Subject: LEBANESE DISCOVER PEACE IS HELL

>From The San Fransisco Chronicle (Tuesday March 24, 1992) By Lara Marloe

Beirut

What price peace? The Lebanese recently learned. According to statistics compiled by the crime reporter Of Beirut's An Nahar newspaper, 144,240 people lost their lives in Lebanon's 1975-91 civil war, 184,051 were wounded, 17,415 are still missing, and 13,455 were maimed. The government half-heartedly confirmed the numbers which exclude thousands Of Palestinians killed in the internecine "camps war" and massacred by Christian militiamen in the Sabra and Chatila camps during Israel's 1982 invasion.
But who was going to quibble about figures when their release coincided with the country's most severe financial crisis ever? Residents of Beirut are now complaining aboutthee price of bread, vegetables and gasoline rather then remembering the dead.
If nobody won the war, everyone is losing the peace. With unemploYment at 30 percent, the Lebanese pound lost more than a third of its value in two recent weeks. The Lebanese saY they never knew such hardshiP in the 16 years Of war.

There were months of euphoria last summer, when tens of thousands of emigrants returned home bringing with them precious dollars. There was a frenzy of refurbishment and rebuilding. Television ads portrayed an idyllic "New Lebanon" of peasants crushing grapes, feasting and, dancing. In July, the army took control of the Palestinian refugee camps in Sidon and Tyre. In return, Israel was supposed, to relinquish some of the Lebanese territory it occupies, but it did not. From August to Decermber, the last nine American and British hostages were freed. Lebanon expected foreign aid to pour in, but it did not.

Shabby Capital

The returning emigrants found their capital shabby, its streets still patrolled by Syrian troops. For those who had stayed through the war, the miracle of daily garbage collection and 10 hours a day of electricity soon wore off, leaving other, unfulfilled demands for economic prosperity.
The returnees complained that a beggar's mentality had taken hold and that working conditions were impossible. With the autumn storms, most packed their bags and headed back to Australia, Canada, America and Europe, saying the Lebanon they had known was gone forever.
Today, Beirut is a dejected city. Interminable traffic jams are aggravated by guns being fired into the air to break up the gridlock. The worst winter in 40 years has turned the roads into perilous mud tracks. Inflation is running at 100 percent.
Desperate for revenue, the government is trying to collect income tax, quadrupling duty on imports and demanding payment for years of undelivered telephone bills for lines that rarely function.
Telecommunications are a luxury for the rich, who rent illegal private cellular systems.

'Please Help Me'

Refugees scavenge through rubbish bins, searching for cardboard and glass to sell for a pittance. In the Hamra shopping district, an old woman's hand reached through the car window and made her plea in perfect English:
"My name is Josephine. I have never had to beg before. I have no money. Please help me." Seven Lebanese banks have closed for business since December.
The Syrian-backed cabinet all but depleted the central bank's reserves by raising government salaries 120 percent this year. A new scandal - double payment of retroactive raises for cabinet ministers - hit the papers last week, to the populace's general indifference.
"What do you expect?" said taxi driver Abdul Rahman. "They are all thieves." The government reproaches the press for its "irresponsible" coverage of the crisis, but mostly blames the foreigners: the Americans for banning airline travel to Lebanon; the French for continuing to support exiled Christian General Michel Aoun; the Israelis for allegedly plotting to divert the waters of southern Lebanon; the Germans for blocking European Community aid pending the liberation of two German hostages.

Marwan Iskandar, one of eight economists recently appointed to an emergency commission, has said that the only way to reverse the crisis is to end corruption in the civil administration. Lebanon is the only country in the world, noted the L'Orient Le Jour newspaper, where you have to bribe a civil servant to pay your taxes.

Unlikely to Rebel

But, exhausted by the war, bullied by Syria and still distrustful of one another, the Lebanese are unlikely to rise up in rebellion. Syrian soldiers man checkpoints at all major intersections, their green camouflage fatigues blending in with the withered branches propped up to commemorate the March 1963 coup that brought Syrian President Hafez Assad to power.
On walls throughout the city, posters of Sheik Abbas Musawi, the pro-Iranian Shiite Hezbollah leader assassinated by the Israelis compete with faded portraits of other "martyred" leaders: Kamal Jumblatt, Imam Musa Sadr, Rene Muawad, Rashid Karami. Musawi's slaying sent a shiver through Lebanon's tiny Western community. Would another of hostage-taking begin?

U.S. Supplied Arms

Fearing Hezbollah reprisals for the Israeli attack, the State Department discreetly forbade U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker to return to Beirut. It had not escaped Hezbollah's notice that the Apache helicopter gunship and Hellfire missiles that incinerated Musawi, his wife and child were supplied by the United States.
On everyone's mind is September, when Syrian troops must withdraw to eastern Lebanon, under the 1989 Taif peace accords. In theory, the Lebanese army will ensure security in Beirut if the Syrians withdraw as scheduled. But the army has incorporated into its ranks thousands of former militiamen, whose personal hatreds have by no means vanished.
Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has predicted renewed fighting when the Syrians leave. In the meantime, forgotten by all but the Israeli pilots whose air- craft continue their weekly photo-reconnaissance overflights, Beirut grumbles and sinks deeper Into its impoverished peace.