Poor Lebanon!!

 

Poor Lebanon!!

 “The society has been destroyed. There is nothing in Lebanon. We are playing in our blood.”  A Maronite monk.  (From:  Mackey, Sandra. “Lebanon: A House Divided.”)

 I have written about my job in Lebanon in 1966-67, and about evacuating my family out of Beirut as a result of the Six Day War.  I have also tied some of my experience living in Lebanon into Sandra Mackey’s book, “Lebanon, a House Divided”, originally titled “Lebanon, Death of a Nation”.

 Sandra Mackey’s book discusses the multitudinous factions that effectively destroyed any semblance of civilization and rational government in Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990, and onward to the present day. 

 The indigenous warring religious factions in Lebanon, comprise Maronite Christians (including the Phalangists), Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, The Druze (a separate, non-Muslim, non-Christian religion), the Alawites, and other Christian and Muslim sub-groups.  External powers fighting or trying to keep peace in Lebanon, were, and are, The U.S., Israel, Syria, France, the UN. And the PLO.  Political entities include the Christian Phalange, Amal (Lebanese Shia), Hezbollah (Iranian Shia), the PLO, and various Sunni groups.

 I was able to observe some of these factions in the year plus that I lived and worked in Lebanon.  It was evident in 1966-1967, that trouble was brewing in the Middle East.  It started (really it continued the thousand-year conflict), with the Israeli victories over the neighboring Arab states during the Six Day War of 1967.

 I was Technical Service Superintendent at the Mediterranean Refining Company refinery being run by Caltex.  My immediate boss was Ghalib Ali Ahmad, a Sunni Muslim.  He reported to Len Rayburn, who in turn reported to John Creecy, two Americans.  I had two engineers in my group, Carlos Khachan, a Maronite Christian, and Walid__?, , I believe, a Shia Muslim.  The refinery lab with which I was associated was staffed by a mixture of Christians and Sunni and Shia Muslims.  Some names that I remember are Fuad Wanna and Habib Khayatt, both Christians.

 An aside on Carlos Khachan, who had an engineering degree from the University of Mississippi.  To hear him tell the story, his family gave him access to finances and told him “go to the U.S. and get an education”.  The only rub was that Carlos’ language was Arabic, with a little bit of French.  Can you imagine the hoots of “raghead” in Oxford, Mississippi?  Carlos mastered American English really quickly, and got his engineering degree.

 So, I had all of the main religious factions of Lebanon, excepting Druzes, within my normal work environment (there may have been one two Druze, but I didn’t know them).  The only thing that I could really discern was the differences between Christian and Muslims, which was mostly societal, and did not affect work flow.

 Mackey’s book continues in considerable detail, how Lebanon was literally ripped apart by the warring political, religious and societal factions.  It seems that everyone in the Middle East that had a fight, came to Lebanon to fight it.

 I continued my career, in NYC, Dallas, and around the world, and lost track of the details of what was happening in Lebanon.  I remembered major news items, like the U.S. Embassy, with which I was familiar, getting blown up, and hundreds of U.S. marines getting killed.  I remember reading about political assassinations, kidnappings and continuing violence, but eventually it all blended together in one big confused mess.

 Sandra Mackey’s book not only tweaks some memories of when I lived in Lebanon in the 1960’s, it also categorizes what happened during and after the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. The book orders in my mind, how such a beautiful place on this earth could be literally destroyed by the underlying factional hatreds embedded in the religion and politics of the region.  Lebanon was a harbinger for the future for Syria, Iraq, the Kurds, and other parts of the old Ottoman Empire arbitrarily delineated by the Britain and France and the Sykes-Picot agreement.

Ray Gruszecki

May 20, 2021