he said.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Mr Nasrallah regards
the Hizbollah as an anti-Israeli resistance group and thus hopes to avoid UN
Security Council Resolution 1559's stipulation that all Lebanese
"militias" must be disarmed.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In fact, Hizbollah's
best defence was offered by Bahiya Hariri, the murdered prime minister's
sister, when she told the million-strong crowd of Lebanese in Beirut on Monday that they must "protect" Hizbollah. It was an attempt to bring
Nasrallah over to the opposition cause - although this would mean at least
the partial abandoning of its military alliance with Syria. The Hizbollah have not responded to this offer.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>At least 4,000 of Syria's troops in the country have crossed the international frontier; the remaining 10,000 are now
in the eastern Bekaa Valley.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Syria</span></font><font
size=2 color=black face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
color:black'>'s one million workers in Lebanon, however, continue to pay the
price for the revived hatred of their country. Up to 30 have been murdered in
the past four weeks - with scarcely a headline in the Lebanese press about
this outrage. </span></font></p>
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<h1><font size=5 color=black face=Arial><span style='font-size:17.0pt'>The
mystery of Mr Lebanon's murder</span></font></h1>
<h2><b><i><font size=4 face=Arial><span style='font-size:14.0pt'>After the
assassination of Rafik Hariri, his vehicles were taken from the scene on the
orders of a former aide. And now, reports </span></font></i></b><span
style='font-style:normal'>Robert Fisk</span>, many believe the missing cars
may hold the key to the killing</h2>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:15.05pt'><b><font size=3 color=black
face=Verdana><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black;
font-weight:bold'>By Robert Fisk in Beirut</span></font></b></p>
<p class=padnone style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black
face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>17 March 2005 </span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Now here's a strange
story from Beirut. Strange, because it is one of fear and suspicion about
Rafik Hariri's murder on 14 February; stranger still because - although
almost everyone in Beirut knows the story -much of it has not been published
in Lebanon.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It involves a man
called Ali Salah Haj and Hariri himself - and the mysterious decision to move
the most vital evidence of his murder from the scene of the crime. Some say
it is all a mistake, the result of inexperience or ignorance. Others believe
it holds the key to how the former billionaire prime minister was murdered in
a bombing that cost the lives of 18 other innocents.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It all begins in the
late 1990s when Hariri was prime minister. He lived in a palace of
pre-stressed concrete in the Beirut suburb of Qoreitem and travelled
everywhere with a government-supplied team of escorts from Lebanon's Internal Security Force.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Of the 40 men
regularly on his team, Hariri regularly drove with one of its senior
officers, a man he liked, the heavily mustachioed Ali Haj. "Things were
quite normal," one of Hariri's closest associates now says, "until
Sheikh Rafik found that the Syrians seemed to know everything he was saying
in his car. People thought he must be bugged or that there was a tap on his
phone. And after a while, he decided that Ali Haj might be telling the
Syrians what he was saying."</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In a land such as Lebanon - where everyone listens to everyone else (Hariri had his own security informants)
- that had to be investigated.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>"So he told Ali
Haj something very specific that the Syrians wouldn't like," the family
associate says. "And, within minutes of meeting a Syrian official that
day, the very same matter was raised with him. That day, Sheikh Rafik asked
another security man to ride with him. Ali Haj was relegated to another
car."</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Within a short time,
Ali Haj was reassigned - to a Lebanese intelligence post in the Bekaa valley
where he dealt regularly with Brigadier General Rustum Ghazale, the head of
Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Now we flash forward to
14 February 2005. Hariri's armoured motorcade, struck by a bomb of around
600kg, lies blazing in the narrow road beside the St George Hotel on the
Beirut Corniche. The vehicles, pitted with shrapnel holes, perhaps bearing
traces of the explosives, formed a pattern which showed how the bomb
scattered the cars - as well as the order in which the convoy was travelling.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But within hours -
although every other burning car was left intact beside the highway -
Hariri's vehicles had disappeared. The decision was taken by the man who is
now head of the Syrian-controlled Lebanese Internal Security Force, a certain
Brigadier General Ali Salah Haj.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>He ordered that the
wreckage should be removed from the scene of the crime - and this, remember,
was the location of the murder of the most important figure in the history of
independent Lebanon - and taken away on trucks to the Lebanese Charles Helou
army barracks. Where they remain to this day.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Ali Haj was among the
many thousands of mourners who later came to pay their respects to the Hariri
family. Witnesses later recorded he was given a frosty reception. Ghenna
Hariri, the young daughter of Hariri's sister Bahiya, a Lebanese MP in the
southern city of Sidon, greeted him with the words: "Your place is not
here." When he offered his hand to Hariri's widow Nazek - who now wears
her late husband's wedding ring on a chain round her neck - she touched her
chest modestly rather than take Ali Haj's hand.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In a country where
everyone believes in the "moamara" - the Plot - it is essential not
to point the finger. No one has yet discovered who set off the bomb that
killed Hariri. But there are a number of remarkable elements about the
Lebanese investigation.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The first is that, a
month after Hariri's murder, it has still given no information about it.
