At Barricades in Downtown Beirut, Lebanon's Fault Lines Grow Deeper

Fears of Neighbors' Intentions

A 15-minute drive away, Saad Fakhran sat in his Internet cafe, a button with Hariri's face pinned to his lapel. Around the corner were posters of Hariri and his son and successor, Saad. "Your words are commands," one banner read. On Fakhran's door was another picture of the former prime minister. "They destroyed the country," it read. "Where are you, Rafiq Hariri?"

Fakhran took a break from a crossword puzzle in a pro-Hariri newspaper that compared Hezbollah's protests to a coup attempt. Sharply dressed in a suit, his hair graying and his moustache trimmed, he raised his hand and pointed toward the borders that delimit his Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Tariq Jdideh, one of the tenser these days in Beirut. You go to the Khashaqji Mosque, he said, then the Qasqas Highway, a traffic circle, the Martyrs' Cemetery ("For us") and the Cemetery of the Two Martyrs ("For them"). "Who are the two martyrs? Only God knows what they mean," Fakhran said.

Shiite neighborhoods, he said, were in both directions.

"And in the middle is Tariq Jdideh, and we're afraid they'll enter," he said. "We're ready. We're ready by all means."

At 42, Fakhran is too young to remember Beirut's earlier incarnation, as a sleepy Mediterranean port dominated by the country's Sunni and Greek Orthodox communities. As he came of age, a far larger city was undergoing another transformation, as Israeli invasions, economic opportunity and civil war drove Shiites from southern Lebanon toward Beirut. For a time, their settlements on the capital's outskirts were known as "the belt of misery." Today, the southern suburbs, known as the Dahiya in Arabic, represent one of Hezbollah's strongholds -- its name uttered in chants -- and a distinctly Shiite part of the city.

Where these suburbs intersect with the Sunni parts of town, trouble has broken out during the month-long crisis. Several clashes erupted after the funeral last month of Pierre Gemayel, a pro-government minister assassinated in an ambush. Sometimes, gangs of youth incite each other; other times, it starts over the placement of banners, posters or flags of the wrong faction. Slogans shouted too loud caused a fight with Shiites in the traditionally Sunni neighborhood of Museitbeh last week. On Thursday night, Fakhran recalled, a few dozen Shiite residents entered Tariq Jdideh on mopeds, flying flags, and yet another fight broke out.

"More of them were hurt," he said with a nod.

Even in the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh, scores of supporters and opponents of Michel Aoun, a former general allied with Hezbollah, clashed Monday in Sassin Square over putting up his poster. The police and army intervened.

Beirut was never simply divided between east and west, but the surge of trouble along so many fault lines in the city -- fraying, tense and multiplying as they are -- has worried residents old enough to recall the civil war's start in two local ambushes in 1975 that soon spiraled into chaos. A columnist, Darine Helwe, compared the streets, with police posted every so often, to "a military barracks."

"I'm not a little scared," Fakhran said. "I'm scared a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot."

His fear is not violence, though. It is more existential, he said: worry about his neighbors' intentions. In complaints that echo nearly 1,400 years of history, he wondered why Shiites insulted successors of the prophet Muhammad whom Sunnis revere. He worried about Hezbollah's arsenal. "Who are the missiles for?" he asked. He suggested Hezbollah is more loyal to Iran than Lebanon: "If Iran told them to sit, they would sit." And he is sure Nasrallah has in mind a Shiite Islamic republic.

"In my heart, I think they want to wreck the country," he said. "They don't want to rule it -- they want to wreck it.