Exodus

Charles Glass

D'you think you'll bring the Sixth Fleet in?' Roger asked boldly, but Grant took the question in his stride.

7 doubt it,' he said with every appearance of frankness. 'We did, of course, in a similar situation in 1958, but since then the feeling in the UN against that sort of "intervention" has got much stronger. What's more, the Russkies have now built UP a comparable fleet in the Med, and certainly wouldn't hesitate to use our "pro- vocation" as a pretext for bringing it in too; and once that happened we'd have a full international crisis on our hands before you could blink. No, I guess we'll have to confine ourselves to emitting advice like steam from a leaky pipe and warning everyone else to keep off the grass.'

From Death in the Lebanon, a Roger Turnbull detective yarn by John Tyndall (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1971).

Beirut There is no official evacuation of Amer- ican citizens from Beirut this month, but many of them are leaving anyway. Out of 1,500 Americans in Beirut last Febru- ary, an estimate made by the US Embassy, there are only a few hundred left. The sudden departure is not a new phe- nomenon for Americans in Beirut, who have been leaving at a moment's notice almost since they began arriving as Protes- tant missionaries in the early 19th century. The honoured tradition of American evacuations dates from 1828, when the Missionaries feared the plague, which was Moving inexorably north from Acre, and the bombardment of the Allied fleet, Which was then attacking Ottoman coastal * `elwns, including Beirut, in the war for Greek independence. The Americans' Main fear, however, was violent opposition from the Maronite Catholic clergy, who strongly disapproved of Protestants leading the faithful away from the True Faith. So On 24 April 1828 the small American colony chartered an Austrian ship to Malta, taking with them a few English Missionaries and Beirut's first Protestant Convert, an Armenian called Gregory War- tabet. They spent two years in Malta and returned with an Arabic translation of the ible and that most seditious of all man's Inventions, the printing press. It was another bombardment by an Allied fleet, in 1840, that caused the 'pelicans to flee a second time. The ciritish, who had worked so hard to dis- ember Greece from the Ottoman Empire Years before, were in 1840 trying to hold ,ule empire together by wresting Syria kwhich then included Lebanon, Palestine Transjordan) back from Egypt's ruler, Mohammed Ali, and his son, Ibrahim Pasha. The Allied fleet shelled Beirut on 9 September, and the Americans fled aboard the US corvette Cyane to Larnaca, Cyprus. They sailed back after Ibrahim Pasha withdrew from Syria in November. Twenty-six years later, they founded the Syrian Protestant College, which later be- came the American University of Beirut, in mainly Muslim west Beirut — safely out of reach of the Maronite monks in the east.

When America entered the first world war, the missionary families in Beirut suddenly found themselves enemy aliens who were allowed to leave the Empire by train through Aleppo and Constantinople to Switzerland, where they sat out the war. When they came back, it was to a French Mandate territory called Le Grand Liban, though they steadfastly listed their address on university stationery as 'Beirut, Syria'. until French protests forced them to acknowledge Lebanon.

The fourth evacuation of Americans came in May 1941, eight months before Pearl Harbor, when the US consulate in Beirut advised them to go to British Palestine. The British were planning to take Lebanon from the Vichy French, and the US wanted its nationals out of harm's way.

Americans did not feel the need to flee from Lebanon again until 1958, during the country's first civil war of the 20th century. The US Ambassador, Robert McClintock, encouraged Americans to escape, but only a minority of the 5,000-strong community took his advice. US Marines landed in Lebanon on 15 July, the day after the, coup d'etat in Iraq. The Americans who ignored McClintock were not harmed, and only one American soldier, Sergeant James R. Nettles, an orphan, was killed.

Things became much more serious for the Americans in Beirut, who had grown into a large community of academics, businessmen and journalists, in 1967. On the eve of the Arab-Israeli war, mobs in mainly Muslim west Beirut threw Molotov cocktails at the American and British embassies. Demonstrators massed at the main gate of the American University, smashing shops, like Uncle Sam's Café, with American names. In three days, 3,500 Americans were evacuated to Cyprus, Tur- key, Greece and Italy. Sadly for the Americans who had to leave, most of them opposed American policy and sympathised with the Arabs who were attacking them.

