Civil War Commemoration (written on 23 April 2008)

Ten days ago, Sunday 13 April, marked the thirty-third anniversary of the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War(s). To commemorate the event, Beirut became host to a plethora of cultural events that sought to remember the losses and atrocities of the past while providing a platform for debate about the precariousness of the current situation in Lebanon, where the prospect of renewed conflict looms ominously near. The format of events ranged from the more conventional, including photo exhibitions, lectures, film screenings, music and theatre performances, some of which displayed less conventional subject-matter, such as gay porn, to the slightly absurd, the most notable of which was a public art installation of over six hundred toilets arranged in rows, a double allusion to hiding in the bathrooms during fighting and gazing over headstones in a graveyard.

For the most part, the majority of the events that I attended did poignantly portray the core issues of conflict remembrance. One of the most prominent of these was the dual sense of collective and individual victimhood and perpetration that plague Lebanon’s Civil War memory. Like so many other long, bloody conflicts between ethnic, religious of political entities, the Lebanese Civil Wars passed through stages where the seesaw of relative victory and defeat, the scales of collective punishment and the convictions of identity mingled with ideology rendered everyone simultaneously guilty and innocent.

Different projects portrayed those textures in different ways, choosing to focus on either the intimate or the systematic. The former approach was taken by one photo exhibition entitled “Missing”, which consisted in hundreds of portraits of individuals who have been missing for over twenty years: row after row of sometimes smiling, sometimes distance eyes staring out from all around you, accompanied by a name, date of birth and date last seen. Another event that also favoured the personal as a means of accessing a political past was centered around the narratives of two men who fought in a militia, in which they discussed their sense of duty conflicting with their sense of common humanity. Such approaches are valuable because they transform the abstract into the tangible: they give faces to numerical casualty figures and voices to indiscriminate enemies. But the latter is equally insightful, as it explores the influence of broader social trends of group mobilization. Those dynamics were effectively conveyed by a display of political posters that were printed by the many warring factions during the fighting in the 70’s and 80’s, which were arranged both chronologically and thematically in order to enable layered analysis of the forms and methods of propaganda used during the wars. Indeed, both approaches are compatible, and they work together to shed light on the dark, murky waters that tentatively link political engagement and individual suffering in times of conflict.

Far from being mere static recollections of historical incidents, several events effectively linked the tragedies of the past with the trials of the present. The “Missing” exhibition, subtitled “What is to be done?”, offered the most direct engagement with the attempt to combine commemoration with reconciliation and conflict prevention. By far the highlight of the opening pres-conference of the exhibition was an moving, if slightly lengthily speech given by Dr. Alex Boraine, most known for his role as Vice-Chairman on South Africa’s Peace and Reconciliation Commission. His guiding premise was not that the South African experience provided a flawless model which could be applied to any country attempting to deal with the scars of past conflict, but that it could provide some insight into how solutions can begin to be approached.

While he spoke about the various issues at the heart of reforging the social ties that years of systematic oppression, disempowerment and denial obliterate, the humility and determination in his voice made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. He was living, breathing proof that the seemingly unconquerable quagmires of a nation marred by institutionalized racism, comparable to the institutionalized sectarianism that ails Lebanon to this day, could be overcome. What made his speech so powerful was that it was not just some abstract approach to post-conflict resolution, in which words like ‘the need to balance remembering and forgetting’ or ‘a multiplicity of truths’ are frivolously strewn about. Rather, the theoretical notions were illustrated by his own memories of interviewing and taking the testimonies of individuals who were battling the demons of a blood-stained past. The enthusiastic applause that met the end of his speech bore testimony to the uplifting optimism with which he had seemingly infected the crowd.

But whatever hopeful state in which I left the press conference was short-lived. Leaving the ground floor hall and arriving at the first floor exhibition space, I was dismayed to feel that the communal buzz to go forth and do good in the world had quickly dwindled in the flashes of the media wasps and the temptations of an open buffet.

The shallow engagement with the material of the exhibition was expressed in all of us flitting from wall to wall with glass of wine/juice in hand, hovering round the buffet table, posing for local media in front of those many haunting faces; while the media focused on the important people, the ambassadors and Dr. Boraine, but not on the families of those gone missing so long ago. Those old women and their daughters who had been dragged from the South and the Bekka to gaze at the faces of their long lost loved ones amongst the beehive of hip artists, aspiring journalists and politicized youths that such events always attract.


What audience do these events have? Although they proclaim that their efforts will, in some way, create a civil society dialogue that will prevent future conflict, do they really reach the target audience that would be effective? What does some artsy-fartsy high-profile opening of an exhibition have to do with the lives of those many families who are still nursing their wounds form the last bout of violence, wounds that still seethe and out of whose infection the next generation of fighters will bloom?

Such exhibitions and events have an exclusive audience: urbanite, middle class, often expatriate. It is not open to those who will bear the arms and the brunt of the next conflict, if and when it occurs.

I can’t help feeling that such events are more indulgent acts of elitist consciousness-clearing than any real activism aimed at maintaining “peace”.