Beirut, a City Shelled Senseless, Short of Gravesites

NICOSIA, Cyprus —  Some in panic, others in bitter resignation, Beirut residents by the tens of thousands are throwing in the towel, abandoning a city that has been shelled senseless.

Numbers cannot describe the damage done to the Lebanese capital by more than four months of day-and-night pounding by streaking rockets, whistling mortar rounds and thunderous, building-busting artillery. But the numbers gathered and circulated daily by courageous police officers, civil defense crews, doctors and journalists provide the world outside Beirut with at least some notion of the tragedy.

It is hardly a cliche to call these numbers grim statistics, each reflecting the outrageous violence, numbing misfortune and sometimes poignant incidents recorded in the growing rubble.

Take zero, for instance. An East Beirut newspaper, Ad Diyar, reported Monday that there are zero gravesites left in the cemeteries of Beirut. More than 450 Beirut residents have been killed in the dueling by Christian and Muslim gunners, and hundreds of others have been killed in vicious small-arms fighting between Muslim militias. It has been too much for the cemetery operators.

No Burial Space Is Available

“The graves are full,” one operator told Ad Diyar. “The new fatalities will have to remain out in the open because there is no burial space left.”

Or take the figure one. There was only one like Florelle, the press report said. In a city where moneyed classes still cling to a reputation for chic, as if entertaining with elegance could provide a safe dimension to life, Florelle was the most fashionable florist shop in West Beirut. Late last week a 155-millimeter artillery shell exploded in the street outside Florelle, and an outpost of the good life was blown away.

Or two. A pair of 12-year-olds, one Muslim, one Christian, were best friends in a neighborhood where sectarian differences had seldom intruded. Last weekend one was dead and the other dying. Rabbih Mohamed Kabbani, the Muslim boy, had been playing with his Christian pal, George Malke, and was going home when a shell burst beside him. He died of shrapnel wounds. Three days later another shell crashed into the neighborhood, and George was hit. The doctors said he would not survive his wounds.

Zouheir Saade, the photo editor for The Associated Press in West Beirut, has four sons in a dangerous situation and no bomb shelter in his apartment house to protect them.

“I was watching the shells crashing into buildings, not knowing what to do,” he recalled.

So Saade spread the risk.

“The only precautionary measure I could take,” he said, “was to distribute my four sons, each in a different room. I thought that was the only possible way to keep some of them alive in case the apartment was hit.”

Four men, driven to desperation by the relentless shelling that has cut off food, power and water supplies, followed each other to death in separate but identical tragedies.

In the Muslim slum of Ouzai, 26-year-old Hussein Mikdad climbed into a well to fetch water for his house nearby. He slipped on the wooden rung of the ladder and fell to the bottom of the well, where he drowned. One after another, his brother and two cousins went into the well to try to save their relatives. Each slipped and drowned, a police spokesman reported.

Numbers have been at the crux of the Lebanese conflict since the civil war began in 1975. The Christians held the key posts, the presidency and command of the army, and all the power that went with them. That power was allotted in the 1940s based on a census taken in the 1930s, which showed the Christians in the majority.

By the 1970s, the Christian-Muslim numbers had reversed, although there has not been any subsequent census to confirm it.

According to published police estimates, nearly 700,000 of Beirut’s 1.5 million residents have left the city since the latest and heaviest outbreak of Lebanese warfare began in March. These staggering numbers have turned Beirut into a ghost city, populated only by contending armies and militias and those civilians who cannot get out or have elected to stay.

Most Muslim refugees, concentrated in West Beirut and the southern suburbs, have moved south. Some, in one of the political twists that characterize the conflict, have pushed all the way into the security zone established by Israel along its northern border.

Others have traveled east across the Lebanese mountains to Syria, which has 40,000 troops in Lebanon, providing the bulwark of Muslim forces in the struggle against the country’s Christian minority.

Christians Fleeing to Cyprus

When the shelling became intense in early June, the Christians began to flee. More than 20,000 caught the overnight ferries to the island refuge of Cyprus in a matter of weeks, but then Syrian shells began falling around the ferries and their Cypriot owners halted service to the Christian ports.

Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, Christian commander of the Lebanese army, and Syrian President Hafez Assad, have the power to end the shelling, but neither appears ready to take that step.

Aoun, who heads the Christian remnants of Lebanon’s fractured national government, says the struggle against the Syrians and their Muslim militia allies is a “war of liberation” that will not end until the Syrian army has left Lebanon. Like his countrymen, Aoun lives underground, in a bunker beneath the parking lot of the presidential palace in the eastern reaches of Beirut. He sleeps with a pistol beneath his pillow, an aide has said.

Assad, stubborn and clever, insists that his army remains in Lebanon only to help the contentious factions establish a government with an equitable distribution of power.

Meanwhile, the Arab League, which authorized the intervention by the Syrians--as peacekeepers--in 1976, is again seeking a solution to the fighting. On Wednesday, for the second straight day, the shelling subsided in Beirut. The newspaper An Nahar proclaimed it an “undeclared truce.”

The An Nahar story did not hold up 24 hours. Wednesday night the radio reported the first shells falling in a crushing resumption of artillery fire, which went on for eight hours and was the heaviest pounding of the four-month ordeal. On Thursday, the police totaled the numbers: 28 dead, more than 80 wounded.