The Year of Bombs

Today we celebrate the beginning of a year of car bombs. The first one was a year ago, or actually on October 1st, 2004. They blew up, or tried to blow up, Marwan Hamadeh, a pro-Joumblatt minister, or at that point ex-minister, who had openly shown his dislike for the re-nomination of Lebanese president Lahoud. Lahoud was – unconstitutionally – re-nominated with the help/pressure of the Syrians.
So ‘they’ (we are still waiting for the UN report of Mehlis to find out who is ‘they’) blew up Hamada one block away from my work. It resulted in a ‘lock down’ drill, which is not a big deal. You basically stay inside. It was quite a Big Bang, I thought, hadn’t heard a n explosion of that magnitude for quite some time. Things went pretty smooth until February 14, Valentine’s Day, when they blew up someone on the other side of my work, 800 meters away, close enough to have windows shatter in the neighborhood; Hariri. Now that was a BIG BANG. Never saw a smoke plume rise so quickly above an explosion. For a while we thought it was this balloon, which they have downtown these days, that had blown up. The we thought it might have been one of the buildings downtown that had gone down. Well, 20 minutes of suspicion were solved when we saw one of Hariri’s very close advisors pick up his son in tears. That particular lock down drill did not go so well as 1,000 panicky parents came to pick up their children all at once.
And since then weÂ’ve had quite a few number of regular car bombs (without victims), a few close calls (LahoudÂ’s son in law and a judge being among the victims), and a few direct hits (May Chidiac, George Hrawai and Samir Kassir, Rafic Hariri + basilufelinessil Fuleihan).
All together I wouldn’t even be able to tell you how many explosions we’ve had. There are theories as to when you should leave the house. A popular thought is that once a bomb has gone off, the city will be safe for at least 6 days; perfect time to go out on the town. I am not worried, go out anyway, but do have a tendency to leave kids at home, and drop them at ‘safe’ places, such as the beach. I did make one amendment, however. Hana, my daughter, is no longer allowed to sleep under the window. We have a large supermarket across the road, part of a Christian chain, ( imagine explaining it this way in Europe!), and if they blow that one up, my windows will be all over the place. Only last year I finally removed the last remainder of my M3 plastic; i.e. bombproof plastic, which keeps your windows together in case of an explosion, so it doesn’t shatter all over the place. It was a remnant of the civil war, we had it installed then, but it didn’t seem very useful anymore, so I removed the last bits of it about a year ago. Takes a lot of o work as you need to soak the window, and the M3 plastic for 24 hours in dishwashing liquid before you can remove the plastic with a razor blade. Time to get it back on? I don’t know. I am awaiting Mehlis final report, due in two weeks, but rumor on the street has it that the Syrians are going down, and going down hard. And if Damascus is in turmoil, I predict the same things happens in Syria as what happened to Iraq, which is not going to look to good for us here in Beirut. Maybe this was our last ‘peaceful’ summer in a coupe of years. Prophetic words? We’ll see.