The Lebanese Bloggers last week: Remembering The War, Plus Some Kisses · Global Voices
Mustapha

April 13 marked the day of remembrance of the Lebanese Civil War. Lebanese Bloggers have pitched in to give their personal accounts of that terrible war. But before reading their takes, we must remember that the Lebanese have learned to kiss and make up. Just ask Jamal who wrote a whole post about the art of kissing in Lebanon. Now back to the war and the bloggers’ accounts.
Delirious writes on The Lebanese Blogger Forum:
When I think about the war, I feel as though it was always there, lurking in the shadows hand in hand with death and destruction. I was born to the lullaby of shells falling everywhere, and raised according to a simple Pavlovian principle: the moment your parents tell you to run to the shelter, even if it's in the middle of the night, you run, no questions asked
Jamal From Jamal’s Propaganda Site gives us various tidbits from his experience of the war:
I remember my parents not being able to go to my school because they feared for their lifes. My school was 10 minutes from home yet people there were of a different…. species, Nope,….. race, nah, ……. nationality, definitely not ……. religion, not necessarily, …….Sect , that's what it was.
Kais in Beirut To The Beltway gives us an account of the most terrible event he didn’t see:
Growing up I saw many horrors. But it was one that I didn’t see that stuck in my mind. When one day in 1982 we decided nowhere in Lebanon was safe anymore, we took a taxi to Damascus with the intention to fly to Paris. This was early August and “Christians” and “Druze” were massacring each other in the mountains. Our smoky taxi took us up and down the narrow and frightening Karameh road and passed through a ravaged Christian village. My father ordered me not to look, so I hid my head in my mother’s lap but I could hear the awfulness of what they saw: Mutilated corpses dug up from graveyards were put on display on rooftops, declaring to the world their guilt of being Christian in Lebanon.
Omega80 from The Blog of The Free Patriotic Movement offers further anecdotes:
I saw my mother crying at home one day, and my father trying to console her. The next day my father, sister, and I dropped her off at the airport, only then getting an explanation from my father on the way home that she had to go to Lebanon for a few days because my uncle was sick and she needed to help take care of him. It was only years later that I found out he had been kidnapped by a certain militia whose head is now currently in the Lebanese government
The Lebanese are bent on forgetting the bad old days and are trying to make a difference. Fortunately, it seems they haven’t lost their resilience: After giving up writing about politics for a while, Doha, from The Lebanese Bloggers has decided that she will continue to write to be able to make a difference to the life of her 20-year old brother, Abboudi.