Civil War Beirut: The youth needs to know more
Today’s youth feel like they don’t belong because of their lack of knowledge on the civil war that hit Beirut starting 1975. This article looks at the absence of this period of time from Lebanese educational history books.
The year is 1980. Five years into one of the most heated civil wars; the city center doesn’t look the same anymore.
Beirut, a city that was known for being the Paris of the Middle East; an area where the rich and the poor joined hands, and Muslims and Christians shared drinks suddenly transformed into a heated battlefield for sectarian divisions — with no unified place for all.
“Saqata al qinaa (The Mask Has Fallen)” Majida el Roumi’s song began to play while 12-year-old Roula Talhouk searched for sanctuary from the shelling in the midst of Achrafieh, a city on the East side of the imaginary border separating Muslim from Christian areas.
Little Roula lived a childhood exhilarated with fear like most Lebanese who grew up during the civil war, a time where breakfast was shelling, lunch was bombing, and dinner was grieving over the loss of a dear one.
“When you’re living the war your main concern is to live, you don’t think about what is going on on TV and the discussions that spread through it. Your generation suffers from electricity cuts for a few hours; we used to go a few months without electricity,” said Roula Talhouk, PhD, the Director of the Center for Documentation and Islamic-Christian Research at Saint Joseph University.
Lebanese Youth: Literate or Illiterate?
Today, the Lebanese youth do not understand what the civil war was like. The cause? Various factors: be it education, home environment, the silence of the war generation but most importantly because they are not taught the history of the civil war in schools, allowing them to create their own sectarian perception by gathering biased pieces from here and there — why are they leaving out the missing piece of the puzzle?
Based on Knoema gathered statistics, the 2015 youth (those however, when university students were asked if their generation knows enough about the civil war 85 percent of 53 participants responded no, blaming it on schools and their parents’ sectarian bias.
The Role of Schools
From the time children enter school until the day they graduate, the civil war is not mentioned once in any of their history classes nor books that are supposed to teach them about the history of Lebanon. Instead, the last piece students learn about Lebanon is Independence Day that occurred in 1943.
While the Ta’if Agreement (Document of National Accord); which was approved in the year 1989 as an end of the civil war; called for the amendment of all school subjects’ curriculums, history was the only subject that remained the same, resulting in an outdated course of study in comparison to the rest of the subjects.
The War is Silent in Their Hearts
Before delving into schools’ intervention in teaching the youth about the civil war, it is important to understand the importance of family in keeping the war ambiguous in the eyes of the children of the war generation.
According to Assaad Chaftari, the former senior intelligence official of the Christian militia Lebanese Forces, “We discovered that there are several types of silencing the war. There are parents that don’t speak because of trauma, there are parents that don’t speak to hide what they did during the war, there are parents that don’t speak so they don’t discuss what they didn’t do during the war.”
Chaftari is now the Vice President of Fighters for Peace, an organization aiming at alerting the youth about the dangers of war and more importantly engaging with ex-fighters as a step to attain civil peace and reconciliation within Lebanon.
“Mainly, they stay silent to keep a good image of themselves in the minds of their children or not to worry them about what they had to go through during the war,” he added.
However, Chaftari noted that there are parents on the opposite of the pendulum romanticizing the image of war within their children and breeding another generation of sectarians.
In order to build a future generation away from the imperfections of sectarianism, the Lebanese composed of the war generation and those who succeeded them need to define a unified vision of Lebanon, something common to each and everyone of them said Christine Babikian Assaf, PhD, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Saint Joseph University.
Schools on Sectarianism
Parents are not the only ones responsible for creating sectarian youngsters. The way schools are divided in Lebanon and the way history in particular is taught divides students even further. A 2009 research done by Nemer Frayha examined the Lebanese educational structure and concluded that the Lebanese educational structure focuses on infusing sectarianism, since most schools in Lebanon are private and religious.
Articles nine and ten of the Lebanese constitution actually give schools the freedom to teach history through the narrative of their choice.
“When we do this we are raising younger generations that literally don’t know their history or don’t have a common narrative. I see it with my children … when they studied the history, you see the reproduction of myths … the myth is just divisive,” said Bassel Salloukh, PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Lebanese American University and author of The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon, a book which studies the sectarian system in Lebanon.
Salloukh continued on how the absence of a unified history discourse is allowing the generation to grow with a very weak sense of national identity, which is why there is an urgent need to work on the generation at a university level and younger by educating them what it means to be Lebanese, instead of reproducing a sectarian society.
The State of Politicians: Unchanging
Obviously, the absence of a unified history book has been touched upon, however, what is missing is looking at the bigger picture — the political leaders who took charge during the civil war are still in power until today, so how does this affect the book?
At the end of the civil war, the warlords assumed power as part of a two to three year transition period, but here Lebanon is, thirty years later with the same leaders, who are soon passing their throne to their children/followers.
When asked about the issue, Chaftari, the former fighter said, “They created a system for them to stay in power and they are inheriting their children into the system also.”
Salloukh also agreed, since “they took a concerted decision that there should not be any kind of interrogation of the past leading to a collective amnesia of the war. We should not discuss it and need to hop forward to what was promised as the Singapore of the Middle East.”
However, other experts deem this realization unworthy blaming the issue on politicians’ laziness to agree on a common history, such as Tony Atallah, PhD, the Dean of Law, Political, Administrative and Economic Sciences at Lebanese University.
Spain seems to resonate
Even though the suggested inference received some criticism, the case of the Spanish civil war confirms the idea that the everlasting political leaders of the war is a reason for the absence of a unified history book.
