Beirut Is Alive and Well

Every table at every open cafe was full in downtown Beirut this evening when we left at 10:00 p.m. Sure, it's like a mall dressed in Ottoman and French Mandate architecture, but Place d'Etoile, which had been a virtual ghost town between December 2006 and yesterday, was a beautiful site this evening. People who stayed away from the heavily militarized downtown after Hezbollah and its allies occupied the adjacent Martyrs' Square with an also heavily armed, tent city for the past eighteen months returned this evening to sit, stroll, smoke nargileh, eat, and enjoy the beautiful spring evening.

There are still tanks in the streets, still soldiers patrolling the neighborhoods with machine guns, still Syrian Social Nationalist Party flags up in Hamra, still Hezbollah and Amal posters up elsewhere, still the giant photograph of the Hariris in Ain el Mreisse torn in half, still more than sixty people dead and several more wounded, but now, along with these things, there is a future in Beirut. There is a present, there is a here and now, of enjoying the city for what it really has to offer, which we hadn't seen in full bloom like this since we arrived in September. It's like a cancerous patient lying in the hospital for months on end with very little hope of survival who suddenly and miraculously is up and walking with a clean bill of health. There will always be fear of relapse into political instability, sectarian violence, and foreign meddling, and there are still deeply rooted problems of poverty, environmental degradation, and employment discrimination, but for now, in this first evening of Lebanon's power sharing agreement, things are looking good.


The corniche in Ain el Mreisse at sunset


Place d'Etoile at about 7:30 p.m. (just as people were starting to come downtown)


The Hariri Mosque just after sunset


A busy downtown cafe at 10:00 p.m.