By boat to Beirut
Richard West
Larnaca, Cyprus Asoon as Beirut airport was closed by the invasion of the Israeli army, the Lebanese discovered another means of travelling to and from the outside world. This was a daily service of boats between Larnaca, Cyprus and Jounieh, a port in the Christian section of Lebanon, five miles north of Beirut. Some independents got in on the act — including a yacht of the skylark type run by a very amiable Englishwoman — but two vessels made regular scheduled trips: the Liban of Jounieh and the Alisur Blanco, variously said to be registered in Las Palmas, Panama, Piraeus and Larnaca. I made the Larnaca-Jounieh trip on the Alisur Blanco, a ferry boat that apparently was taken off the scrap heap when the war began. 'It has five engineers,' said a rival captain, 'and none of them really qualified, but they've managed to keep the defective engines go- ing.,
As always in the Levant, the people of one country are not slow to enrich themselves out of the misery of another. I'm told that after an earthquake on one of the Greek islands 30 years ago, a dentist Worked on the quayside pulling the gold teeth of peasants who had no other means of buying a place on a boat. Many people Frew rich from the civil war in Cyprus itself in 1974 when Greeks and Turks were wan- ting now the Cypriots see the chance to get rich from somebody else's misfortune. A cheap- rate one-way journey of only 100 miles costs $135 from Larnaca and almost $150 from Jounieh. The owners apparently have to pay a cut of their profit in 'tax' to Phalangist or Christian militia in Lebanon; nevertheless the pickings are good, for nothing will stop the Lebanese from travell- ing to and from their business. Only a handful of those I met on the two journeys Were actually refugees. Most were going on business trips to and from Europe, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and everywhere where the Lebanese display their talent for business.
The first Lebanese I met on the Alisur Blanco, a Christian, was coming back from a business trip to Saudi Arabia. 'We can't get back through Damascus,' he said, `because we are Christian. They take all our Money and send us back to the country we started from. We can't go through Israel; so we have to make a two-day journey via Larnaca. But Beirut is still the business Capital of the Middle East. They still need us. There have been attempts to make it Athens, Nicosia, Cairo, even Bahrain, but 11 never works.'
I complained to another Lebanese that to flee a hostile part of the island. And back in Larnaca one could not get fresh orange juice though Cyprus is a producer of oranges. 'In Lebanon,' he said, 'you will be able to get orange juice. In Lebanon you can get everything at a cheap price oranges, vegetables, meat, whisky, TV sets, cars, everything. That is why we weep for our beloved Lebanon. It was a country where you could get anything.'
Another man, an electrical engineer, ask- ed if I had been to Beirut before and, when I told him not since 1969, he said in a ponderous fashion: 'Now you will find that everything has changed.' I supposed that he meant that half of Beirut had been blown up, but not a bit of it: 'You will find now that we have the newest technology. Everything works very well.'
A man in the construction business said there would be more work than ever: 'The old buildings of sandstone are not badly damaged by the Israeli bombardment, though they weren't designed against horizontal blasts. The cement buildings fell to bits. It wasn't until 1975 that building was done with the idea of war in mind.' (When I got to Lebanon I saw he was right. Most of the gimcrack skycrapers are gutted. The fine sandstone remains. I bet the old Crusader castles would stand up against modern bombs and artillery, as did most of the good ancient buildings during the se- cond world war, like Cologne cathedral.) I met a group of British doctors and nurses from Christian Aid. One of the doc- tors told me: 'We have two things in com- mon. We're all odd-balls of some kind or other and we're none of us Christian.' Another doctor said he specialised in plastic surgery but he had heard that most of the injuries in West Beirut were crush wounds. `Even in Belfast,' he said, 'there were not many opportunities for plastic surgery.' I also learnt that several nurses at one of the London hospitals, who had little to do because of the present strike action, had volunteered to go to Lebanon but their leave of absence was refused as this might be termed strike-breaking. Florence Nightingale would today be considered a scab.
