Beirut: 'Everyone Has Lost'

Karsten Prager has been TIME'S Beirut bureau chief since August 1973. After returning to New York, he filed this assessment of a tragic, fratricidal conflict:

For most of the 14 months since Lebanon has been at war with itself, Beirut managed to deal quite resiliently with its misfortunes. Even as the war grew ever more ferocious, the structures of state collapsed one after the other, and artillery pounded away, some services continued to work almost normally. Until the very end, gutsy P.T.T. (Post, Telegraph and Telephone) officials kept telex and telephones alive, while Middle East Airlines, the country's flag carrier, flew in and out of a sandbagged airport that frequently took mortar fire, until it finally closed. Food prices soared, but cart vendors always seemed to have fresh produce for sale. Merchants who had lost their shops in downtown fighting transformed the once flashy Corniche into an open-air souk, closed only on days when the artillery thumped dangerously close. With no censor about, a few movie theaters even were daring enough to show European soft porn -afternoon diversion for weary militiamen back from the front line downtown.

Almost from the beginning, there was a tragic inevitability about the fratricide, focused in images of crisis and despair: the foreign community melting away, embassies being evacuated, the homeless seeking shelter, wall posters proliferating with the earnest faces of militiamen killed in the fighting.

Agreements were reached, then shattered. Cease-fires came and went in giddy sequence. Events that were seen as possible bench marks on the way to peace -the initial Syrian intervention, the early election of a new President -turned into bad dreams amid ceasefire violations and Byzantine arguments among feudalistic politicians.

Each time, the level of violence rose, frighteningly, demoralizingly. In the long fighting, barely 2 sq. mi. of Beirut real estate changed hands. And the weaponry grew ever more lethal: finally even surface-to-surface missiles were used. Residential sections once considered safe were shelled by both sides. Guns of every description, every caliber were everywhere. In a country with no police force, no army, no government, the streets belonged to the gunmen and their visions of macho reinforced by Kalashnikov automatic rifles.

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The bitterness of the fighting and its undertones of religious fervor surprised and repelled not only foreigners but the Lebanese as well. Of more than 20,000 dead, the bulk were civilians caught in crossfire. Prisoners were rarely taken. Many people were summarily executed on the basis of religious affiliation. Bodies were often mutilated. Christians imagined themselves being pushed into the sea by a Moslem tide. Palestinian guerrillas, righting alongside the predominantly Moslem left, saw the grim possibility of another Black September, a reference to their losing battle in 1970 with King Hussein's troops in Jordan. Lebanon, the Palestinians said, was the last place in which they retained any freedom of action. They would fight to keep it.

Eventually, the hopelessness of it all created a sense of bitter resignation. The early, almost unreal conviction that somehow, miraculously, peace would come, dwindled. "There are no longer any plans for the future," said a longtime Western observer. "Certainly not for a future in Lebanon." Those who could afford to leave, left. Out of 3 million people, an estimated half a million Lebanese -or one out of every six -had by now found refuge in neighboring Arab countries, Europe, the U.S.

Most Lebanese found it impossible to blame themselves for the catastrophe. Conspiracy theories abounded: the Palestinians were responsible, or the Syrians, or the Iraqis, or the Americans -all playing Middle East power games. Everyone was convinced that millions of dollars in cash and arms were flowing into the country, even if no one could show visible proof. The very fractiousness of the fighting factions, particularly on the left, and the ease with which a cease-fire could be ended by a small group, made the theory of foreign manipulation all too easy to accept.

Even if peace eventually came, one wondered how long it would take for the wounds and the bloody memories to heal. "Lebanon -good country, bad people," a Lebanese told a colleague of mine. Less emotional, but perhaps more pointed, was the sad comment of a Western diplomat who had watched Lebanon's agony from the first day: "Everyone has lost."

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