One thing that we’re hearing a lot is how time was stopped on August 4th for many people in Lebanon, especially those who lost loved ones.
This is what Rita Hitti said in an AFP interview. She is is the mother of Najib Hitti, aunt of Charbel Hitti and mother-in-law of Charbel Karam. All three of them died in the Beirut port explosion last year as firefighters. They were sent to their deaths by the Lebanese government which did not tell them what was waiting for them. The ammonium nitrate – 2,750 tonnes of it – that exploded was not disclosed by the Lebanese government.
What worries me is that we heard the same thing – that time stands still – from relatives and friends of the war’s ‘disappeared’. And they’ve been waiting since the 1970s and 1980s.
The Lebanese government passed an Amnesty Law in 1991 exempting themselves from their own crimes, including the crime of forcibly disappearing thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians. They then proceeded to tell Lebanese and Palestinian civilians to bury the dead without telling them whether the dead were truly dead.
I spent a few years working on the story of the war’s ‘disappeared’. I’ve interviewed relatives and friends and familiarized myself, as much as one can without a direct connection, with their situation. An entire chapter of my dissertation is on the topic of how time is experienced by people in such situations, and the chapter is summarized by what Rita said: time stands still.
This is what Mariam Saiidi said in Sleepless Nights as well. She is the mother of Maher who, at the age of 15, was forcibly disappeared in 1982, likely by the Lebanese Forces.
Mariam has done multiple interviews over the years, and confronted Lebanese politicians and ex-militiamen dozens of times. As a result, she’s had no illusions as to the nature of ‘postwar’ (post-1990) Lebanese society which she’s described as complicit in the erasure of people like her son.
The parallels are, as with so much of Lebanese history, haunting. Mariam has been denied accountability for 39 years and counting. Rita has been denied accountability for one year and counting.
At the time of writing, the committee of the families of the Beirut explosion victims gave Lebanon’s authorities 30 hours to lift the immunity of officials. Otherwise, they declared, “bones will break”. As of now, the Lebanese government’s policies are identical to the ones that led to the 1991 Amnesty Law.
It is absolutely crucial that we support this committee and recognize their anger as legitimate. We must not, under any circumstances, seek to police that anger.
This is what post-1990 Lebanese society did with relatives and friends of ‘the disappeared’. We failed to understand that there could be no healing while so many lived with such cruel injustice. We accepted – some more than others, many reluctantly – the Faustian bargain of ‘reconstruction’ at the costs of accountability, and we inherited a regime that embodied such criminal values.
Post-1990 Lebanese society sought to police the anger and grief of people like Mariam. The Committee of the Families of Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon, which was formed in 1982, sought time and time again to appeal to the Lebanese government to investigate ‘the disappeared’.
They were often campaigning on their own. Lebanese officials told them to move on. They could not move on.
The problem is that the Lebanese government, in all its incarnations since 1990, is comprised of men – all men – who are directly complicit in forcibly disappearing thousands. As a result, 39 years have passed since 1982 with no accountability. Some members of that committee have even passed away since then, with no knowledge of what happened to their loved ones.
If we want to avoid the same happening to friends and relatives of those who died – were murdered by the Lebanese government – on August 4th 2020, we must stand with the committee of the families of the Beirut explosion victims, including – especially – if bones must break.
Those who are uncomfortable with such ‘violence’ must at least acknowledge its validity. The Lebanese government is murdering people on a daily basis. The economic crisis is a form of violence. Hunger is violent. Lacking medicine is violent. People are dying on hospital beds or at home, some are dying by suicide, others are trying to leave, others still are paralyzed with grief. These are all the result of structural violence by the Lebanese government.
That people choose to fight back is both predictable and understandable, and it is crucial – this must be repeated – that they be supported.
In The Fire These Times episode on the legacy of the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915-1918), the journalist Timour Azhari described the presence of both peaceful and non-peaceful protesters on the same streets of Lebanon since 2019 as a form of coexistence.
This is a healthier framing, in my opinion, than those who choose to condemn protesters who are ‘violent’. Even if you are uncomfortable with ‘bones will break’ rhetoric, please do not judge those who are justifiably angry enough to use it.
There is a story, recounted by Lina Mounzer in that same episode, of Djemal Pasha, the Ottoman military leader who ruled over Lebanon/Syria during the famine asking Lebanese women whether any of them have eaten their children. When they said no, he replied that they were not really suffering from hunger.
In November 2019, the Lebanese president Michel Aoun told the Lebanese that if they don’t like his policies, they can just leave the country.
