Diplomacy takes a Vacation by risa
this sad tale was spun and sent some while ago by our annonymous
correspondent Foggy Bottom, and I waited to post hoping for illustrations,
but i’m not waiting anymore.
Diplomacy has a weird way of taking a vacation during the summer.
Despite the launching of ballistic missiles in North Korea, terrorist attacks in
Mumbai, resurging violence in the Levant, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, ongoing
carnage in Iraq, and what the International Crisis Group described as the
great resurgence in global instability since the end of the Iraq War, things
were fairly calm. Everyone is on vacation. It really makes you wonder what
diplomats actually do.
Then, two weeks ago, I got an email from our human resources
division telling me to get to Beirut to help with the evacuation of
stranded citizens.
The short email briefly told me to go to Lanarka Cyprus, and “the Americans
and Brits will take it from there.” 48 hours later, I found myself in
Cyprus, my luggage lost in Frankfurt and my phone lost in London in the
midst of a terrorist crisis at Heathrow. I found it liberating to free
myself from my belongings and my phone albeit temporarily.
Lanarka is a gaudy tourist town where Brits and Scandinavians mingle in meat
market clubs. It was also the staging ground for several of the evacuation
efforts taking place for Lebanon.
Because Israel bombed Lebanon’s only international airport in the opening
stages of the conflict, Beirut can only be accessed by boat or helicopter,
pending the approval of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Instead of a US or
UK helicopter as planned, we boarded a chartered Ukrainian MI-8 military
helicopter. The helicopter smelled old and musty. The gray-green interior
was covered with old Cyrillic instructions stenciled on the wall. A pilot,
who looked drunk, walked in to brief us on security slurring his broken
English. Ominously in broken English he mentioned to the “emergency exit to
your right”, by pointing to our left. We all immediately volunteered to put
on our lifejackets.
Approximately an hour and a half later our helicopter approached Beirut. The
city is beautiful, nested between steep mountains and beautiful beaches.
Dozens of cranes rise above the skyline, a testament to the robust growth
that characterized the city’s economy until recent weeks.
Across the port, we could spot a huge crater, ten feet deep,
where Lebanon’s Prime Minister Rafik Harriri was assassinated in a car
bomb last year.
We landed in the abandoned parking lot of the Beirut airport and were met
by our military personnel who escort us to the hotel. One thing that was
surprising about Beirut is how life seemed to go on in the midst of a state of
war. The highways were full of cars swerving insanely through traffic. Anyone
that has ever left North America knows that in most cultures, honking is not just
used for warning but is rather an intricate form of communication meaning
anything from “hey out of my way” to “Hello again Najib, nice to see you,
how are your children?” to “Hey girl, you look pretty fine, I know a place
in the Brumama hills where we can grab a drink and get to know each other.”
The city is also noticeably rich and relatively liberal with ads for
high-end boutiques, lingerie, and hard alcohol plastering the side of the
highway. Signs are written in Arabic, English, and French and most of the
locals we met had an incredible ability to switch fluently between the
three.
We arrived at a beautiful, but virtually empty hotel to drop off our stuff
before heading to the heavily fortified embassy. MyCountry generally tries to
avoid fortress embassies since it tends to project a negative image of an
intolerant garrison state. However, following the strong, and very
controversial, endorsement of Israel by OurLeader at the beginning of the war,
razor wire, bomb detectors, and a fortified wall were installed.
Our ambassador briefed us that the UN Security Council
was finally agreeing to a resolution on a ceasefire. He warned that
the ceasefire could ironically mean a spike in violence as the belligerents
would try to score as many last military and political points before the
guns go silent. This would be, so to speak, the storm before the calm.
The next day we started our plan to help evacuate some 1,100 people
by boat from the city. The work of processing these evacuees was fairly
routine, taking place in a large hangar in the north of the city, before
sending them to a boat in central Beirut. Talk of a ceasefire meant that
only some 800 people showed up. There are some 40,000 Lebanese MyCountry
citizens that usually reside in Lebanon. A few have only lived in MyCountry
for 4 or 5 years during the Civil War before coming back to Lebanon.
For many, their friends, family, property and businesses – in short their lives –
are in Lebanon.
These are not things they wished to give up lightly, even in the face of a
war. For many, staying in Lebanon is an act of defiance: they don’t want to
be intimidated to leave by the Israelis. Others do not want to abandon their
country to the most radical fringes of their society. Indeed, there were
weddings taking place at our hotel, even as the electricity wavered on and
off.
Evacuees came from all walks of life. Some were professional from
the posh northern suburb of Jounieh, while others were poor artisans from
the south that had seen close members of their family die in the bombings.
Although the evacuation itself had an interesting equalizing effect,
it was clear that the conflict had not. The areas that were spared from the
bombing were rich and Christian, while those that were most heavily hit
were poor and Muslim. As often is the case, crises can starkly expose
underlying structures of inequality in a society. This applies as much for
poor African Americans after Hurricane Katrina as for poor Shia Muslims
in Lebanon. Indeed, poor Shias who had lost their homes had
little to turn to, and therefore would naturally mass around an organization
such as Hezbollah, which could provide badly needed social services.
