A Lebanese directory of the dead

Next week, on April 13, Lebanon will commemorate the 35th anniversary of the start of its civil war, and you know the event will provoke laments that the Lebanese have no collective memory. Why not do something different for a change? Praise the ability of the Lebanese to forget, but with one caveat that we will return to below.

The ability of a nation to forget is underrated. When their war ended in 1990, it was not easy for the Lebanese to reach common agreement over what their 15-year nightmare was about. We could all agree that it had been a nightmare, that we were glad it was now finished, and that we regretted the fate of all those who had been killed or who had disappeared. But who was to blame? What had started the whole mess? There was no consensus among Lebanese on the answers.

So they forgot. And their forgetting was facilitated by the two pillars sustaining Lebanon’s postwar order: Syria and the reconstruction process led by the late Rafik al-Hariri. The Syrians engineered an amnesty law in 1991 that was designed to pardon wartime crimes. However, the flip side of this arrangement, as we saw with Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, was that if Syria and its Lebanese acolytes could declare people innocent, it also meant they could declare them guilty if political conditions demanded it.

The amnesty law was a whitewash, but it was a necessary one. Lebanon, and by extension Syria, could not have realistically built a postwar order by condemning the abusers in the war, since that would have meant condemning every leader tasked with ending Lebanon’s wartime mindset. It would have also meant apportioning blame, and the Lebanese could find no accord on who to blame.

Then there was the reconstruction effort. Rafik al-Hariri was not a man whose natural tendency was to wallow in the past. Nor could he afford this. His reconstruction project was a thing for the future, because that’s what investment is about, and while it could be criticized in many ways, the optimism the late prime minister sought to exude and peddle left little room for recollection of the war. Indeed it necessitated a hefty dose of amnesia, since looking brightly ahead meant avoiding at all costs looking, disconsolately, backward.

Was this so bad? Lebanon was not alone in understanding that, sometimes, you have to draw a big black X through the past to progress. In recent days, for example, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon was indicted for investigating crimes committed by the forces loyal to General Francisco Franco during the Spanish civil war, despite the fact that Spain passed an amnesty law in 1977. Garzon’s initiative may have been defensible morally, but legally and politically it crossed a red line the Spanish authorities could not permit, because the point of the amnesty law was to put to bed a divisive past.

But we can now throw in that caveat. If it is impossible for the Lebanese to reach unanimous agreement over what their war was about, nothing prevents them from remembering in a pluralistic way. Here we are in 2010, two decades after the end of the war – meaning a period of time five years longer than the duration of the war itself – and yet hardly a memorial to the conflict can be found anywhere.

If you drive by the Defense Ministry complex in Yarzeh, you will see the monolithic Arman sculpture Hope for Peace, which was at one time supposed to be placed in the downtown area as a memento to the folly of war. That is until someone, perhaps Hariri himself, decided (not without aesthetic justification) that it would be folly to place it in an area seeking to evoke a very different version of the past. Other than that, a brief village statue or commemorative cannon here, or an eroding plaque there is all that we have to remind us of our conflict.

Lebanon can really do a bit more at this stage. Museums, memorials, even an official day of remembrance for the dead and disappeared, are all mnemonic devices that would allow the Lebanese to remember individually what happened, and to pass this on to their children. Why not start by asking the government to print a book with the names and photos of those who died or disappeared, with no more or less than their names, date of birth, and date of death when known?

This wouldn’t cost more than what it costs to print our national phone book. It would be a directory of the dead, and it’s the least that we can do for those who didn’t make it through. This endeavor would help build a collective memory, but in a natural way, absent the strident insistence that we remember whether we like it or not. Rather, we would remember because we want to, because we feel it’s time to.