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(continued)
Beirut’s birth as a city occurred over 5,000 years ago, during the earliest stages of the Bronze Age. By the Iron Age, Phoenicians had established a strong trading and seafaring tradition along the natural harbor of Beirut’s shores. Romans conquered the city in 64 BC, ruling it for over four centuries.
Emperor Augustus granted Beirut Roman rights and privileges as a Roman colony, naming the city after his daughter, Julia Augusta Felix Berytus. Roman urban planners laid out Beirut along the grid of a Hellenistic city. Its two main axes, the Decumanus Maximus and the Cardo Maximus, divided the city into four quarters—a layout that would endure long after Roman rule had ended.
During the Crusades, control of Beirut shifted between Muslim Saracens and Christians, a medieval prequel to the warfare that would later trouble modern Lebanon. In 1516, the Ottomans conquered Beirut and adorned the city’s architecture with the columns and domes of Istanbul. When Ottoman rule ended in 1920, Lebanon came under French control. Through massive public works projects—constructing roads, hospitals, sewers—the French brought Beirut into the 20th century.
In the decades before 1975, Beirut grew into a crowded cosmopolitan center with an increasingly diverse urban population. After absorbing over 50,000 Armenian refugees following the Armenian Genocide, Beirut become the destination of Palestinian refugees with the creation of Israel in 1948. By the time the civil war erupted, the Armenians had established themselves in Bourj Hamoud, in East Beirut. The Palestinians were still living in crowded refugee camps.
The city’s different quarters and neighborhoods all flowed into the Bourj, the heart of Beirut. Buses and taxis clustered beneath the palms of the central square, the Place des Martyrs. Outside the square, merchants hawked their goods in the markets along the downtown alleys. Here, the smell of fish mingled with the scent of camellias and mangoes, as vendors sold gold jewelry and fine fabrics.
When civil war came to Beirut, the markets—or souks, as the Lebanese called them—were burnt to the ground. The mosques and churches of downtown Beirut were destroyed. The militias vied for control of the entire central district, aware of its symbolic importance. After months of fighting, the warring militias established a line of demarcation, cutting Beirut in half along the Damascus Road. Eventually, shrubs and weeds sprouted up from the ashes of the city’s center: the Green Line.
West Beirut was already dark when James Corbett left the offices of the Daily Star, Lebanon’s English-language newspaper. Heading home to his apartment, he could only see a few feet in front of him. The use of a regular flashlight was inadvisable on nights like this in Beirut, making one an easy target for robbery or kidnapping. Instead, James lit up the sidewalk in front of him with a tiny, bean-sized flashlight. He stuck it in his mouth and bit down to turn the light on. He bit down intermittently, not wanting to leave it on for too long.
James flashed the light. It illuminated an Arab man standing two feet in front of him. James froze. The man was armed with an AK-47 and speaking Arabic. Probably Hezbollah, James thought. Probably strung out on heroin too. The man motioned to James’s pockets. Reluctantly James reached into his right pocket. He handed the man a few Lebanese pounds. He hoped that would be enough. It wasn’t. With Lebanon’s shattered economy, the Lebanese pound wasn’t even worth a dime at one point. And here was an American in a sport coat roaming the streets of Beirut late at night. Surely he had some American money too.
The Arab man reached into James’s other pocket. He had guessed right. James handed over a slim wad of American dollar bills. A small price to pay, he thought. But the Arab man was still not satisfied. To someone like him, foreigners—particularly Americans—must have had big dollar signs inscribed on their foreheads. If they did not have money or valuables with them, they did at home, stored safely.
The Arab man was getting belligerent now. James couldn’t understand Arabic, but he could tell that the man wanted to follow him to his apartment. There he would rob him once more. Or worse.
Following the Israeli invasion and the Siege of Beirut in 1982, James had arrived in Lebanon to teach journalism and advertising classes at the American University of Beirut and Beirut University College. When he wasn’t teaching, James wrote articles for the Daily Star. His main interest was studying terrorism. In Belfast, he’d written his dissertation on the Irish Republican Army. James argued that the distinction between a “terrorist” and a “freedom fighter” was greatly misconstrued. Anyone who resisted tyranny, he figured, was a freedom fighter—as long as they didn’t demonstrate a reckless disregard for the lives or property of civilians. After he earned his Ph.D., he’d gone to Nicaragua to study the Sandinista Revolution then underway. With its factional warfare and displaced communities, Beirut seemed like an ideal place to further his studies. For him, the parallels between Beirut and Northern Ireland were hard to resist.
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