BRIH, Lebanon – It took more than three decades and an unexpected death to bring the village of Brih back together. Nestled
among fruit trees and olive groves in a rugged valley, Brih was
populated for generations by both Christians and Druze – adherents to a
small but influential offshoot of Islam that emerged in the 11th
century.
But when Lebanon descended into civil war in the 1970s,
the two communities found themselves pitted against each other. In 1983,
when the last Christians fled, Druze villagers moved into abandoned
Christian houses; others were razed.
Then last November, Georges
Chalhoub, a 56-year-old shopkeeper whose forefathers had come from Brih
but who had lived near Beirut for much of his life, was killed in a car
accident. Chalhoub had dreamed of moving back to his ancestral village
and so his family decided to bury him there.
The funeral created a
moment of amity. Christians and Druze carried his coffin together,
reviving a local custom. The procession passed by the site where the
Chalhoub family home had once stood, and where they are now building a
new house.
“The Druze carried him with us from the start of the village. The
reception was beautiful. There was great respect for the body,” said
Khalil Chalhoub, Georges’ 89-year-old father.
Twenty-six years
after the end of Lebanon’s civil war, the story of Brih is a reminder of
how long it can take to stitch together societies torn apart by war.
Much as in Syria and Iraq today, Lebanon was shattered by its
15-year-long war. Villages and neighbourhoods in which Muslims and
Christians had lived side by side for centuries were reshaped. Hundreds
of thousands of people retreated into separate enclaves controlled by
sectarian militias.
In Brih, whose population is 4,000, it was not
until 2014 that a government-sponsored settlement opened the way for
Christians to return. Across Lebanon, very few displaced people have
moved back to areas from which they fled. Deep sectarian fractures
continue to hurt the country, from villages like Brih right up to the
national parliament. The lesson for Syria and Iraq is this: even when
peace comes, divisions can last for decades.
The Chalhoub family
returned to rebuild in Brih only after national leaders oversaw the
reconciliation agreement for the village. As with most other Christians
from the village, their return has so far been limited to weekend
visits. And it was not until Georges Chalhoub’s funeral that they sensed
a true spirit of reconciliation.
“It’s been some two years now since the official reconciliation, but
there wasn’t this kind of interaction,” Khalil Chalhoub said. “We opened
the door, and there was a good response.”
The family hosted
mourners at the building site where Chalhoub was building the new family
home, arranging chairs and offering visitors coffee. Druze from Brih
and the surrounding area – uninvited, but welcome – arrived to pay their
respects.
“I did not know him, but I knew he was from my
village,” said Hamza Abou Ezzedine, who is 32, and has only ever known
Brih as a Druze village. “This is a duty.”
THE SPLIT
The
first major outburst of violence in Brih came in 1977, two years into
the civil war. Druze gunmen opened fire at a church, killing 12. The
next day, many Christians fled the village.
Five years later, the village became a battleground in the so-called
“Mountain War” that erupted after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Israel wanted to crush the Palestine Liberation Organisation and install
a new Lebanese president friendly to Israel. The Christian Lebanese
Forces militia saw the Israel presence as a chance to challenge Druze
dominance of the Chouf mountains.
But a year later Israel withdrew
from the Chouf area and a full scale civil war between Christians and
Druze began. With the defeat of the Lebanese Forces, the remaining
Christians were forced from Brih and dozens of other villages. An
estimated 250,000 Christians fled the mountains – the single biggest
sectarian displacement of the civil war. In Brih, Christian homes were
destroyed and two churches blown up.
Theodor Hanf, in his
“Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon”, said that it took just two weeks for
the Chouf to be nearly entirely cleansed of Christians. The Druze
spiritual leader at the time declared Christians would never again live
in the area.
In 1993, the government set up a ministry to oversee
the return of people who had been displaced. It took years before
progress was seen in the Chouf. Christians began trickling back to
Christian villages, but agreeing terms for their return to what had been
mixed villages was much harder. The Lebanese government has sponsored
two dozen reconciliation agreements in the Chouf, each of them amounting
to an individual peace process.
