Learning to live with the rats

Press, 12 May 1981, Page 17

Learning to live with the rats

By

SEAN TOOLAN

“Observer,” London

George Baaui is 88-years-old. He is paralysed, frightened, and sleeps on a blanket surrounded by rat poison on the cold, hard floor of a parking garage which has become a bomb shelter for 50 families in East Beirut.

His wife is coy about her age, but it's a safe bet she is close to 88. She is on her feet most of the day,. standing watch over her husband, feeding him, cleaning him, and comforting him when the shells from the Syrian guns drop close. The rat poison is around the old man’s bed to keep the hungry . rodents off his blanket. His wife explains that the sleeping area is too

deep in the ground for her to make regular rubbish-dump-ing trips, so the empty food tins, the old newspapers, and discarded pieces of bread are piled up in a corner and rat powder is sprinkled around the heap. The night is bad for the 50 families. They can hear the Syrian and Muslim guns — but worse, they say, they can hear the rats snuffling about the rubbish heap. The children do not sleep well because they believe the rats will bite their toes.

Mr and Mrs Baaui are only two of the 16,000 Lebanese Christians who, for a month now, have been living in makeshift bomb shelters

in Achrafieh, a predominantly Christian neighbourhood in East Beirut. When the fighting between the Christian forces and the Syrians started on April 2, Mrs Baaui, helped by a neighbour, half dragged, half carried her paralysed husband through the streets. Shells and mortars dropped around them until they found the garage, and the three of them tumbled down the stairs into scared but friendly Christian arms. Achrafieh has been the target of Muslim attacks since the civil war five years

ago. and it was bombed and shelled by Muslim militia in 1978, apparently in retaliation for the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. However, there is little in the past to equal the last few weeks. The worst, say the people, was April 6 — “or was it April 7?” — when dozens of Christians were killed in the streets trying to flee the shells and mortars. The storyteller cries .when she remembers a school bus desperately looking for a way out of the carnage. It took a direct mortar hit. Seven children were killed

and dozens wounded. Since then the people of Achrafieh have either fled to the mountains, left Lebanon by boat from illegal ports controlled by Christian forces, or have taken to the shelters. Cinemas have been commandeered, and hundreds of people sleep on the cellar floors, or on steps, surrounded by film posters that tell the world how glamorous war is. The children ask visitors to identify the film stars, and ask if the England soccer captain, Kevin Keegan, has been a film star. They love Keegan. The schools are closed, and hundreds of Christian children

spend their days kicking balls and empty tins around the cellars. The adults play cards and take turns at cooking and carrying water. If the shelling stops for a couple of hours, some of the refugees go to their homes, if they are still standing, to cook a hot meal, which they put into pots and pans and bring back to their shelters.

Mrs Baaui was spreading out more rat powder, but she looked up and nodded eagerly when a neighbour spoke "of “never again living with the Muslims.” There is much talk of “partition” and the Christian resolve is hardening, alongside their hatred of the Svrians.