Clowning conveys sombre message in Beirut

Press, 14 May 1984, Page 10

Clowning conveys sombre message in Beirut

NZPA-AP Beirut Lebanese saw the country’s first real peace demonstration yesterday, a parade of children who marched amid ghastly carnival figures depicting the horror of the nation’s nineyear war. The parade, stretching over six blocks, was greeted with rice thrown from balconies — a symbol of welcome — as it wound along Hamra Street, the main shopping thoroughfare of mostly Muslim west Beirut. The 6-metre-high figures amid the children — with exaggerated papier-mache faces and bodies controlled by sticks — included a sniper, a victim with brains spilling out and blood spattering his clothing, and a woman in a black scarf who held her hand to her mouth in fear. “They are personalities from the war,” said Zeki Mahmoud, a student at the Lebanese University school of art who worked on the parade. “It is street theatre. We are trying something new here, an experiment, to say something about the war,” said Adel Fakhoury, a professor in the university’s teaching faculty and a main organiser of the parade. Apart from a few small demonstrations at the beginning of the war in 1975, Lebanon has seen no real peace march. Mr Mahmoud, in clownface make-up, and a woman got up similarly, led the parade by running down Hamra Street carrying a banner that said, “We have arrived.” Many of the children were also in make-up and costume. One group of boys and girls marched as hostages, blindfolded with their hands tied. About 20 young boys were in the fatigue uniforms of militiamen and walked along behind a donkeydrawn car decorated with plastic foam skulls and a huge gambling dice — a suggestion that war is a wager with death. Many of the costumes were less symbolic of war. One boy wore the baggy pants of a Lebanese mountain man with a paste-on handlebar moustache. Another had the flowing white robes of an Arab sheikh. A group of girls was dressed as angels with wings bearing the cedar tree of the Lebanese flag. The national flag was everywhere, along with flags of the boy scout troops that provided the bands. Fitting for a nation tracing back to the seafearing Phoenicians, there also was a sea scout band. Lebanon’s diversity showed in the march. One group of children marched down the street guided by two mothers, one in jeans and T-shirt and the other in the modest dress and gauze scarf of a Shi’ite Muslim. The marchers passed shell-pocked buildings, sandbagged soldiers’ posts, roaring portable generators that supply the electricity Beirut is often without because of war, and armoured personnel carriers with guns decorated with flowers. One young girl handed flowers to soldiers, and she said when asked why, “Just to give flowers.” The woman who hurriedly shepherded her away added, “to tell them we have had enough." Later, shells slammed into housing areas of Beirut for more than seven hours, killing at least 18 people and wounding at least 70. The shelling, some of the heaviest in Beirut for weeks, extended far into residential areas.