An English doctor asked the barman if there was beer enough to last the voyage. Yes, the Alisur Blanco was well equipped and comfortable, he was told; it could also stand the sort of storms one meets in this part of the Mediterranean. One of the passengers said: 'You get what they call a mistral, a wind that gets up very quickly; in half an hour it reaches Force 7 strength. The fishermen are very frightened of it. Whereas in the Atlantic you get permanent winds, here you get winds that come from the sudden heating or cooling of the sur- rounding land.'
We did not meet a mistral on the way to Lebanon. Nor did we suffer the even worse disaster of a search by the Israeli navy, who frequently stop ships on the high seas here in disregard of international laws of piracy. One of the passengers said that on his previous voyage the Israelis had kept them for seven hours rolling about in a heavy swell. On this occasion one Israeli ship came alongside and there was panic when one of the Englsh doctors took out a camera to take a picture through a port- hole. The officer who stopped him just in time said: 'The Israelis see everything.'
Ahore at Jounieh the madness starts. Quite apart from the chance of some- thing falling on to your head, there are the dangers of any country where there is no ac- tual government. I gave my passport to an official who disappeared with it. Two teenage gunmen (of the Phalangist militia?) ignored my request to go to Beirut and put me into a car whose silent driver took me about ten miles in the other direction. He stopped at a hotel where I found a room and later I enjoyed a very good meal in the restaurant of a castle.
Next morning in the hotel lobby I met some agreeable Lebanese women (like all of their kind they smoked incessantly, drank coffee, and chattered in bad French), who told me I was in Byblos, adding casually: 'It is the oldest town in the world.'
I went back to Jounieh on the following day and tried to find my passport from three sets of officials, the last of whom ask- ed me angrily: 'Why did you presume to come to Lebanon without a visa?' I almost bit my tong..: resist giving the obvious answer that half the Israeli army were here without a visa, but instead made an apology and paid him the 'tax' of about £20. In- cidentally it had taken me more than an hour and a half to change some travellers' cheques. Many stolen cheques are around from the bombing and looting of banks; the ordinary banks refuse to change cheques unless you can give them a reference; the money-changers give you a bad rate.
Armed with a visa for 48 hours, I got to Beirut and the 'green line' dividing the two rival factions. Oddly enough, getting to West Beirut and staying there was little trouble. The Muslim militia were surly, the PLO apparently psychopathic, but neither suggested that one should get their ac- creditation. The Bristol Hotel was comfor- table; it took me five minutes to make a telephone call to London that I had ,failed to make in Byblos and even in Larnaca. There were bottles of ice-cold beer in the fridge — and very welcome they were next morning when I woke to Beirut's dawn chorus of bangs.
West Beirut was altogether much less try- ing than East Beirut and Jounieh, where I faced the problem of getting permission to leave. I spent countless hours driving from office to office including one trip with a cowboy driver who started to try the famous Lebanese sport of 'bumping' another driver. The game consists of trying to push your rival on to the pavement or in- to the line of oncoming traffic. The loser then draws his revolver and tries to shoot the winner. The referees in this game, who are the army or the militia, then open up on both cars with rockets, grenades and machine-guns or anything else they have to hand. From that third, hot and horrible day I remember only two pleasant incidents. At the offices of the Phalangists (or Lebanese army, it is hard to tell) I was asked to fill out a form by one of the most attractive girls I have ever seen, in spite of her uniform and her gun. As an added bonus, she smiled and tried to welcome me to an extent that was almost flirtatious. My other pleasant memory comes from a cafe whose buxom and smiling hostess gave me a dish of figs from her own garden, a steak from one of her own cows and, strangest of all, bottles of '33' beer, the same that we drank all those years ago in Vietnam. Some Americans there said that '33' beer gave you leprosy; some peasants believed that it gave you immunity from defoliation sickness. Nobody knew what it was made of. But the '33' beer I drank in Lebanon tasted delicious.
I came back here on the Liban, a ship-to- shore landing craft with a flat bottom that thumped and crashed at every wave of the mistral that we were facing. The crew, apart from four pleasant Gambians, were drunk and aggressive. The next day in Larnaca, so I am told, the Liban was pronounced unseaworthy, even by Lebanese standards, and taken out of service.
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