The next evacuations came in 1976, the second year of the second civil war, when the Ford administration decided that Americans in Beirut were in mortal dan- ger. The main official evacuation was by sea in August 1976, when Christian forces were besieging the Palestinian refugee camp at Tel el-Zaatar. The US Navy sent launches to the west Beirut seafront to take Americans and other nationals to ships of the Sixth Fleet. President Ford and Henry Kissinger allowed themselves to be photo- graphed in the White House that night furrowing their brows with concern for the Americans in Beirut. When the evacuation was completed, Ford and Kissinger took the liberty of congratulating themselves in front of official photographer David Hume Kennerly's cameras on a job that went off 'without a hitch'. There was, however, a hitch in Beirut: the Palestinian commandos ' of Al-Fateh who were 'protecting' the evacuation kidnapped five of the departing evacuees at the dock. Although the five, all Arabs, had been promised space on the ship by the US Embassy, no American diplomat raised the matter of their abduc- tion with Al-Fateh. Al-Fateh accused the five of 'treason' for trying to leave with the imperialists, and one of them — an Iraqi Christian student — had his passport con- fiscated by his embassy.

At the. end of February this year, as American marines were 'redeploying' to ships of the Sixth Fleet, American citizens were again evacuated. The seafront was shelled as the evacuation was in progress, and a young girl was wounded. But the Americans did get out alive.

The latest evacuation is unofficial and might be dubbed 'the press exodus'. It began on 24 October with telephone calls from the US Embassy to all American correspondents in Beirut, warning them to be careful. The theory was that, with the US embassy closed and US diplomats well protected, other Americans, particularly journalists, might be the only available targets. (A non-American western diplo- mat confided that the US embassy had told other diplomats that they might be- come targets because the Americans were out of reach.) Some of the American hacks left immediately, while others remained until their companies (relying on informa- tion from Washington) ordered their cor- respondents out. By the night of the American presidential elections, only five American journalists remained in Lebanon.

The one place the Americans were told to avoid was Baalbek, the Lebanese town of nearly 200,000 people whose name has become synonymous in Washington with terrorism of the Shi'ite Muslim variety. But the town itself was quiet on the night of the American elections. There was no shooting in the air or any other form of celebration as state after state in America gave its electoral votes to Ronald Wilson Reagan. The militias were cordial to this American correspondent, and the Baalbekis did not even seem particularly concerned at re- ports from Washington, republished in the Lebanese press, that Reagan had ordered the aircraft carrier Eisenhower to the east- ern Mediterranean so that its planes could bomb Baalbek either in reprisal for any

attack on Americans in Lebanon or aVa pre-emptive strike to counter any anti- American attack the Shi'ites might be planning. (How the US, whose diplomats have been confined to Christian east Beirut since last September's embassy annexe bombing, would know what the Shi'ites Baalbek or anywhere else were planning was not spelled out.)

The Islamic Jihad group, the people who telephone threats to the .news agencies in Beirut and claim responsibility for most attacks against Americans, called the Beirut daily As-Safir on election night and promised to kill individual Americans ill Lebanon. The US administration, through 'intelligence sources' in Washington, promised to bomb the Shi'ites. The mutual threats have so far not been carried out, and many of the hacks who left Miring the pre-election scare are returning. There has been an 'ominous develop- ment though: a Sunni Muslim fanatic from Tripoli, Sheikh Said Shaban, drove down to Beirut last weekend to give a speech at, the American University. He denounce° the university for turning out what he called 'traitors' to Islam and enemies °f good Muslims. The university authorities were powerless to stop his coming on to the campus, and the Shi'ite Amal militiamen who guard the area did not seem to care that a Sunni fanatic, whose theology is inimical to theirs, would enter what has become their turf and condemn an institu- tion they are trying to protect. But if Sheikh Said was angry at American poll* he might have been addressing himself to the wrong American enemy. Archibald Stuart Crawford, from whose American Evacuations from Beirut (Librairie du Liban, Beirut, 1972) I've cribbed much 01 the information in this article, wrote that 'the enmity against our country has rlOt been due to acts of Americans abroad '– we are rather model US citizens — hi1! rather to Arab reaction to decisions 0' actions of our government.' Crawford was a vice-president of the American Univer. sity and a grandson of missionaries NO° briefly fled Beirut in the 19th century. American policy in Lebanon has been, to put it mildly, a success. But the missionaries who founded the America,n University left behind a legacy of whict; they and their successors can be proud, arm it is a tragedy that the university should he brought into disrepute because of the American government. 'Maybe in a bun" dred years,' a Sunni friend of mine said tot me as we ate lunch at Faycal's, an excellen_ restaurant facing the university's 01dgate, 'some new Bayard Dodges a0,1".. Daniel Blisses [two of the founders of ta" Syrian Protestant College] will hoe come back and start all over again.' For come Lebanon has descended into T; religious and tribal fanaticism syhtc., wr

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plagued it a century ago. Only a few bratt unarmed Lebanese and Americans, of them at the university, remain to rest_'' : the tide. Their political leaders are n° making their task any easier.