Furthermore, the bombing took place in a part of Beirut - site of a recent
Francophone conference, close to the Phoenicia Hotel where many foreign
dignitaries stay and within half a mile of parliament - the most heavily
guarded area of Lebanon.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>For the killers to
have avoided the attention of the ISF, the army, the traffic cops and a host
of other security organisations as they prepared their bomb was a truly
extraordinary achievement. And for anyone to have ordered the removal of the
principle evidence from the scene of the crime was an even more unlikely
denouement.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One of those working
on the Lebanese security investigation has admitted there have been
"many mistakes made", suggesting Ali Haj's decision to move the Hariri
convoy cars came about because of his conflicting loyalties - he had been one
of Hariri's own bodyguards but was now a senior security officer - rather
than any desire to cover up the evidence.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>He also said the
police are convinced the killer was a suicide bomber, possibly an al-Qa'ida
operative who targeted Hariri because of his links with the Saudi royal
family. Hariri held Saudi citizenship. Hariri's supporters are increasingly
convinced the bomb was hidden under the roadway, down a drain or a telephone
cable duct.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It's easy to see how
each theory suits their respective creators. An al-Qa'ida murder clears the
Lebanese and Syrian security authorities of blame.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The
bomb-under-the-road story suggests the Lebanese military security
institutions must have been breathtakingly careless in failing to notice the
planning and planting of the bomb.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The Lebanese and the
Syrians believe in the al-Qa'ida plot - even they are blaming the Israelis as
a poor second - but the political opposition is increasingly fingering Syria for, at the least, incompetence, carelessness, even criminal negligence.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Hence Hariri's
supporters - even many thousands of those demanding the truth about Hariri's
death - are demanding the resignation of seven principal figures, all deeply
in the pro-Syrian Lebanese justice or intelligence services. They include
General Ali Haj. The remainder are: Adnan Adoum, the minister of justice and
prosecutor general; Jamil Sayed, the head of Lebanese General Security;
Mustapha Hamdan, head of the Lebanese Republican Guard; Raymond Azar, the
head of the"mukhabarat" intelligence service; Edgar Mansour, the
head of "national security", and Ghassan Tfayleh, the head of the
security service's "listening department", the "Amn
el-Tanassot".</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The authorities have
refused to accept the list, claiming all are honourable men performing their
duties with patriotism and devotion.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Needless to say,
there's an old Arab argument which runs in parallel with any ordinary
policeman's first question: in whose interest was it to commit the crime? Ask
the Syrians, and they say they would never commit such an act, not least
because the calumny which the accusations have since brought upon Damascus
have caused such political disadvantage to Syria's young president, Bachar
al-Assad - who has himself condemned the killing as a "heinous
crime."</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Syria's political
friends in Lebanon - some of them Bachar's acquaintances - have been pointing
out, accurately, that the American neo-conservative project for the Middle
East originally drawn up by Messers Perle, Feith, Wurmser and others, called
not only for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein but for diverting of Syria's
attention "by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilise Syrian
control of Lebanon."</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>How better to
destabilise Syria in Lebanon than by killing Hariri?</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Those million Lebanese
who demanded Syria's withdrawal, the resignation of the Lebanese president
and the truth about Hariri's murder on Monday do not recognise themselves in
this scenario. They also demanded to know who killed ex-President Rene
Mouawad, the Grand Mufti Khaled and the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It is worth pointing
out that the Christians among the demonstrators did not call for the truth
about the murder of prime minister Rashid Karami and National Liberal leader
Danny Chamoun - because wartime Christian militiamen rather than the Syrians
are widely regarded as their murderers.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The imminent return
from self-imposed French exile of the messianic ex-General Michel Aoun - who
led a hopeless "war of independence" against the Syrians in 1989
which cost thousand of innocent lives - is a clear sign that the opposition
here could find themselves gravely embarrassed.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Most, in fairness, do
not personally blame President Bachar al-Assad of Syria for Hariri's murder.
