Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City

Chapter Two. Downtown in "The Ancient City of the Future"

This chapter discusses the discourses surrounding Solidere’s reconstruction project in Beirut’s Central District (BcD). After a brief description of Solidere’s plans to reconstruct the downtown area, I present the responses of two groups who were excluded from participating in defining the future of the city.The first group consisted of intellectuals, historians, architects, and social scientists who voiced their opposition to Solidere’s plans through publishing “hegemonic texts” and holding meetings. The second group consisted of less powerful collectives such as the displaced families, local residents, and long-standing tenants who defied Solidere’s plans. They voiced their opposition by evoking their prewar and wartime spatial memories, announcing religious decrees ( fatwas), spreading rumors in informal gatherings, and forming neighborhood collectives. Both groups took it upon themselves to preserve the city’s endangered past and the heritage of its diverse ethnic groups.They doubted Solidere’s promotional motto “Beirut an Ancient City of the Future.” In analyzing the debates among intellectuals, political and religious leaders, property owners, and the population displaced by the war, the following questions must be addressed: In whose image and to whose benefit is space shaped and reconstructed? How is space influenced by powers of domination (Harvey 1989, 177–178)? How does the inclusion and exclusion of spatial memories take place? Which sites and locations are to be preserved for the future? And for whom? To answer these questions, I discuss how certain binary concepts such as public/private, traditional/ modern, hegemonic/powerless, and remembering/forgetting are constructed and questioned through the representations and interpretations of space/place and time/history. Chapter 2 Downtown in “the ancient city of the futuRe” 24 ReconstRucting BeiRut an aBsent state During the sixteen-year Lebanese civil war (1975–1991), the state and its agencies were completely absent. Government institutions failed to provide the services they had supplied before the war after militias and political parties took over the army, the municipalities, and television and radio stations, and after soldiers and policemen deserted their positions and joined militias based on their sectarian affiliation.1 This absence of a single, unifying political power left a void later filled by Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.2 By the late 1970s, five years after the beginning of the war, militias and ideological groups had become highly effective politico-military machines . They developed sophisticated bureaucracies and provided public services, collected ransoms, ran educational institutions, provided health services, controlled markets and ports, operated radio and television stations , and published newspapers (Denoeux 1993, 92). Accordingly, residents of Beirut found themselves interacting with militiamen and other armed groups on a daily basis. Militiamen acted as mediators when conflict erupted between neighbors, they housed the war-displaced, and they offered jobs for the unemployed. Merchants and shop owners solicited militia members to protect them and their properties and in return paid protection money; owners of residential buildings maintained a subordinate relation with militias in charge of their neighborhoods by offering them vacant apartments; and the children of the displaced families joined these militias as fighters. The majority of the interlocutors I interviewed in Beirut recalled occasions when they solicited the help of militias in securing food, shelter, security, employment, water, or electricity. Under these circumstances, sectarian or confessional identity had become a viable medium for survival. “Without it [confessional identity], one was, literally, rootless, nameless, and voiceless. . . . One was not heard or recognized unless one’s confessional allegiance was disclosed first. It was only when one was placed within a confessional context that one’s ideas and assertions were rendered meaningful or worthwhile” (Khalaf and Denoeux 1988, 192, 196). The devastating sixteen-year civil war formally ended in 1991 after most of the combating parties signed the Taif Accord. Accordingly, a new government was formed by Prime Minister Rafik Hariri; the country’s constitution was revised, giving more power to underrepresented confessional groups; and most of the militias were disarmed. Although the war ended, postwar government institutions continued to be subjected to the Downtown in “the ancient city of the futuRe” 25 interference of political parties, warlords, and traditional leadership, in addition to regional and international developers. The challenges confronting the Hariri government were to restore the authority of the state, to reunify the army and the police forces, and to rehabilitate the damaged infrastructure. Moreover, the government needed to reconcile the conflicting groups, solve the problem of thousands of displaced families, rebuild the war...