In the long queue in front of a prison camp where parents were waiting for news of their children and relatives, a woman met Anna Akhmatova, a famous poet, who was also standing in line to inquire about her detained son. The woman pointed to the people waiting, who were overwhelmed by fear, cold, and horror stories of forced labor camps. She asked the poet: “Can you describe what you’re seeing?”
Akhmetova looked at the people who are eager for some kind of reassurance about the fates of their detained children and friends, smiled faintly, and then said, “Yes I can.”
Akhmetova wrote about the horrors she and her fellow citizens lived through in Stalin’s prison camps, which devastated Russian society and those of other Soviet peoples to rebuild a “new society.” A testament of her torment and that of countless others can be found in her elegy, Requiem, which reflects the horrors - which she and nameless, faceless others went through and which would have been forgotten if it hadn’t been memorized by the poet.
Today, we are faced with the same question that the woman waiting in line posed to the poet: Can we describe what’s currently happening to us? Is there anyone documenting the violence, persecution, and humiliation the Lebanese people are being subjected to? More importantly, is there any use in keeping a diary of misery for future generations, just like Akhmetova did, in the hope that today’s disaster will not be repeated?
The Great Terror of the Stalin era descended upon the Soviet people as the price for a prosperous future. The question that a bystander poses, however, when he sees people in supermarkets fighting over a bag of sugar or baby formulas would go as: What is the slogan and project forcing the Lebanese to endure this? How would “Christian rights” be of benefit if there are no more Christians or Muslims in Lebanon? What are the rewards that the ruling clique hopes to reap after the country becomes a pile of sand? Does the presidency of the republic deserve this price?
Does anyone care about the pain and anguish of those who cannot find a free bed in a hospital or medicine in a pharmacy? Does the increasing suicide rate of desperate young people- who can’t immigrate out of the country after having their future stolen from them- mean anything to those with a rigid sectarian mindset? Will the resistance’s weapons, which killed the people of Madaya, Yabroud, and Al-Qusayr, console the mothers who can’t transfer money to their children living in limbo abroad because the banks are preventing her from doing so? What is the purpose of all this? Rather what are the politicians, bankers, and blood merchants hoping to gain from the destruction of this miserable country? Indeed, will Lebanon’s ruins and ashes allow for their greedy and depraved deals?
The current dark state of affairs could lead us to forget that we are not mere hostages of small politicians, and nor are we cards to be played in an insane region; it leaves us forgetting that before anything else, we are human beings who have struggled to retrieve our dignity from our occupiers and their clients for a long time. This is what stands between us and death. Thus, it is urgent that we document the crimes that the clique clinging to power is committing against the Lebanese, just as writers and researchers have documented the horrors of the Nakba and the Holocaust. Otherwise, we would leave room for forgers, opportunists and parasites to shape them.
While the popular movement was forcefully put down through sectarian mobs, silencers and bags filled with Ammonium Nitrate that destroyed Beirut, this doesn’t mean that shaping memories and history should be vacated in favor of the narrative of the alliance clinging to power and their lies and fabrications. From the depth of our graves and the gutters of our poverty, with our empty stomachs, we must not forget the names and faces of the members of this repulsive, criminal alliance. They caused the afflictions that people of this country do not deserve, leaving them living under conditions that make the most violent phases of the civil war seem like a picnic when juxtaposed with the current state of affairs.
We must memorize their lines, dogmatism and their manipulation of simple people’s feelings, inciting them to hate, kill and steal, with rhetoric adorned with claims of virtue, reform and purity. We hope that the day we denounce their arrogance and depravity to their faces is not far off; we will remind them of how they misled their citizens and crushed them under the weight of corruption, fear and poverty.
These generations might not be lucky enough to see the day. It seems that there is no escaping the formulation of the story of the darkest of days that had been brought upon the country by belligerent mobs and mercenaries to whom the country unfortunately submitted to, as the majority preferred the cave to the breeze of freedom. It is the story of a crime whose victims haplessly and silently watch themselves being led to their demise after their hands and feet were made heavy with chains of hate and fear. This story will be the Lebanese of the present’s contribution to the history of human savagery and man’s viciousness toward his fellow man.
