After Syria, where will Lebanon go now?

Last month the spectacle of two Lebanese politicians from rival parties and sects slinging insults and then nearly fists at each other on live television petrified people across this country which lies nervously in the shadow of its Syrian neighbour, writes Channel 4 News Foreign Editor Ben de Pear.

The two politicians were arguing over Bashar al Assad, the Syrian president who has repeatedly warned: “Syria……is the fault line… any problem in Syria will burn the whole region”, a man who is accused of grevious human rights abuses of his own people.

Lebanon, it was always said, is where Syria has its wars. So now that Syria is actually hosting what amounts to a war, with thousands dead, people next door expect violence in Lebanon any day with a grim inevitability. A physical fight in the studio was prevented by the intervention of the presenter, but Lebanon is torn between those pro and anti-Assad, along broadly sectarian lines. However thus far, the hideous conflict next door has yet to migrate next door, and there are reasons to hope it may not.

In one sense the war has already spilled over into the country, with villages and towns along the border and in the north of Lebanon playing host to thousands of mainly Sunni Syrians fleeing repression and torture. We met dozens of them in the course of filming “Syria’s Torture Machine”: traumatised men and women, huddled and injured in safe houses, who told us of the unimaginable horrors they had been subjected to and witnessed. All worried desperately about family members left behind and perhaps targeted in their absence, some were with family or friends desperately worried about them. A few of them were clearly racked with guilt.

In October I met a couple, freshly fled with their children, who were nearly shot by soldiers in hot pursuit as they crossed the river into the relative safety of Lebanon, old opponents of the Assad regime who chain-smoked as they calmly told me of their different detentions, the beatings, electrocutions, and endless torture endemic inside Syria’s prisons. They agreed the worst method was the German chair; simply explained, a metal school chair with no back, reversed and upsided, through which the occupant’s spine is stretched to breaking point, and often beyond.

“If the physics of your body are wrong, you end up in a wheelchair or dead,” the husband told me. “You say anything they want you to say”.

Tortured children

More recently two other families have stuck in my mind. A grandfather in his seventies, with his son and daughter in law listening intently behind him, telling of how the mukhabarat came for him at night, put him in a cell with men and boys of all ages. They were all beaten and tortured by turns, but the adults tried to console the children who were tortured after they were dumped back in the cell.

After days of torture, the mukhabarat came him for him one night and released him into the dark, a man in his seventies forced to walk home barefoot in the same pyjamas he arrived in, battered and bruised and humiliated, wondering about the fate of the score or so prisoners with whom he shared his 4 by 4.5 metre cell.

Another was the father of five, detained himself, who sat next to me whilst his 16-year-old son told of his own two weeks in detention. As the story started the father stared at his son calmly with his hands on his legs as he knelt on the edge of the carpet.

Then as the son described the terrifying fear at the moment he learned that despite his father being released from detention, he was still to be held, beaten and questioned about him, the father looked at his wife, then briefly at me and then stared at the floor.

As his son slowly detailed the abuse, the beatings, and the electrocution, he pinched finger and thumb either side of his nose to stem his tears and visibly crumpled. It was unbearable for the father to hear the pain the son went through on his behalf. He slowly shook his head and left the room.

There are thousands of these refugees, broken and traumatised across the country, who now swear revenge against the regime, (revenge in almost all cases involving the return to Syria and tracking down and killing of the perpetrators of their abuse), being sheltered in turn by thousands of Lebanese.

But not everyone is so hospitable. At least a dozen refugees are reported to have been kidnapped and returned to Syria by bearded men in four-wheel drives who are commonly believed to be Hezbollah or their agents, or even Syrian agents themselves. With hotels and flats in certain Beirut districts full of pro-Assad supporters, looking to sit out the worst, and other districts hiding those who would bring his regime down, it’s easy to understand why Lebanese fear the worst.

Where Do We Go Now?

Which makes Where Do We Go Now ?, a film by Nadine Labaki (pictured below), which almost everyone I met in Lebanon told me to see, remarkably timely and important. Most told me to see it as the true reflection of their country, how fragile the fabric of religions and sects truly is.

The film, playing to packed houses across Lebanon, depicts life in a mixed and apparently harmonious Muslim/Christian village unravelling as the outside world intrudes into their remote community. After bad news appears on the evening news, watched on a communal TV in the village square, the women of the village turn the channel over and then later have the television vandalised so the outside world cannot intrude. But when it does, things fall apart quickly, and to avoid a repeat of the wars of the civil war, the women take drastic action.

The cinema I watched it in was packed with Christians and Sunni, Shia and druze, my colleague told me. Women in hijab and niqab and in low-cut tops laughed at the same jokes as bearded Shia and clean-shaven men in jeans and T-shirts.

Triumph

When the camera panned across the photos on the Christian graves of men killed in the war and then their Muslim counterparts, the audience  sighed and sobbed. And when, in the film’s climax, the women of the village drug their warring men with hash cookies and then overnight swap religions, so that the village mullah is met by his wife kissing the rosary, and the Christian mayor finds his wife praying to Allah, there was hilarious uproar throughout.

At the end, when the body of a man with mixed Christian and Muslim parentage is carried into the divided cemetery, the pallbearers turn to the mother and say “Where do we go now ?”, there was silence.

It is hard to actually imagine the reality of the terrible abuses we were told about inside Syria, the nature of the pain, the fear of the unending cruelty and brutality, but in that cinema and with that audience it was hard to imagine Lebanon unravelling in a similar fashion to Syria.

That the country, through this film, is able to stare into the abyss and then step back and laugh at itself is no small triumph in these times.

Follow Ben on Twitter @Bendepear