Another Tale of Two Cities

My second hometown of Singapore has a reputation as a SimCity: a sparkling, spick-and-span place that might just have come from Will Wright’s groundbreaking simulation videogame instead of the real world. Beirut’s downtown, too, bore SimCity-esque touches at first glance, when I visited it two years ago. The place had been freshly reconstructed after the Lebanese Civil War and restyled the BCD—Beirut Central District. The office buildings were new, the intricate network of streets and tunnels clean and freshly-paved. Around the Place de l’Étoile, a smaller and rather cosier version compared to the demented Parisian one, discreetly expensive shops catered to the well-heeled. The Ottoman-era Seraglio nearby looked fresh and was far from dilapidated. But the similarities, in this case, end at the surface.
Singapore is an orderly place: pedestrian crossings and queues are only some of the exhibits on show in its exhibition of neat civility. In Beirut a congenial chaos reigns: crossing the road there is a veritable gladiatorial battle between man and car. Singapore is a peaceful place: the most recent bombs and riots were long ago enough to be treated as cautionary but sanitized bits of history, narratives which are no longer raw. Beirut still displays, very visibly, the scars of the Lebanese Civil War. The BCD may be fairly full of office buildings and shop spaces, but many of those are still just vacant commercial space, yet to be animated by human activity. One block south of the BCD along Damascus Street, apartment blocks stand next to abandoned, pockmarked testaments to the destructive power of modern munitions and firearms.
Beirut was once a great city, its profile then very much resembling Singapore’s now: a bustling entrepôt, a cosmopolitan centre of commerce, a gateway to the world for its region—the Middle East in the former case, South-East Asia in the latter. Tolerance was such a norm in the city the association between the two between cliché. So what went wrong? Why did Beirut dissolve into intractable chaos while Singapore successfully overcame her teething troubles and became a new paragon of diversity?
Maybe Lebanon’s diversity was just too much, even compared to Singapore’s. Not 50 kilometres from Beirut is the equally ancient city of Sidon (or, as most of the now Arabic-speaking local population would call it, Saïda) and its medina (marketplace), preserved from medieval times. The medina feels ages away from the BCD—a quintessential actualization of the somewhat hackneyed contrast between East and West—yet the two places are nearer apart than Paris and Lyon, or Beijing and Shanghai. The liberalism epitomized by Beirut’s famous nightlife exists alongside deep conservatism. Christianity and Islam, both rather jealous monotheisms by nature, claim nearly equal followings among the Lebanese population. Such a diversity of cultures, of religions, of attitudes became a Pandora’s box, out of which leapt intractable disputes over political power that were eventually exacerbated into civil war. Singapore similarly has a wide gamut of races and religions, but perhaps not as wide; moreover there is a clear majority, the Chinese, who, quite conveniently, are not big on any one religion, or indeed religion in general.
Maybe it was spillover from the south. The Palestinian exodus into Lebanon after the Catastrophe of 1948 created a lingering and destabilizing imbalance between the Christian and Muslim populations, encouraging both sides to try and get a one-up on the delicate sectarian compromise over political power worked out during Lebanese independence, by violent means or otherwise.
The continued presence of displaced Palestinians, some of them advocating violent resistance against Israel, occasionally invites Israeli attack and creates lingering insecurity. The Lebanese themselves are divided in their feelings towards the Palestinians in their midst—perhaps one of the reasons disunity continues to be a leitmotif of Lebanese politics. The day before we headed south to see Sidon and Tyre (Sour in Arabic), we were potting around Achrafiyé, east of the BCD, walking its pleasant leafy streets and exploring the grand old dames that lined them. In a restored Italianate mansion now occupied by a business school, we struck up a conversation with the receptionist. When we mentioned that we were visiting the south the next day, the receptionist told us to take care as there had been an Israeli air-strike just south of Beirut a few days before. “It’s between the Israelis and them [the Palestinians]. None of our business.” But are they not your neighbours and fellow human beings, and do not you fates closely intertwine?
Travelling around Lebanon, we ran into Palestinians every now and then. At the ruins of ancient Tyre, yet another reminder out of many that this land is no stranger to the vicissitudes of time, the only other people present nearby are a family living in a shack at the edge of the ruins. As we walk towards the very well-preserved Roman hippodrome, a teenage girl approaches and, using an involved creole of Arabic, rudimentary English and universal hand gestures, offers mulberries for sale. “Palestinians,” our taxi driver tells us later. They do not seem to be doing particularly well. On the way back to Beirut we pass by Shatila refugee camp and decide to alight and take a look. It was quite a bustling place, that entrance to the camp: the street full of human and vehicular traffic, the sides lined with stalls selling, among other things, radios and other electronic goods. There is no grinding poverty here, but still sulkiness and frustration pervade the air. As we turn back a battered old Mercedes screeches to a halt nearby, nearly hitting a street vendor. No one is hurt, but the pieces of glass craftwork on the vendor’s tray have hit the ground and shattered. The vendor slams the bonnet of the Mercedes hard with his palms, eyes flashing with anger, visibly enraged—there must have gone a substantial part of his income.
Maybe it was poor socioeconomic conditions which kept the conflict raw. Whereas Singapore has been an economic success story for the past four decades and counting, Lebanon’s economic outlook has been less rosy, and the lethal cocktail of a protracted civil war and an influx of impoverished refugees did not help one bit. People who are getting richer pay relatively less attention to their grievances against their fellow human beings than those who aren’t doing so well.
In the end, maybe, circumstances are really stronger than we mere humans—形式强于人 as the Chinese say. Maybe the triple whammy of general economic ill-being, an extremely volatile mix of ethnicities and religions, and a loony neighbourhood—with bad karma radiating not only from the south but also from Damascus—pre-ordained Lebanon’s sad recent fate. Not too long after we left, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated, triggering off another cascade of assassinations, demonstrations peaceful and violent, and a second Israeli campaign in Southern Lebanon in the interim. Lebanon’s travails have not quite ended yet.
But does it have to be that way? What if the parties involved kept in mind the simple moral precept to do unto others as you would them do unto you? If they kept in mind that other people, no matter how much they may seem like pricks, are still after all humans too? Then maybe the Lebanese would be able to agree on a common, kinder line towards the Palestinians; maybe the conflict-locked sects and factions could acknowledge one another’s interests as equally valid and accept a compromise in the interests of all; maybe, just maybe, Damascus could be persuaded that less ham-fisted meddling in Lebanon may not be harmful to its interests.
There are many churches and mosques in Beirut. At certain times of the day, like around five in the evening, if one stands along Damascus Street near the BCD, one can hear the wailing of muezzins and the tolling of church bells sounding out together, in a novel but pleasant harmony. It may be difficult to argue, against the weight of history’s evidence, that appealing to humankind’s better instincts can keep the peace in trying circumstances, but even then, I believe firmly, we should never forget that our differences notwithstanding, we are all human beings, united in our humanity, and to therefore treat others as would have them treat you.

(I need to cut this down to half the length for an university application essay. God help me.)