These photos show how everyday life continued at the heart of Lebanon’s brutal civil war
Daily activities continued along Beirut’s Green Line
This story is brought to you in partnership with Beirut, the new movie starring Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike. Coming to theaters April 11.
For 15 long years, Beirut was a city divided by religion. Christian on the east side, Muslim on the west. Between 1975 and 1990, the Lebanese capital bore the brunt of hostilities during a civil war that saw intense inner-city skirmishes and destructive artillery bombardment. But division implies more than ideology. In the context of full-blown urban warfare, the bifurcation of Beirut into east and west was manifested physically in a demarcation running through the heart of the city.
For the most part, the Green Line followed the north–south course of Damascus Street, beginning at the Mediterranean Sea and Martyrs’ Square in the north and running roughly five miles into southern Beirut. It earned its nickname from the foliage that reclaimed the once bustling strip as conflict roared on either side. But the Green Line was by no means deserted. Daily activities had to continue. To the people who lived nearby, the Green Line was a hindrance to be navigated, carefully and pragmatically. A fact of life.
“I don’t think I felt I was safe or unsafe,” recalls photojournalist Patrick Baz, who was 12 years old when the war came to his neighborhood, which bordered the Green Line in East Beirut. “For me, it was life. That’s how I grew up.”
Of course, life on the Green Line was anything but normal. Residents who wanted to visit friends or family on the other side could be kidnapped and held for ransom, or worse — simply because they were the wrong religion or at the wrong checkpoint. Control over various sections of the line could change among the many competing militias without warning. Ordinary people became actors in the conflict whether they liked it or not, serving as lookouts or storing munitions for fighters. As Baz says, “I was too young to fight, so I was climbing on rooftops of buildings that were used as sniper nests to collect bullet cartridges so the militia could fill them. Not to do anything—not to take part in the conflict—was considered abnormal.”
Most of the Green Line is unrecognizable today. Downtown Beirut has rebounded; cranes now dot the horizon. Money is flowing. Discotheques are bouncing. People do yoga in Martyrs’ Square. But trauma is hard to scrub out. A close look reveals building facades pockmarked by bullets. Some structures, like the Barakat building — a former residence and east-side sniper’s nest — have been preserved in their ruined state, a reminder of the past at a time when relative economic health threatens to erase the memory of an increasingly distant conflict.
But maybe this is the way people heal. The rupture of Beirut in the 1970s and ’80s required resilience. It forced ordinary people to sustain a sense of normalcy, no matter how divided or violent the city became. As Baz says, “People need to live, you know? People get married, people go to the pool. I think in every war zone, in every conflict, there is life.”
This story is brought to you by Beirut, the brilliant new thriller set amid the chaos of the Lebanese Civil War. In theaters April 11.
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