Lebanon: War and peace

Lebanon is a land of ancient glories and grisly memories. Robert Fisk takes you on a very personal tour of the country which has been his home for 25 years

In Lebanon, you can ignore Basil Fawlty. "Whatever you do, don't mention the war" just doesn't apply. Ask a Lebanese about his country's 15-year civil war, and like as not he'll want to talk. True, you'll be told it was all the fault of foreigners – not for nothing is the bloodbath called "harb al-akhareen", "the war of the others" – because most of Lebanon's tourists have turned up over the centuries wearing armour and carrying swords or automatic rifles. Beside the "nahr el-kelb", the Dog River, north of Beirut

In Lebanon, you can ignore Basil Fawlty. "Whatever you do, don't mention the war" just doesn't apply. Ask a Lebanese about his country's 15-year civil war, and like as not he'll want to talk. True, you'll be told it was all the fault of foreigners – not for nothing is the bloodbath called "harb al-akhareen", "the war of the others" – because most of Lebanon's tourists have turned up over the centuries wearing armour and carrying swords or automatic rifles. Beside the "nahr el-kelb", the Dog River, north of Beirut

– half way to the bathing beaches of Jounieh – the Lebanese even have a set of monuments to remind them of these bloody visitors. Crusaders, Babylonians, Pharaos, Romans, British and French all carved their inscriptions on the rocks. Nebuchadnezzar the Second could not resist telling the story of his Lebanon expedition in stone. Nor could the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Caracalla whose disgraced 3rd Gallic Legion had its name defaced in antiquity. The last plaque was erected by the Lebanese themselves, a monument to the departure of the last French troops in 1946 as the country obtained its independence.

Since then, the hospitable Lebanese have succeeded in booting out half the PLO, various Iranian and Iraqi militiamen, the US Marines, French paratroopers and the supposedly all-powerful Israeli army. Only the Syrians are left, about 21,000 of them, whose gun-pits and Stalingrad-era anti-aircraft batteries can be enjoyed by visitors en route to that most romantic of all Roman cities, Baalbek. In a country scarcely 200 miles in length, you can gaze within a single hour upon the Crusader ramparts of Sidon's 13th-century Castle of the Sea and Israel's now abandoned fortresses. In just 20 minutes, you can finish coffee beside the Roman forum in the resurrected centre of Beirut (the best view is from Casper and Gambini's) and find yourself in the ruins of Damour, the village whose Christian inhabitants were massacred by Palestinian gunmen in 1975 – and in which, 34 years earlier, a Vichy French sniper shot out the eye of a young Jewish volunteer in the British army called Moshe Dayan. Given its reputation for pleasure and blood, there's not much point in trying to dodge Lebanon's history.

There's no better way to start a pilgrimage to this most tortured and beautiful of countries than by walking through the campus of the American University, founded by 19th-century Quakers with imperishable names – Daniel Bliss and Pliny Fisk (no relation) – above the Mediterranean. It is a paradise of bougainvillea and dark college halls, the most glorious of which was destroyed by a car bomb after the war was officially over but then meticulously rebuilt, stone by stone, to its original magnificence. There's a little archaeology museum containing gentle statues with a gift shop selling models of the city's porticoed Ottoman villas which Beirut's developers are still tearing down. You can sit on stone seats over the sea and read into the evening, the hush of pine trees around you, the summer lizards snukkering into garden rocks. Among its more notorious graduates was Dr George Habash, later to lead the ruthless (and venal) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But 19 of AUB's graduates – from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria – were delegates to the San Francisco conference which produced the UN Charter. Present-day undergraduates will happily provide a guided tour – call my old friend Ibrahim Khoury (on 00 961 1 353228) and he'll tell you how to find the student guides who have an office beneath the main gate.

Of course, there are the usual tourist traps in Beirut: the newly unearthed Roman city, destroyed by an earthquake and then a massive tidal wave – which drowned the Beirutis who were plundering ancient wrecks when the sea temporarily withdrew – and the National Archeological Museum with its fragile gold Phoenician figurines. But there are other, more hidden treasures. The old Jewish cemetery on what was the civil war front line has been restored and its Shia Muslim guardians will let you walk around the graves of those European Jews who – fleeing Hitler's Germany – made their homes in Lebanon rather than Palestine. Towards the end of the civil war, their tiny surviving community was cruelly assaulted by "Islamist" groups who murdered at least six elderly Jews. Perhaps a hundred remain, preferring the Arab world's least dictatorial country to the Jewish state to the south whose gunboats, one day in 1982 – claiming to be attacking "terrorists" – managed to shell the roof off the city's 19th-century synagogue.

