Entre Amnistie et Amnésie : Dara Mouracade

Dans le cadre de notre Dossier "Entre Amnistie et Amnésie, où est passé le souvenir de notre guerre civile", nous publions des témoignages, mais aussi des articles, études, essais, publications sur ce sujet.

Publication (datant de 2007) de Dara Mouracade, Head of Programs at Bloom.pm

The amnesia of amnesty:
The reconstruction of collective memory in post-war Beirut

“Civil wars are not to be erased from reality or from memory. There are only reborn or reincarnated. Banished from the written, they take to the spoken. Erased from memory, they colonize the subconscious.” – Elias Khoury

INTRODUCTION
What is left of a civil war? Memories more or less precise, sensations more or less strong, impressions more or less blurred, but mostly obscure zones. Memories are gradually distorted because of the necessity for one to forget those moments of insane violence but also because of the impossibility to collect all accounts and evidence related to past events. An interesting case can be made of the memory of the civil war in Lebanon (1975-90).

This paper discusses the form of collective memory of the civil war and examines the tension between the process of forgetting and remembering in the context of the urban reconstruction of the Beirut city center. Furthermore, it explores the relationship between the capacity of the nation to deal with the memory of the conflict and the unfinished nature of the end of the war, in particular the transition from war into peace through a law of general amnesty justified by the formula of la ghalib la maghlub (no victory, no vanquished) and how it contributes to a culture of amnesia. Finally, it attempts to justify that examining recent history as well as the role and responsibility of the Lebanese in the civil war is an important process in creating a national narrative and critically facing Lebanon with its past to make sense of what happened during the war.

URBAN SPACE IN POST-WAR BEIRUT
In 1994, Solidère, a private development company whose biggest investor was the late Rafik Hariri, Lebanon’s former prime minister, was assigned the responsibility to reconstruct the Beirut City Center. After fifteen years of civil war, the city’s capital was left in ruin. Through intensive media coverage and massive investment, Solidère transformed the city center into one of the world’s most fascinating urban experiments. Solidère’s slogan “Beirut: Ancient City of the Future” makes explicit the company’s efforts to concentrate the reconstruction process into reviving the pre-war past of the city in the hope that Beirut would regain its status of financial center of the Middle East as well as a place where different sects and ideologies interact (Cooke, 2002). Rushing to complete the project and erase any physical scars that the civil war might have left on the urban space of Beirut, Solidère destroyed the down town area, dynamiting the buildings and bulldozing the streets while attempting to preserve what, in Solidère’s Chairman, Nasser Chamma’a’s words, “is worth preserving”1 (Fricke, 2005). The project is to eradicate Beirut’s recent history, to hide or rather bury the scares of a violent civil war and instead to promote ancient heritage and national culture in the projected fantasy of

1 Out of 800 damaged buildings, a total of 291 were retained. Moreover, as the destruction process evolved, layers of architectural ruins were revealed. It is estimated that Beirut has 7 layers of memory going back as far as 550 BC with the Phoenician era. Most of the ruins were conserved in the city center thus changing Solidere’s orginial masterplan for the reconstruction. (Gavin, 1998)

the city’s center. Often compared to “a sanitized Middle Eastern theme park”, the reconstructed Down Town area aims to provide a safe vision of a prosperous city (Nagel, 2002). Solidère’s glamorous project attempts to erase the war from the urban space of the city thus encouraging the Lebanese society to deal with the inherently disturbing trauma of the civil war through erasure and forgetting.

Pierre Nora’s term « lieux de memoire » defines sites in which we find “a residual sense of continuity of memory; places in which memory is crystallized”. He further argues that “there is no such thing as spontaneous memory”, thus the necessity to root memory “in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and object” or what he calls “lieux de memoire”. However, when the physical realms of memory are physically erased, it is no longer possible for memory to be spontaneous. Eradicating the physical traces of memory in Beirut’s city center thus renders the construction of spontaneous and constructed memory difficult, if not impossible. Remembering Beirut’s historical ancient heritage and national culture comes at the cost of forgetting its modern history and particularly the trauma, both physical and psychological, of a daunting civil war. The process of destruction, that was central in the down town’s reconstruction, “signals a profound commitment to forget, or more pointedly, the will to amnesia, characterized by a physical inability to remember” (Nora, 1989).