They were insulted by his speech in the Syrian parliament last Saturday but
are well aware that far more ruthless men exist in Syria - and outside Syria's borders - to whom Hariri's fate could be assigned, or even self-assigned.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Many opposition
leaders, including Walid Jumblatt - it was his father Kamal who was murdered
- hope desperately Bachar was not involved. But it remains the case the
Lebanese security officers who were appointed to guard Lebanon on Syria's behalf have established a wretched reputation.</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Why, for example, were
three more bodies discovered at the site of the Hariri mass murder in the two
weeks that followed the bombing?</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Ali Haj could
immediately take the vital evidence from the scene of the crime - something
which no police force in the world would do - on the grounds that he needed
to "protect" it. But how come his investigation failed to spot
three corpses at the scene?</span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>When the Zahle MP and
former Syrian ally, Mohsen Dalloul, announced this week that the Lebanese
authorities "knew" who had assassinated Hariri - who was the
unofficial leader of the Lebanese opposition to Syria until his death - those
same authorities were as silent as the proverbial grave.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Maybe they are
listening to the million Lebanese who demanded the truth. Or maybe they are
just following the usual trade of all security services, silently listening
to their telephone lines. I say this because just three days ago, Ghassan
Tfayleh, the head of the Lebanese eavesdropping department, put a tap on my
home telephone in Beirut. Well, there's only one response to that: call any
time.</span></font> <font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></font></p>
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<h1><font size=5 color=black face=Arial><span style='font-size:17.0pt'>Memories
of war, fear and friendship in my home city, where time has stood still</span></font></h1>
<h2><b><i><font size=4 face=Arial><span style='font-size:14.0pt'>Reality,
normality, was back in Beirut, with its burning garbage tips and its
matchstick crackle of gunfire</span></font></i></b></h2>
<h3><b><font size=3 color=black face=Verdana><span style='font-size:11.5pt'>Robert
Fisk</span></font></b></h3>
<p class=padnone style='line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black
face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>19 March 2005 </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My home in Beirut has been a timebox for almost 30 years, a place where time has stood still. I have
sat on my balcony over the Mediterranean in the sticky, sweating summer heat
and in the tornadoes of winter, watching the midnight horizon lit by a
hellfire of forked lightning, the waves suddenly glistening gold as they
slide menacingly below my apartment. I have woken in my bed to hear the
blades of the palm trees outside slapping each other in the night, the rain
smashing against the shutters until a tide of water moves beneath the French
windows and into my room.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I came to Lebanon in 1976 when I was just 29 years old, and because I have lived here ever since - because I
have been doing the same job ever since, chronicling the betrayals and
treachery and deceit of Middle East history for all those years - I felt I
was always 29.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Abed, my driver, has
grown older. I notice his stoop in the mornings when he brings the
newspapers, the morning papers in Beirut and The Independent, a day late,
from London. My landlord Mustafa, who lives downstairs, is now in his 70s,
lithe as an athlete and shrewder, but sometimes a little more tired than he
used to be.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The journalists I knew
back in 1976 have moved on to become associate editors or executive editors
or managing editors. One founded a brewery and became a millionaire. They
have married, had children. Some of them have died. Sometimes, reading the
newspaper obituaries - for there is nothing so satisfying as the narrative of
a life that has an end as well as a beginning - I notice how the years of
birth are beginning to creep nearer to my own.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>When I came to Beirut, the obituary columns were still recording the lives and deaths of Great War
veterans like my Dad. Then the years would encompass the 1920s, the 1930s, at
least a comfortable 10 years from my own first decade. And now the hitherto
friendly "1946" is appearing at the bottom of the page. Sometimes I
know these newly dead men and women - spies and soldiers and statesmen and
thugs and murderers whom I have met over the past three decades in the Middle
East, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Sometimes I write these obituaries
myself.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And still I was 29. I
could look back over the years with nightmare memories but without dreams or
pain. Lebanon had a brutal history but it had been a place of great kindness
