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URBICIDE Beirut 1975 - 2006 By Isabelle Verhaert Master thesis in Human settlements Promoters: Lieven De Cauter & Bruno Demeulder Postgraduate Centre for Human settlements Departmement of Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning, KUleuven - Belgium 2006 Close up satellite image of part of Beirut city June 2006 2 Close up satellite image of part of Beirut city August 2006 Before After © Copyright 2006 DigitalGlobe Inc. © Copyright 2006 DigitalGlobe Inc. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. Satellite image of part of Beirut city after Satellite image of part of Beirut city after bombings June 2006 bombings August 2006 3 part 0 | introduction. I write this introduction after finishing this thesis, in order to explain how I have written the rest. After coming back from Beirut on the 12th of June, I did not have a clear plan on how to structure the thesis, but I had some ideas. Some things I felt that were important to me and comments that I had on the situation. So I started writing about the civil war. One month later, when in my thesis I had arrived at the 1982 invasion of Israel, the present conflict started. In a strange way this paralyzed me and the first days I spent watching television, seeing the same comments and images over and over again on different channels and talking to people in Lebanon on msn messenger or on the phone. My whole introduction and starting point seemed irrelevant now and I was not sure how to proceed. I had chosen the text ‘Le Liban’ by Amin Maalouf, which Jad Salhab had given me, to show the relevance of the civil war in the world today. I had written an introduction where I compared the Lebanese civil war with the “global civil war”. This term tries to define the transnational character of the American ‘War on Terror’. I wanted to compare the characteristics of the civil war in Lebanon with these civil/international/extra-systematic characters of wars today. But after the 12th of July the civil war stopped being an event that had ended and that could be used to analyze a present day situation. It became the present day situation. The meaning and content of the civil war seemed to change, and the comparison with the war on terror in a clear-cut and isolated case- study suddenly became impossible. I started to rewrite my history of the 1975-1990 war, punctuating it with references to the situation today. I certainly felt encouraged because at that time I was reading about the ‘82 invasion and in the beginning I could relate what I read with the things I saw on the television. It seemed all one and the same conflict. So there I was writing about past, present and future at the same time, when the war started to change. Israel had a lot of difficulties on the ground in their advance to the Litani river and from the air they bombed more than ever before. Hezbollah on the other hand seemed to be more active and putting up more resistance than expected, while the international community kept quiet. And I ended up rewriting the same thing over and over again, still talking about the 1982 invasion. It became clear that I was trying to do the impossible, that I needed to find a way to separate the present conflict from the past, because of its presence and ever changing nature. I did this by splitting the thesis in two major parts, one about the civil war, with no reference at all to what was happening now and one part about the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. In the second part I used no information more recent than the ceasefire in mid August. An important part of this thesis is the history of Lebanon and the current affairs. More than ever I see the difference between those two. While history is moulded into a story, the present tells itself only as a series of events. There are different reasons why I spent so much time writing about this. I started to read and write before I left to Beirut, for myself, to get to know a part of the country before I was there. I wrote a small part with a brief history, full of Phoenician splendor and great conquerors. This text grew when I arrived in Lebanon and I started to notice that everything people told me about their country was the same I read in the travel guides and saw in ads promoting Lebanon. So I started reading more and I found out that a lot of the Lebanese idealized their own history. By the time I came back, I wrote a great deal about the different struggles in the region, but I had not decided yet whether I was going to include all this in the thesis. But then the present conflict erupted and I found myself frustrated in front of the television wondering how little current affairs are placed in a historic context. This was also the time when I started to reread the texts about the theory of urbicide. To my surprise, none of them bothered to situate the destruction they were analyzing in a historic framework. History never should be an excuse for excessive pain and destruction, but if this destruction is isolated from its context, it quickly assumes the mythical proportions of pure evil. In postmodern times everything is questioned in Western society. Modernism's 4 ideologies have been criticised to bits yet if these authors talk about war or in the context of war situations, they paint a picture that is very much black and white, happily simplifying matters into a tale of good and evil, god and the devil. The more you read about actual war situations the more you realize this distinction never existed. While writing on the civil war and the present conflict I became obsessed with the idea of objectivity. This had already started when I was reading about the civil war and was fueled by hearing contradictory accounts from different people or reading documents on the internet. Sometimes it is hard to recognize the same events in different accounts. I do not suggest people are lying, but a difference in emphasis makes for a entirely different story. I remember that in the past I always wrote a small introduction about the subjectivity of every author. This became a formality for me, required at the beginning of every text, but this got a whole different meaning in this thesis. In war situations people belong to certain groups. There seems to be no place for people who wants to remain neutral: every position is claimed by either ‘side’. These parties fight each other and as a consequence the people get isolated from the other groups, locked up in their own territory. When the war ends, those groups might live together again, but their past experiences and memories remain. Their personal history is not always rewritten according the experiences and memories of the ‘other side’. In this way, different stories of the same war are kept alive. Of course, this process occurs every day, everywhere, but in war situations it is far more pronounced. In the present conflict, there was a lot of debate on how many minutes the news had spent on the Israeli side and how many on the Lebanese side, and the objectivity of it all. My experience was that during this past two months I spent a lot of time defending Lebanon. It is amazing how people can transform this conflict of Israel and Hezbollah into a ‘we’ versus ‘they’ situation, resulting in statements like “yes, but they started [Hezbollah kidnapping soldiers]”. And there I went for the next half an hour, explaining the history of conflicts between the two countries, arguing that the conflict was merely a phase in a long enduring series of past struggles, rather than a “new” event with a clear starting point. I can't shake the feeling that I am doing the same in this thesis, trying to defend Lebanon. This is inherent to the subject being Lebanon and its capital Beirut, not Israel versus Lebanon or Lebanon versus its neighbours. Because I focus on Lebanon as a subject in this thesis, I automatically seem to side with today. Trying to change that would result in an attempt to cover things up, so in the end I simply stopped trying. The amount of rockets that landed on Israeli territory and the death and destruction they brought on is not in the scope of this thesis, but the Lebanese casualties and destruction is. This is a very blunt remark and some people might still insist my interest betrays a moral judgment, but it is in fact the only way to distance myself from moral judgement. This thesis consists of four parts. The first part is a treatment of the history of Lebanon and the civil war. In the second part I look at the term urbicide and how this has been defined and used by different authors. I revisit some events of the war and connect them to urbicide. In the third part I look at the recent conflict that started on the 12th of July 2006 and some factors that proceeded it. In the fourth part, finally, I reconsider urbicide from a more military point of view, and focus more on aerial bombardments. Throughout these four parts I talk about my experiences in Lebanon through anecdotes an stories. My original aim was to write a more conventional thesis, with specific sources and statistics I had hoped to gather in Beirut.

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