Lebanon "Grenades Are Bad for Business"

By Jill Smolowe

The bar of the Commodore Hotel in West Beirut had been a place where journalists congregated to relax and trade war stories. Today, it is so deserted that the bartender "feels guilty for even being here." Most evenings, there is not enough in the till for his salary. Just before one of the last remaining U.S. journalists, Associated Press Correspondent Ed Blanche, finally left the war-torn city last month, he stopped off at the bar. A well-known gunman, slightly wobbly from drink, approached Blanche, tucked an object into his pocket, then burst out laughing. "I failed to see the funny side of it," Blanche reported afterward. "The present was a fragmentation grenade." The gunman, a veteran killer who seemed to be losing his nerve after years of firefights in the shattered city, took back the grenade and proceeded to place it between the legs of a Lebanese official sitting on a barstool. As he laughed, the unsuspecting fellow spilled his drink, then fell off the stool. "The barman closed up early," wrote Blanche. "Grenades are bad for business."

Such perversity is now commonplace in the city that was at one time a cosmopolitan gateway to the Middle East. Last week in the Muslim-controlled western sector, new depths were achieved when gunmen turned their vengeance on an 84-year-old Frenchman. Camille Sontag and his wife Blanche, 85, were driving along a seaside boulevard when a cab blocked their way. Gunmen leaped from the vehicle and pressed a pistol to Sontag's temple. Seconds later he was packed into the cab and driven away, bringing to nine the number of French currently believed to be held by extremists. The Sontags, who made their home in Lebanon for more than four decades, had decided to leave this month.

The couple were among the 60-odd survivors of Beirut's once thriving European and American communities, which at their height numbered in the tens of thousands. The staunchest Western holdouts: the academic fraternity, which had made Beirut into the regional center of higher education. But the execution of three hostages--two British teachers and an American librarian --in retaliation for the U.S. bombing of Libya in April persuaded most of the few remaining Westerners to leave. Explains George Miller, a professor at American University of Beirut, who has lived in Lebanon for 40 years: "We stayed until there was no longer any hope." Those who remain behind bemoan the university's deteriorating academic standards and the lawlessness of campus life. "We've had students demand better grades at gunpoint," laments a Lebanese professor.

A similar exodus has occurred at the American University Hospital, once one of the most prestigious teaching facilities in the region. In April, Dr. Dennis Alexander, a research lecturer, became the last Westerner to quit the hospital staff. "In the past year morale has gone," he says. "At present, the hospital is just barely viable." Administrators estimate the 420-bed facility's annual loss at about $8 million.

The hospital has trouble keeping even its Lebanese staff members, as rival militias continue their street warfare in the hospital's corridors when they seek treatment for battlefield injuries. The ensuing dramas can make the scripts of St. Elsewhere or Trapper John, M.D. seem prosaic. One gunman blew himself up with a hand grenade in an emergency room. Another held a gun to the head of a surgeon as he operated, threatening to pull the trigger if the patient died. Fortunately, the operation was a success.

Most of the foreign press corps, which at one time numbered more than 300, has also fled. Every U.S. news organization has pulled its American reporters out of the city. The presumed murder of a British journalist and the kidnaping 14 months ago of A.P.'s Beirut bureau chief, Terry Anderson, have demonstrated that the press carries no special privilege. "When we became part of the story," says a U.S. network-TV correspondent, "it was time to leave." When A.P.'s Blanche quit Beirut, he traveled overland with the clandestine assistance of friends. He refused to carry a gun. "If those gonzos find you carrying anything," he told TIME, "you're as good as dead."

Other Americans have also staged hair-raising escapes. Jim Yamin, a representative of Grassroots International, a small Boston-based aid group, was en route to Beirut on March 25, just after U.S. ships crossed Libya's self-proclaimed "line of death" in the Gulf of Sidra. Suspecting that the U.S. action would fan anti-American feelings in Beirut, Yamin dashed nervously to his appointments, trying to stay off the streets.

Then, on April 15, U.S. planes attacked Libya. "My hosts were not just worried for my safety," he says. "They also felt that they were being endangered because I was their guest." He holed up in an apartment while Muslim friends plotted an escape route. Three days later, he feigned sickness and was bustled into an ambulance and driven to the airport. Safely back in Boston, he now says of Beirut, "It could be ten years before there's any sort of stability."

Still, some Lebanese cling to hopes that their capital, once teeming with spies and scholars, striptease artists and oilmen, can recapture its lost glory. "We only need peace," says former Prime Minister Salim al Hoss. "Then we will rebuild the country and re-establish its role as the hub of the Middle East." Others are pessimistic. Says Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt: "The city is dying." For those left behind, its death throes are not a pretty sight.

With reporting by John Borrell/Cairo and Roger Franklin/New York