Spain was victim to a civil war between the years of 1936 and 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Following the war, the Republican victor; General Francisco Franco; assumed power up until his death in 1975.
Throughout his term, the topic of the civil war was seen as a taboo and there were no reconciliation efforts, just as in the case of Lebanon.
However, things changed with Franco’s death. The pact of forgetting; which was given a legal basis in the 1977 Amnesty Law; was a political decision that was taken in Spain in order to move on from the civil war period.
As a result, those who were imprisoned for mass sufferings in the civil war were not persecuted, in order to reach a stage of democracy.
Despite the law, it was not until 2007 until enactment of a law pushing for a collective historical memory, which called on the Minister of Justice to investigate the killings and torture that occurred during the civil war.
What about Lebanon?
Unlike the above case, the Francos of Lebanon are still strong and ignoring the necessity of both reconciliation and the writing of an amended history curriculum.
The issue of a unified history account was only brought up twice in the Cabinet — once in 2001 and another time in 2012, but like any other stipulation in Lebanon, it never got passed due to specific sectarian sensitivities.
Based on press reports gathered by Gregor Nazarian, who did his Masters thesis on the issue, the first attempt to update the history curriculum was halted due to disagreements over Lebanon’s civil war years as well as Lebanon’s place in regional politics.
Then Member of Parliament Bassem Yammout urged the Center for Research and Development (CRDP); which is the public institution that creates educational curriculums under the custodial authority of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education; to deduct a page from the suggested academic history due to the usage of the term “Islamic conquest,” which gives out a “wrong” identity of Lebanon to students.
The second attempt that came in 2012 was also derailed due to sectarian disagreements. It all started when the Minister of Culture, Gaby Layyoun, criticized the draft for avoiding the item “Cedar Revolution,” which is when Syrian troops completely withdrew from Lebanese grounds.
In conjunction, the Phalange Party MP Sami Gemayel threatened the government not to approve the suggested history book for excluding certain events of the Lebanese civil war as well as the 2005 Cedar Revolution. He accused them of treating history with subjectivity, even though it is known worldwide that subjects like those are entirely objective.
Hezbollah MP Mohammad Fneish also accused the draft of being selective in delivering the history of Lebanon.
Instead of amending changes, the whole history book was shelved and nothing has been done since.
What the Minister of Education has to say
While investigating this topic, both the former and current Ministers of Education were contacted for personal input on the issue, however, neither of them responded to various attempts.
Instead, the CRDP was contacted, in which they discussed what has been and is currently going on regarding a new unified history book.
In a meeting with Blanche Abi Assaf and Ghada Alali, two representatives of the Social Studies department at CRDP, they disclosed that nothing has happened since 2012 in terms of updating the history curriculum, which needs to be signed by the Minister of Education.
However, on several occasions the Minister praised and called for the amendment of the history curriculum, but nothing was done in practice.
Abi Assaf and Alali continued that updating the curriculum is not that easy of a task. History is made up of four cycles dividing the 12 years of school study in order to cater to the age range. A committee is created for this purpose and the process goes up the ladder accordingly.
The two representatives of CRDP also blamed the absence of a unified history book on some administrative problems they face such as the lack of concatenation; since the Ministry is not recruiting new members of staff, there is a lack of continuity in the projects worked on.
The Tribal System in Lebanon
When Mohamed Gameel; part of Adjunct Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University of Cairo doing a thesis on post war nostalgia; was asked about whether we could relate the absence of a unified history book to the existence of the same political leaders in power, he blamed the tribal system that is evident in Lebanese politics.
“As leadership inherits within certain families, new leaders will hold same old ideas and views, of course with some upgrades to fit with the new generation. I always call the Lebanese politics the democracy of dictatorships,” he said.
As a result, no political sect can individually dominate the political scene in Lebanon, making reconciliation all the worse.
Moving Forward: Reconciliation
Certainly, there is an urgent need to develop a memory of the war, before those who lived the war first hand pass away and the writing of history becomes less genuine.
A few experts see accountability as the bridge leading to reconciliation, such as Gameel.
Both Atallah and Chaftari suggested that the war needs to be studied from an accountability perspective in order to shock the youth and avoid a romanticized image of the war, instead they need to be confronted with a list of losses caused by the war, economically, physically, infrastructurally, to name a few.
CRDP suggests but doesn’t implement
According to the representatives of CRDP, a new method of teaching has been put forth labeled as Teaching Divided History (TDH), which was influenced by cases in Ireland and India.
Through TDH, students create their own in-depth projects looking at all the aspects of a specific historic event without the need to go back to their parents as sources.
That way, students are able to better record the history of the civil war, for example, and see it as less of a taboo as formulated at their homes. However, this project might not be implemented due to lack of funding.
Identifying with the youth
Since school is the main socializing institution, a unified sense of what Lebanon is and should be should start from there, said Salloukh, or else the sectarian system will reproduce potential militias at any moment.
Dean Assaf agreed that the absence of a common vision for Lebanon is a main problem and is allowing for divisions even though we are living together in practice and have the utmost commonalities.
The youth needs to understand the need to accept the other in order to better understand the history of the civil war rather than having to go back to the biases of their parents, who associate the war with reproducing sectarianism.
Historically speaking, prior and during the civil war, everyone lived in unity, this sectarian separation only became strong after the war. As a result, in order for the unified history book to be praised, it must cover all the aspects of the war objectively, joining all the events, whether black or white, Muslim or Christian, negative or positive; History must be based on facts and not on selection.