The French colonial general Henri Gouraud created Lebanon from part of Syria for the benefit of the Christian Maronites whose fractional majority was afterwards overwhelmed by the country's Muslim communities. This imbalance helped to provoke the civil war, although – in keeping with the confessional system imposed by the French – a Christian president still presides over a largely Muslim country. The Maronites, roaring their opposition to the Syrian military presence (though never, in the past, to the Israeli occupation), regard Lebanon as their place of refuge, a sanctuary after centuries of Muslim domination of the Middle East. Kemal Salibi, one of the American University's finest academics, has refuted this in a clinical, slightly cynical book.

But no one should miss a trip to the Christian heartland around the Cedars of Lebanon and the cool mountain town of Bsharre, whose population has produced one of Lebanon's most frightening militia leaders – the now-imprisoned Samir Geagea (pronounced "Ja-ja") – and the nation's finest poet, the philosopher and mystic Khalil Gibran. Gibran's Blake-like paintings and sorrowful poems are remembered in the elegant little museum at Bsharre, where Wahib Kairouz (tel: 00 961 6 671137) will explain his own interpretation of Gibran's mystic love. Wahib looks a bit like Gibran and sometimes, I suspect, thinks he is Gibran, a poet who spent much of his life in the US and was deeply depressed by the 1912 sinking of the Titanic – perhaps because many Lebanese Maronites, fleeing an Ottoman famine, went down with the ship. Gibran's tomb – Wahid will tell you where to find the grotto – is bound in iron chains to prevent the faithful pillaging his bones. In Bsharre, stay at Wadih Shbat's Shbat Hotel (tel: 00 961 6 671270). Down the road west to Tripoli lives the country's only surviving hermit ("habis" in Arabic). I visited him once and found him talking about God to a young woman in a diaphanous see-through dress. It was the only time I thought I might be interested in religion.

The French colonial army opened a ski school in the Cedars in the 1930s and today the slopes are used by thousands of Lebanese. Local shops hire skis – and qualified instructors – although poor rainfall and unusual heat mean that little snow is expected this year until mid-November. Lamartine visited the giant trees and, with usual Gallic arrogance, carved his name in the trunk of one of the 2,000-year "Cedars of the Lord". You can still see a few letters, the massive bark having mercifully covered the beginning and end of the Frenchman's name in the past 150 years.

Christians still aren't sure of the location of Qana, where Jesus supposedly turned water into wine. There's a Qana in Galilee – in present-day Israel – and then there's the Lebanese Qana, just over an hour's drive south of Beirut. A clutch of cave drawings more than 1,000 years old – apparently of the Virgin – attests to the belief that this was the place of miracles. But for the Lebanese – and for the brief moment the world gave to it in 1996 – Qana is the town where Israeli gunners massacred 106 Lebanese refugees as they sheltered in the local headquarters of UN peacekeepers. Visitors can enter part of the barracks – still a UN base – and see where most of the refugees burned to death in the UN's canteen. More than half the dead were children and their mass grave stands outside the walls of the UN compound. Local shopkeepers sell tasteless photographs of the dead and there's an equally tasteless reference to Qana being a Lebanese "Holocaust". But you must have a heart of stone to ignore the photographs on the graves, of children in party dresses and smiling women with babies and of old men. The Israelis called their shelling a "tragic error" but the UN concluded it was almost certainly no mistake. Up the road at Siddiqin lives Saadallah Balhas, who lost one of his eyes and 32 members of his family in the slaughter, suffering, in individual terms, on a truly Holocaust scale.