to me. It taught me to stay alive. And amid all the memories of war, of
friendships, of fear, of books read past midnight - long into the early
hours, when dawn shows the crack between the curtains - there had always been
the idea that Beirut was the place one came home to.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>How many times have I
sat on the flight deck of Middle East Airlines' old 707s - from the Gulf,
from Egypt, from the Balkans or other parts of Europe - and watched the
promontory of Beirut lunging out into the Mediterranean "like the head
of an old sailor" and heard a metallic voice asking for permission to
make a final approach on runway 1-18 and known that, in half an hour, I would
be ordering a gin and tonic and smoked salmon at the Spaghetteria restaurant
in Ein el-Mreisse, so close to my home that I can send Abed to his family and
walk back to my apartment along the seafront to the smell of cardamom and
coffee and corn on the cob.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Of course, I know the
truth. Sometimes when I get out of bed in the morning, I hear the bones
cracking in my feet. I notice that the hair on my pillow is almost all
silver. And when I go to shave, I look into the mirror and, now more than
ever, the face of old Bill Fisk stares back at me. Yet I am surrounded by so much
history that an individual age seems to have no meaning.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The knights of the
First Crusade, after massacring the entire population of Beirut, had moved
along the very edge of the Mediterranean towards Jerusalem to avoid the
arrows of Arab archers; and I often reflect that they must have travelled
over the very Lebanese rocks around which the sea froths and gurgles opposite
my balcony. I have photographs on my apartment walls of the French fleet off
Beirut in 1918 and the arrival of General Henri Gouraud, the first French
mandate governor, who travelled to Damascus and stood at the most
green-draped of tombs in the Omayyad mosque and, in what must be one of the
most inflammatory statements in modern Middle East history, told the tomb:
"Saladin, we have returned."</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A friend gave me an
antique pair of French naval binoculars of the mandate period - they may well
have hung around the neck of a French officer serving in Lebanon - and in the evenings I would use them to watch the Israeli gunboats silhouetted on the
horizon or the Nato warships sliding into Beirut bay. When the doomed
multinational force had arrived here in 1982 to escort Yasser Arafat's
Palestinian fighters from Lebanon - and then returned to protect the
Palestinian survivors of the Sabra and Chatila camps massacre - I counted 28
Nato vessels off my apartment. From one of them, the Americans fired their
first shells into Lebanon. And one night, I saw a strange luminosity moving
above the neighbouring apartment blocks and only a minute afterwards realised
that they were the lights of an American battleship towering over the city.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>War gave a kind of
symmetry to Beirut. The smell of burning garbage became a symbol of summer
evenings. The wartime electrical cuts would have me racing on foot up and
down floors without elevators - war keeps you fit, I once churlishly remarked
to a friend. I remember once, flying off to Geneva to see a beautiful girl
(by chance, sitting next to me, was a certain Ahmed Chalabi, but that's yet
another story), feeling that Switzerland, where I couldn't throw a cigarette
packet out of a car window, was unreal, false, a bubble of luxury in a cruel
world. Reality, normality, would be back in Beirut with its burning garbage
tips and its matchstick crackle of gunfire.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I was here on the very
last day of the civil war, following the Syrian tanks under shellfire up to
Baabda. In conflict, you never believe a war will end. Yet it finished, amid
corpses and one last massacre - but it ended, and I was free of fear for the
first time in 14 years.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And then I watched it
all reborn. The muck along the Corniche below my balcony was cleared and
flower beds and new palm trees planted. The Dresden-like ruins were slowly
torn down or restored and I could dine out in safety along the old front line
in fine Italian restaurants, take coffee by the Roman ruins, buy Belgian
chocolates, French shirts, English books. Slowly, my own life, I now realise,
was being rebuilt. Not only did I love life - I could expect to enjoy it for
years to come.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:0pt;margin-bottom:8.35pt;margin-left:
0pt;line-height:11.7pt'><font size=2 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Until, of course, that
Valentine's Day morning on the Corniche just down from my home when the crack
of a fearful explosion sent fingers of dark brown smoke sprouting into the
sky only a few hundred metres from me. And that was the moment, I think, when
the beautiful dream ended, as it did for tens of thousands of Lebanese. And I
no longer feel 29.</span></font></p>
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