Quiet days in Beirut

This is my third day in Beirut - the second full day. I have been very busy walking (and running!) up and down the Corniche - for in Rome, do as the Romans do. And then, I had to get to know the area - Ain al-Mreisseh, just west of downtown. I wondered about the derelict buildings, scattered among the new, extremely posh and often gated high-rise buildings. Well, they ARE remnants of the civil war, twenty years after it officially ended. Downtown, everything is spic and span - but all around, hmmm...

This war, still so present in the city, and so (apparently) absent from the minds of all the people I met. I seldom met such friendly, open people - they seem so peaceful... And yet, they have been killing one another for fifteen years. When I ask them, they have no explanation. And yet, one factor - apart from all the others, international and national - seems obvious: their community system. This is the basis of the whole society, everything is divided along the lines of religion and ethnicity. Their communities are much more fenced off than those in, say, Belgium. Today, in the newspaper The Daily Star, I read about the election of the Beirut Order of Physicians' chairman. And I was smiling ironically about what I perceived to be the 'provincialism' of this city - only a local newspaper would have published a news item like this on the front page, I thought. And then I started reading the article, and my mouth fell open. Because even the doctors here choose their chairman according to religious criteria, or rather, the different candidates were backed by the different parliamentary alliances. And it stated seriously that, ever since its beginnings in 1946, only two Muslims had been elected at the head of the Beirut Order of Physicians, whereas more than half its members are Muslims. And The Daily Star writes: 'Several parties have been debating the issue of rotating the post of the head of the order between Muslims ans Christians each term. Such a policy is adopted by the Syndicate of Engineers.

Really...