Tyre is a mere 20 minutes away and its great road and forum by the sea has about it a power and majesty that – along with the pale Mediterranean sky – should be a Roman Empire prelude to any visit to Baalbek. Tyre itself is a tatty town with a couple of good fish restaurants in the port (the Christian quarter) and you enter the city on the great causeway built by Alexander the Great when he besieged the city in AD332. This was the same Tyre through which King Hiram sent his cedars to build the Temple of Solomon. In Arabic, Tyre is "sur" ("rampart"), in Hebrew it's "Tsor" ("rock"). If Herodotus was right, it was founded 4,300 years ago. Hiram's tomb stands beside the Qana road; in 1978, I sheltered behind its great stone hulk to avoid splinters from an Israeli tank shell. Good old Hiram, I've thought ever since.

It's good to check the papers before visiting southern Lebanon – L'Orient Le Jour is written in Royalist French and the Daily Star can be monumentally boring, but both carry reports on any violence along the Lebanese-Israeli border. You can take in the whole area in a day's drive, including the great Crusader keep at Beaufort where Saladin besieged the French invaders in 1192. Lured from the castle, one of the Crusader lords was tortured in full view of the defenders – but they held out for another two years. Beaufort lies on top of a sheer mountain precipice and for 22 years the Israeli army used the keep as an artillery and reconnaissance base. But to understand the meaning of occupation, you have to drive across the valley to Khiam. Here stands the old French barracks which the Israelis and their local Lebanese militia allies turned into a jail and torture centre for captured guerrillas or their family members and for Lebanese who refused to collaborate. Ex-prisoners regularly show visitors their places of torture (including the notorious "electricity room") and – worst of all, perhaps – is the absolutely irrefutable proof from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other humanitarian groups that the stories of cruelty were all true. You need an Arabic speaker with you on such a trip, but you can arrange a guide in advance. Ali Qshesh, a member of the Hizballah who spent 11 years in Khiam, can be contacted on his mobile phone (tel: 00 961 3 359121) for a guided tour.

You may not feel like eating after Khiam, but an hour's drive up the Bekaa Valley will bring you to the little Armenian town of Aanjar. The Armenians here were twice victims of persecution – in the 1915 Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Ottoman Turks and then again when they fled their homes for a second time just before the 1939-45 war, when France gave their city of Iskenderun to the Turks. Take lunch at Khatchik Terzian's Al Gezira restaurant, where children can watch a menagerie of ducks, goslings, snakes and trout swanning around a lush island of lupins and silver birch. The trout is excellent, the humus and fatoush fresh. Terzian's grandfather almost died in the 1915 massacres. Aged five, he hid from the Turks under a pile of bodies.

And on to Baalbek. No one can prepare a first-time visitor to the City of Heliopolis and its giant temples. The surviving pillars of the Temple of Jupiter and the great walls of the Temple of Bacchus are like the set of Ben Hur (part of which was actually filmed in Tyre). It's a monument to pure, unadulterated power. If this was the Roman Empire, you keep thinking, you'd better be on the side of the Romans. The best guide (with the best English) is Hussein el-Outa (tel: 00 961 3 392575) who can even tell you where the Hizballah kept their western hostages in Baalbek in the bad old Eighties. You must stay at the Palmyra Hotel (former guests include George Bernard Shaw, Kaiser Wilhelm and a squad of Second World War Abwehr spies). Ali Husseini, the affable son of the former Lebanese parliament speaker, runs this dark old mansion with its winter log fires and summer tea-in-the-garden afternoons. Try not to trip over the (real) Roman statuary as you navigate the lobby. And try not to think about the war.

The facts

Getting there

Ahmed Shebaro can arrange flights from the UK, taxis with English-speaking drivers for $120 per day, and organise tourist visas at the airport. Identify yourself as an Independent reader when you contact him (00 961 1 354229, 00 961 1 347699 or 00 961 1 349597; email: cistoursatcyberia.net.lb).

Being there

The Palmyra (00 961 8 370230 or 00 961 8 370011) charges $38 for single rooms, $53 for doubles.

Further information

The best time to visit Lebanon is mid-autumn or early spring. Salibi's book on Lebanon's Phoenician past is "A House of Many Mansions" (I.B.Tauris, £35) and is essential reading. An updated edition of "Pity the Nation" by Robert Fisk is published next month (Oxford University Press, £9.99). You'll have to buy it in Britain; the Lebanese government banned the book more than eight years ago.