THE DAY THEY KILLED KARAMI

Charles Glass reports the

Lebanese reaction to the death of a Prime Minister

Beirut THE rumour preceded the news by only a few minutes. `Have you heard?' a friend asked, as he approached me outdoors at about ten o'clock on Monday morning on the campus of the American University. We stopped to talk in the shade of old banyan trees, their roots reaching down from branches into the earth, near the wall which surrounds the 19th-century stone house of the absentee American president of the university.

'What happened?' I asked, venturing a question which in this country could elicit almost any response — true or false, momentous or trivial, but invariably bad.

'We may be called upon to take hostages.' 'It seems they've shot down Karami's helicopter.'

`Who did? Where?'

`Someone just told me the helicopter came down. He didn't know anything except that Karami and Rassi were on board.'

Karami was Rashid Karami, the Lebanese prime minister, a Sunni Muslim from Tripoli. Rassi meant Abdallah Rassi, the interior minister, a Greek Orthodox physician from Zgharta, also in north Lebanon. Both men took a Lebanese Army helicopter on Monday mornings from their homes in the Syrian-controlled north to their offices in Syrian-controlled West Beirut to avoid driving through Maronite areas dominated by the anti- Syrian Lebanese forces militia.

My friend told me he was on his way to have shoes made to fit for about $30 a pair. As an expatriate, his salary was in dollars, and Lebanon is the only country in the world where the value of the dollar has been rising. The dollar was four Lebanese pounds a few years ago, when American, French, Italian and British troops patrolled the streets. It was now 122 LL. Within the coming two hours, when the banks would close abruptly, it would be 125.50 LL, making my friend's shoes about five cents cheaper.

I walked on to the faculty cafeteria upstairs, where another friend and I were going to have coffee. (The students eat downstairs in the American University system of segregation which makes little sense to me.) We walked up to the cashier, an unshaven man with little to do, and ordered two coffees. I asked for Turkish, and my friend, an Arab, wanted Nescafe, white. He asked the cashier if there had been any news on the radio and told him what we had just heard. While the man prepared the coffee, he took a small transistor radio out of a drawer and fiddled with the dials. Nothing happened. 'The batteries are dead,' he said. 'Why don't you buy some?' my friend asked. 'Why? Batteries cost 80 pounds. I would rather Vend it on food than hear about Karami.'

We went with the coffee to a table near the window from which we could watch the students walking back and forth from their classes, particularly the girls in their sum- mer dresses enjoying the recently de- liranianised atmosphere of the Syrian reign in West Beirut.

We talked for a while about Lebanon, Israeli raids over the last few days on villages in the south and the sad prospects for the future. When we were leaving, someone else told us Karami and Rassi had been slightly injured and taken to hospital in Jebail, ancient Byblos. 'Don't worry,' my friend said. 'They never kill the lead- ers.'

I went with a driver up to the ministry of information to see if there were any additional details. The ministry might at least have a radio. It was a beautiful, sunny morning, and most people were shopping, everyone and everything relaxed. Shop- keepers sat on stools outside their shops, drinking coffee or talking to friends. Beg- gars asked for small sums of money, and maids and poor housewives haggled with vegetable-sellers over the prices of the goods on their barrows. 'One hundred pounds for a kilo of tomatoes?'

In the ministry of information's salle de presse, once in the hands of Christians after the Israeli invasion and now run by Amal officials (Shi'ite Muslim Amal officials) with mostly the same staff, a radio was Playing on a table. A couple of employees of a kindly type who lurk in almost every office in Lebanon doing nothing in particu- lar but ready to do anything from making coffee to typing out telexes, were listening to the news. 'What's happening?' I asked one of them. This was about 11 o'clock. `Karami is very bad,' he said. 'But Rassi is okay.'

`Who shot them?' I asked.

`No shoot. Boom!'

`Where?'

`Boom inside. Under seat.'

From there, I went to see a banker friend, but he was not in the bank. I left him a message and returned to the car park, where the driver was sitting with the attendant, both of them listening to the radio. In Arabic, very solemnly, the driver told me, `Karami is dead.'

`Haram?' the attendant blurted out. `Haram Karami? Haram =line.' (Pity Karami? Have pity on us. We are the ones who will suffer,' he said, raising his hands towards the sky as though at any moment it would be dark with rockets and shells.

We drove out of the car park, just below Hamra Street, a fashionable shopping dis- trict many years ago. The scene of a half-hour earlier had suddenly changed. People were walking quickly, shopping for bread and supplies in case of some sort of siege. Men shuffled nervously, as we drove past the street where the Druse leader Walid Jumblatt lives, moving along the pavement, hands behind their backs, fing- ering worry beads or key chains. The beggars had disappeared. Shopkeepers were closing or standing ready to close. People were leaving their offices to drive to the safety of home, and traffic grew worse. We were losing time, and I shared the general impatience to be on my way.

Iwas going to see a friend who lives near the Green Line, going up a hill which leads from the ruins of the Hotel St Georges on its own tiny bay. We drove past the old presidential palace, long since replaced by a hideous 1960s mock Holiday Inn above the city in the Christian mountains, where laundry hung from lines outside windows, shell-holes went unrepaired and weeds were visible in the garden behind a 12-foot stone wall. Just opposite was the un- finished Murr Tower where Syrian soldiers stood ready (for what?) behind sandbags and sand-filled barrels painted with the Iranian colours of its previous occupants until last February, the Shi'ite Hizballah. Nearby, shopkeepers stood just inside their doorways, ready to pull down the steel shutters if anything happened.

