Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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Syrian mixture of minced lamb and cracked wheat. It was perfect lunch, exactly the food my grandmother would give me when I was young and would drop in on her unexpectedly. Hind and her sisters had lived in the apartment with their mother, who had died a year earlier, when they were girls. All three still dressed in black. Hind was the only spinster, one sister was married to Tanzi and the other to a Lebanese. She was staying with Hind while she recovered from a broken hip. She and her husband lived in a flat on the fifth floor of an apartment building in Sin el Fil, part of Christian east Beirut. With all the electricity cuts, which put the lift out of action, she had become a prisoner.
The sister recalled that the Sin el Fil area had suffered until 1976 from attacks by the Palestinians in the nearby refugee camp at Tel el Zaatar.
“I remember Tel el Zaatar.” I said. “I covered the massacre there.”
“You remember the massacre, but you don’t know that the Palestinians killed every young Christian man they found. When the camp was taken, they found Christians crucified in the cellars.”
“I went into the camp the morning it fell,” I told her. “All I saw were the bodies of Palestinians trampled underfoot by Christians looting the houses. If there had been crucified Christians, I’m sure the Christian militiamen would have shown them to us.”
“We lived with them,” she said sadly. “Until 1973, when the first fighting began between the Palestinians and the army, we lived on the Corniche.” The Corniche runs along the seafront in Muslim west Beirut between the American University of Beirut and Raouche, a Marseilles-like quarter of flashy apartment buildings, restaurants and night clubs.
“Are relations between Christians and Muslims better here?” I asked.
Hind said nothing, but her other sister answered, “To them, we are all giaour.” Giaour, pronounced g’war, was a word I had not heard before outside literature. Byron used it as the title of a poem in 1814. It was the pejorative Turkish name for “unbeliever.” “To them,” she repeated, “we are all giaour, Christians, Jews, everybody. We were having dinner at some Muslim friends’ the other night. Our host was talking about people who had done something awful, and he said they were ‘just like the giaour’. When he realised what he’d said, he excused himself, saying, ‘I didn’t mean you.’ “
She said that Turks in Alexandretta had accused the local Christians of treason during the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. “They said we were secretly supporting the Greeks,” she complained. She opened her purse and handed me a photograph of a handsome young man in uniform. “I had to listen to this, and all the while my son was an officer fighting for them in Cyprus. For twenty-one days, we did not know whether he was dead or alive.”
We talked about the referendum of 1938, when, according to the Arabs, trainloads of Turks had come from eastern Anatolia with false papers giving their residence as Alexandretta. When France handed the area to Turkey a year later, most of the Christians had left, some to French-ruled Syria, others to Lebanon. In Alexandretta, many Christian Arabs still wanted to be part of Syria. In Lebanon, Christians fought and died to stay out of Syria. In a few cases, they were the same people – wanting Syria to come when they were in Alexandretta, wanting it to leave when they were in Beirut. (I had seen the same kind of thing in Ireland with a Protestant friend, who had fled the violence of Belfast for a peaceful life in the Republic. When I asked whether he would like to see Ireland united under the same government which treated him well in Dublin, his answer was, “Never!”)
All three sisters felt things had changed, not least in subtle ways that had nothing to do with politics. In the past, local people had taken their summer holidays in the mountains, away from the heat of the coastal plain, particularly in the village of Sogukoluk. Recently, they had been taking European-style beach holidays at Arsuz and Samandag, burning their skins on the beach and sweating as much as if they had stayed home. “We have a house in Sogukoluk,” Hind said. “but we don’t use it any more.” The mountain resort had lost some of its charm when a convent there closed and later became a house of prostitution. “This forced all the family hotels to become brothels,” they lamented. “There were stories of young girls kidnapped in Istanbul and forced to work in Sogukoluk. Finally, the government stepped in, arrested some people and closed all the hotels. Now there are no hotels there at all.” Back in Arsuz, I went for a walk on the beach. Next door to the hotel was a single-storey stone house with red tile roof. It was the family home of Georges Sayyegh, the old man from Beirut I had met at Abdallah Tanzi’s. I saw him exercising on the sand. He walked up to the fence which separated the hotel beach from his, and we talked through the wire. At the Tanzis’ I had found him to be distracted, playing chess or bridge to avoid conversation. He tended to look away when other people talked to him. I had thought his manner strange and unsettling until Hind Koba told me his only son had been killed in Beirut, not by the war, but in a car accident. She said he had not been the same since. Standing there on the beach in his swimming trunks, he told me that he swam every day in Beirut at the beach of the Hotel St Georges. He was looking forward to his return there. I wondered how many people whose behaviour seemed awkward or offensive had lurking within them some tragedy, the death of a son, a daughter, a wife. Sayyegh invited me to visit him when I reached Beirut. “We can play chess.” he said.
At twilight, I took a walk through the leafy streets of old Arsuz. The first place I went was the post office, from which I hoped to make a call to my children in London. It was a tiny stucco shed at a bend in the road. A man sat at a vintage telephone switchboard behind a low counter. He spoke only Turkish, but understood a few words of English. He told me to use a call-box outside and sold me several 250 TL tokens. I tried both telephones outside. Neither worked. I walked back in. The operator, unsurprised, gave me a refund for the tokens. He wrote down my number and called the central operator in Istanbul to book the call. He hung up and said it would come in forty minutes. I went to the hotel to bring a book to read.
When I returned to the post office, there were two other men with the operator. One was a middle-aged worker and the other an old man wearing black sharwal, the billowing Turkish trousers still worn by old peasants, Turkish, Greek and Arab, throughout what had been the Ottoman Empire. The old man, who was born when the province was part of Syria under the Sultan Abdul Hamid, and spoke a few words of Arabic, invited me to his house for coffee, but I explained that I had to wait there for my call home.
So much and so little had changed since the old man was born. He dressed as his forebears did in the last century, and he had the hands of a man who worked the land just as they had. It mattered little that there was now a telephone link to London via Istanbul, because he had no need to call either city. There was no longer a Sultan, and the French army had interrupted Turkish rule for twenty years, the blink of an eye, before he went back to living with the polis who had kept a kind of order since 1845. Yet there were now a modern hotel, European tourists and a Turkish nation-state, all of which might pass away, leaving old men in sharwals whose sons would work the land as they and their fathers had. Or would the land and the sea which had always provided the peasants’ and fishermen’s bounty be turned over forever to package holidays for the fair-skinned Goths and Gauls who, in centuries past, had been unable to hold them by force of arms?
The sun was nearly setting when I reached the fields outside Arsuz. I had walked along the coast road and then up footpaths through the meadows, some of wheat, others of grass where sheep and goats were grazing. The foothills seemed to hold back a few clouds, leaving the sky near the sea an undisturbed mingling of red and blue, slowly giving way to blackness. Cut into the hillsides were level plots of earth upon which stood small houses, which from a distance looked adobe, the colour of the exposed earth around them. As the sun receded on the horizon, peasants slowly made their way from the fields, carrying their tools. The men wore black sharwals or khaki trousers, and the women’s long dresses trailed in the dust. Covered in sweat and dirt from a day’s labour, they seemed almost the colour of the earth, the colour of the houses they were entering, the colour of the hard ground neither they nor their ancestors had ever escaped. And they were as silent as the crops under their feet.
It was dark when I returned to the hotel. Wedding guests were arriving. The men wore new suits, many with lapels too wide or trimmed in black or brown,