The Brih agreement was one of the toughest to finalise, said Ahmad
Mahmoud, director general of the Ministry of the Displaced. “In a place
like Brih, you had Christian and Druze homes next to each other. They
know that so-and-so killed so-and-so,” he said. “You have to convince
someone who lost his father to invite over his killer and offer him
coffee.”
Mahmoud keeps leather-bound copies of every
reconciliation agreement on a shelf in his Beirut office, each page
signed by the villager and official involved. Brih, he said, “was a
difficult story. Their wounds are deep.”
Reconciliation in Brih
required, among other things: Druze families to move out of dozens of
Christian homes they had occupied for three decades; the demolition of a
Druze community centre built on Christian land; the construction of a
new Druze community centre; the construction of two new churches; the
state paying compensation to Druze forced to evacuate homes, and to
Christians who needed to repair or rebuild theirs; and inquiries into
the fate of people still missing after the conflict.
Two years on,
very few Christians have moved back to Brih permanently. Most have
built their lives in richer urban areas and are reluctant to leave. As
well, the compensation to rebuild homes – an initial payment of $10,000
per person followed by another later on – is way short of what is
needed. Many are still waiting to receive the first payment. For most,
“return” has meant weekend visits.
ONE FAMILY
Hanna Hassoun, now 83, used to be the director of
Brih’s secondary school until he fled with his family in 1977, thinking
they would be gone for a few months at most. He did not return until two
years ago.
Hassoun remembers when the school had 500 pupils and
30 teachers. There was no school building, so the school rented houses
they turned into classrooms. He was president of a village club.
“We
had lots of activities, but then the events came and drove people
apart,” he said at his apartment in Antelias, a Christian suburb north
of Beirut.
His house, a two-storey stone villa, was destroyed in
the 1980s. The Druze later erected a community centre, known as the
Bayt, on the site. The fate of the Bayt became a major sticking point
during the reconciliation talks. As mediators sought to reach a
settlement, Hassoun and his neighbour rejected offers to sell their
land. Eventually, the Bayt was knocked down and a new one constructed,
opening the way to the reconciliation agreement.
The person with no land has no existence,” he said. “I tell my
children, if we still have land in Brih, never sell it. Leave it to your
children and your grandchildren.”
The process in Brih echoes
Lebanon’s national approach to dealing with the peace. The post-war
administration agreed a general amnesty for all political crimes
perpetrated before 1991 – an attempt to turn the page by allowing civil
wartime leaders to move into government.
That approach has been
widely criticised. The International Center for Transitional Justice
(ICTJ), an organization set up to help societies deal with the legacy of
war, says short-term peace was chosen at the expense of justice. That
has left Lebanon vulnerable to spasms of violence and political conflict
since.
What should have been done is to involve victims, to talk more about
the war. Truth-seeking is a main condition for a real reconciliation,”
the ICTJ’s Nour El Bejjani said. The Chouf agreements, while helpful,
have not been built on solid ground.
Christian villagers hope the completion of the two new churches will
encourage more of their community back. The reconstruction was a
sensitive process: excavators had to take care to locate the bodies of
the 12 Christians killed 39 years ago and buried beneath the rubble of
one of the churches, St. George. That church has been rebuilt 30 percent
bigger than its predecessor and the remains were reburied in the church
in August.
In April, there was standing room only for the first
service at St. George’s since the 1977 shooting. Several hundred people,
including Druze villagers, packed a reception hall. Loud applause
greeted the arrival of the priests as they made their way up the aisle.
Swinging a thurible, one of them stopped to kiss a man in a traditional
black Druze shirt, shirwal trousers and white hat seated in the front
row. Before communion, the priest asked God to “deepen and strengthen”
the Christian return.
Ghandi Yehya, who lost five members of his
family when fighting erupted in 1982, said since Christians began coming
back “there has not been a single big problem, or slap thrown.”
Still,
he said, it is best to avoid discussion of the past. “I might say
something others won’t accept, even though it is a truth.”
Additional reporting by Issam Abdullah in Brih