I remembered walking down this street at the end of June 1975 from an old house nearby. The newly appointed prime minis- ter, Rashid Karami, had just told a crowded press conference that he had formed a 'cabinet of national unity' and that the fighting was over. As I walked down that road towards the Hotel St Georges, I was nearly killed by a sniper. Ever the optimist, Karami would be found by the Syrians nine years and many deaths later, just as he was leaving his house in Tripoli to go fishing, to form another last-chance national unity government.

We went up the hill, parallel with the demarcation line between East and West, `He's had enough promotion to make General by now.' past the Greek orthodox patriarchate, past the façades of destroyed houses, to the graceful stone Arab house of another friend. He and I talked for a while about Karami, whom he knew. We talked about who the culprits might have been and why someone might want to kill him. 'Who would want to kill Rashid?' he asked. 'He had no militia. He had no personal ene- mies. The Lebanese forces wanted him to resign, and he did resign. Why kill him?' There seemed to be two variables: who and why. Unfortunately, we knew neither and, as with so many other deaths in Lebanon, we were unlikely to learn. It is possible that the man who planted the bomb didn't know his employer.

My friend asked if I had time for a coffee. Before I answered, he advised, 'I don't think you should stay on this side. Something might happen. Nothing might happen. You never know, but you should be safer in the East for a while.'

The traffic going east was heavier than usual. Cars along the wide Corniche Maz- raa stretched back a mile in three lanes going east and west. We moved past the Nasser Mosque (built by West Beirut's Sunni Muslim community in its palmier, Palestinian-backed days), its high minaret overlooking little now but destruction, filth and fear. The highest Sunni official in the land, albeit one from the north, was dead.

The traffic thinned out as we neared the crossing point. Most people travelling be- tween the two sides have to go on foot. But exceptions are made for journalists, sol- diers, officials and anyone with influence.

At the final west side checkpoint, the Muslim soldiers could not have been more relaxed if they'd been having lunch in a Neapolitan trattoria. They lounged outside in deckchairs near a small shed without sandbags, their weapons lying nearby. They looked up at us, uttered a greeting and waved at us. For the next 200 yards, the road was deserted. At the other side, the Christian soldiers who ostensibly be- long to the same army demonstrated the same nonchalance. We were inside the Christian sector when we heard the first explosion at 12.30.

It turned out to have been a stick of dynamite thrown, like two others that afternoon, from a car at a pile of rubbish in the streets of West Beirut. Either it was someone from the 'Keep Beirut Tidy' campaign or someone was hoping to stir up trouble.

On the east side, one heard a variety of rumours and reactions. When we heard on the car radio that all schools, banks and government offices would close for a period of national mourning, a Christian taxi driver said, 'They close for one za'im (strong-man)? They never closed for the 20,000 who were killed.' Why 20,000? I wondered. I'd believed more than 100,000 had died since the war began. 'Twenty thousand young people,' he explained, amending that to, 'Twenty thousand young

men.' At dinner that night, one man said to me in all seriousness, `In 1976, the Amer- ican Secretary of State sent a letter to the French saying there would be no peace in Lebanon until all the political leaders were killed.' He pushed the point forcefully over his cigar. `Are you saying,' I asked, 'that the US killed Karami, the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, the northern Maronite leader Tony Franjieh, and President Bechir Gemayel?'

`Why not?' Later, an Armenian driver said, `Our side blames the Syrians. They blame Israel. Who knows?'

All that is known is how it happened: explosives had been planted in the back of Karami's seat on the helicopter. When they went off over the sea south of Tripoli, Karami was literally blown apart. Rassi, the interior minister, was injured. The pilot, Captain Antoine Bustany of the Lebanese Army, was seriously wounded. His co-pilot, Captain William Mullees, reacted quickly and landed the aircraft on the highway just inside the Christian area near Jebail.

The bomb might have been placed on board while the helicopter was at its base in the Christian area, or while it stopped at Tripoli.

Tension eased after the first day, and all sides condemned the killing. The Maronite President, Amin Gemayel, has appointed the non-military, moderate education minister, Selim Al Hoss to act as prime minister for the time being. Karami had in any case boycotted Cabinet meetings with the president since January last year and resigned early last month.

His loss, like that of most Lebanese politicians, will be felt mostly in his home town, where his father had been the mufti, the religious leader, since before he was born. Abdel Hamid Karami, like his son a prime minister, had the distinction of being the only Arab governor of Tripoli. King Feisal of the Hejaz during his short-lived kingdom of Syria in 1920 had made him governor until the French drove out the Arab forces and replaced them with the mandate. After his death, Karami had a statue erected in his honour at the southern entrance to Tripoli. His son Rashid lived to see it torn down by pro-Palestinian militia- men under the command of an ancient family rival in 1975. He was nonetheless heir to an Arab nationalist tradition: he opposed the Western leanings of President Camille Chamoun during the civil war of 1958, and he had opposed the Islamic fundamentalism of the new religious lead- ership in Tripoli over the last few years.

For now, there has been no violent reaction. The flags on both sides of Beirut are at half mast — in the West because Karami, the `Effendi' of Tripoli, was a Muslim; and in the East, because he represented in his office national legitima- cy. Perhaps one day they will erect a statue to him.