Half way through the afternoon we heard the deep thump of 10 Israeli bombs.
The sound of the bombing resonated in the cavernous hangar. For a few
seconds, the crowds of evacuees went silent, waiting to hear if the sounds
are getting closer of further away. You could feel the collective clenching
of teeth in the crowd. I rushed outside, to see some small mushroom clouds
float up some 3 kilometers south. Some of the evacuees started speculating
about the location of the attacks, most likely the poor Shia suburbs where
Hezbollah has a strong constituency. The children remained surprisingly
unaffected by the events, continuing to play at their parent’s feet either
too oblivious or too busy to care.
I looked towards to sky, expecting to see jets rushing over the horizon, but
saw nothing. Indeed, the morbid beauty of GPS precision-guided munitions is
that they allow bombers to fly at very high altitude. They are hard to spot
before they discharge their payload and are long gone by the time the bombs
actually detonate.
To the uninformed observer on the ground, it would appear
that these explosions just happen out of nowhere. On an ethical level,
while precision-guided munitions can help avoid collateral damage,
they also ironically dehumanize warfare. Pilots become detached from
the consequences of their actions, buffered by distance and layers of
technology.
The rest of the afternoon went smoothly, and hundreds of refugees were soon
on board a boat to Cyprus. Later that night, I joined some colleagues at our
hotel bar on a wonderful terrace overlooking the city. We were celebrating
the evacuation and the cease-fire, which was to enter into force the next
morning at 8 am. However, the bombing continued over the city, with plumes
of smoke rising every ten minutes. It was certainly a surreal experience to
be perched in a hotel in the North of the city, having a beer, watching the
South being bombed. I was already disturbed by the moral dilemmas involved
in evacuating rich citizens of MyCountry while poor Lebanese were suffering.
It seemed all the more unacceptable to helplessly watch a
conflict unfold like a fireworks show.
It was also clear from that vantage point that Israel was not at war with
Lebanon, but with a very specific part of Lebanon. This was a war between
Israel and Hezbollah, with numerous innocent Lebanese stuck in between.
Indeed, while people in the South were sifting through the rubble of their
homes, those in the North continued to shop in expensive shopping malls.
Lebanon, a fractious country with a brutal history of civil war, was divided
on this conflict. Anecdotal evidence from numerous cab rides seemed to
confirm this fact. A Maronite Christian driver from the North explained to
me how he was grateful that Israel was cleansing Lebanon of a cancerous
Hezbollah. Another driver from the South, who had lost his home to Israeli
bombings, said he was thankful for Hezbollah. Signs across the city
proclaimed that Lebanon was being held hostage by Israel, Syria, and Iran.
After the cease-fire, many were decrying a useless war. There seemed to be
no change from the status-quo ante. Hezbollah still held the captured
Israeli soldiers and Israel still occupied the same positions as before.
However, public statements from all sides to the conflict seem to indicate
that all parties were quite pleased with the war. All were under the
impression they had won. Indeed, besides the habitual political spin, there
is some truth to this. Hezbollah’s prestige rose dramatically as it became
the first Arab force to bring the Israeli army to a standstill by inflicting
substantial damage to Israeli forces and cities. In addition, through
unlimited monetary support from Iran, it has been able to gain further
political capital by offering to rebuild all the homes destroyed by Israeli
bombing. Despite extensive commentary in the media, Israel did also gain
from the conflict. At a strategic level, it reinforced its deterrence, by
showing its determination to respond to unprovoked attacks by its neighbors.
It also neutralized a great deal of Hezbollah’s forces conventional attack.
With Syria out of the country and a greater international peacekeeping
presence in the country, it may become more difficult for Hezbollah to
rearm. In fact, the conflict helped Israel expose to the international
community Iran’s role in fueling insurgency in the Levant, as well as
sowing instability more globally.
While Iran hoped that the conflict in Lebanon would distract
from its ongoing nuclear weapons program, instead it galvanized the
will of the permanent members of the UN Security Council to confront
Iran. Most importantly, the terms of the ceasefire will create a
more robust UN force to defend Israel’s northern border.
Israel will therefore has achieved the amazing feat of having the world community,
through UN peacekeepers, defend three of its five international borders
(Sinai, Golan Heights, and Lebanon). The cease-fire was particularly timely
for Israel, as it was clear that it was being dragged into an occupation it
could not sustain and an insurgency it could not defeat. As long as Israel
would not win the war decisively it would lose. For Hezbollah, however, as
long as it was not defeated it would be seen to have won. This asymmetric
equation was one that would eventually defeat Israel.
A few nights later after our final evacuation, I found myself among the
amazing bars of Beirut, which were once again filled with the beautiful
moneyed youth. The next day, I was back on flight to Cyprus where I met up
an old friend who is working with the UN Development Program doing
peacebuilding on the site of another useless war.
Before I left Lebanon, I asked local Lebanese whether they believed the
cease-fire would hold. Many answered with a shrug “Insha’allah.” I asked a
Lebanese colleague what this expression meant. “Think of it as a yes,” she
said with a smile, “a yes with an escape clause.”
I hope all is well in your respective journeys.
FoggyB.
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