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Beirut, August 10, 2006
From Beirut
from Diane Wilson
August 10, 2006Diane Wilson, author of An Unreasonable Woman, traveled last week with a delegation of people from CodePink: Women for Peace to Jordan where they met with members of Iraq's Parliament to discuss the Parliament's plan for peace. Afterward, four of the women went to Lebanon to witness firsthand what the current conflict is doing to the people caught in the crossfire.
Beirut—Two days before the l00 cars. The last talk I heard of the hundred car convoy was at Martyr's Square where over 700 cement stones representing Lebanon's dead was stretched in a dozen rows with a paper sack and a candle in front of each one. We went at 5:00 p.m. to help put out the candle sacks for the vigil, but we got our directions wrong . For over 45 minutes we sat under the shadow of a dark statue of four figures, a man and a woman prostrate, then a child with an arm blown off, then a giant woman looking something like the Statue of Liberty. All of the figures had bullet holes and the child's arm was totally blown off. We didn't know if the bullet holes were the artist's rendition or if it was actual bullet holes.
Finally we landed a taxi with the red license plates (which means it's service and therefore lots cheaper!) and were headed back to our cheap apartment. Medea was haggling over the taxi price and Gael was taking up for the taxi driver because she said he was an old man. Then, in the middle of the arguing, we saw all the cement stones and lurched out of the cab.
It was still light out, nobody had lit the candles yet, and a dozen plastic lawn chairs was filled with men sitting together. Eventually, we started talking with Green Line, an activist group in Beirut with many projects. They took their name from the band of green trees that separated north and south Beirut during their civil war and now used the words to unite all of Beirut.
Were the hundred civilian cars still going? Still taking supplies into southern Lebanon? We had heard that the road to the south was impassible. The night before on CNN, a UN peacekeeper was shown crossing a log over a river to get on the other side. Oh yes, yes, he said. Not to worry. A route that would take 30 minutes will now take 5 hours. It is still passable.
This is the third time I’ve ran into so called facts and found them orphaned from the reality of the ingenious Lebanese people. The first was that there were no roads into Lebanon that were not bombed out and closed. The second was that the price for a driver taking you into Beirut could cost you hundreds of dollars. The third was that you couldn't drive a car into southern Lebanon without running up against that log on the river. Oh, yeah, and an invading army and an artillery gun that will shoot anything that moves. (We saw that! on CNN last night, too.)
Still the talk of a l00-car convoy into southern Lebanon runs strong even though the gas (literally) is running out and could be a deal breaker, although I’ve been told repeatedly that all Lebanese have their little 'stash' of gas hidden somewhere. Somewhere. And if that doesn’t work, you can always get 'benzene' off the black market for nine dollars a gallon.
The l00 cars are also complicating our plane tickets. How do you fly out on Monday morning when your car's tires are shot out on Saturday?