As the process of reconstruction/destruction evolved, the politics of remembrance re-surfaced among the public sphere. Post-modern architect Bernard Khoury repeatedly voiced his concern regarding the systematic destruction of war-damaged buildings in the new Down Town area (Khoury, 2006). In 1991, he developed a design studies called Evolving Scares that aimed at transforming “the process of demolition of war damaged buildings in the city into a collective architectural experiment” (Fitzel, 2003). Khoury suggested a city that was cannibalizing itself as it worked to rebuild: “The project consists of a temporary transparent skin that is implemented around the outer periphery of a ruin and a memory collector that deploys itself within the perimeter of the ruin while collecting data” (DWS, 2006). Khoury seemed to suggest that architecture can contribute to collective memory by soothing over difficult memories (Ouroussoff, 2006). Evolving Scares remained a study. But its themes and objectives resonate in some of Khoury’s later architectural projects. Two of his projects are particularly relevant in this perspective: the discotheque BO18 and the Beirut City Center Building restoration proposal (also known as the “Bubble Dome”). In both projects, Khoury clearly attempts to reconcile Beirut’s past and future in the present by incorporating and preserving elements of the past in the urban space. BO18 was built upon the soil where Palestinian Refugees were once massacred. Khoury attempts to incorporate this painful history by designing the discotheque almost as a memorial to the traumatic events that happened during the civil war: an underground structure resembling a bunker, coffins and tombstones, coarse and barbaric language to remind those who come to dance here that there was once a tragic event that must be accounted for in their history (Spindle, 2004). Similarly, Khoury intends to restore the Bubble Dome while preserving “its artillery-scarred surface in wire mesh and surrounding it with permanent red scaffolding” (Fricke, 2005). Khoury’s work attempts to signal the fundamental need to incorporate physical remembrance of violent trauma in urban planning to engage the wider society in a dynamic discussion of Lebanon’s collective memory. Khoury’s work is inscribed in a recent aesthetic movement of remembrance whose artistic work center on the topic of postwar forgetting and remembering thus challenging the predominant culture of amnesia and revealing the lack of consensus when it comes to how to deal with the memory of the civil war.

DIMENSIONS OF COLLECTIVE AMNESIA
The tension that exists between proponents of collective amnesia and those who encourage a process of public remembrance reveals that the unfinished nature of the civil war has hindered the capacity of the nation to deal with the memory of the conflict. Furthermore, seventeen years after the civil war, the Beirut city center is yet to be completely reconstructed. Despite the major renovation and reconstruction efforts deployed by Solidère, the vast majority of the Down Town area remains empty, almost ghostlike. Beirut is a vacant terrain vague, a voided center that’s physical and political structures were dismantled by a dual tabula rasa resulting from a destructive civil war and the subsequent reconstruction efforts. Those unfilled spaces in the urban structure only reveal the gaps that the unfinished civil war left in Beirut’s history.

It is hard to find a consensus among the Lebanese on the exact date of the end of the war. Lebanon came out of the war with a number of political problems unresolved. The Taif agreement signed in 1989 under the formula la ghalib la maghloub (no victor, no vanquished) marked the country’s transition from a state of war to a state of peace. Shortly after that, a law of general amnesty that pardoned all “crimes against humanity and those which seriously infringe human dignity” was passed in 1991 (Haugbolle, 2005). The majority of the Lebanese warlords were pardoned and none were compelled to assume their role and responsibility during the civil war. That violent period in history conveniently became La guerre des autres (The war of the others). Consequently, those responsible for the destruction of their own country became responsible for its reconstruction; those who killed, now ruled. By default, the war had to be forgotten to be able to move on, thus installing a “state-sponsored amnesia”.

However, forgetting does not offer anything to the civil society in terms of visions for the future. According to Tzvetan Todorov, there are two main reasons why it is essential that the truth be told and written. First, remembering the past allows victims to “demand reparations for offenses suffered” and heroes to “boast about it [the past]” (Todorov, 2001). In the Lebanese case, there was no victor and no vanquished. All were equally guilty and if truth and reconciliation were to be attained through national and international trials, a quite significant proportion of the political class would have been prosecuted. The issues of justice and responsibility were not to be tackled to serve the self-interest of the political leaders and their communities, thus contributing to the culture of amnesia. There were no heroes nor victims when the civil war ended; the Lebanese were left with un-heroic memories thus forcing people into a sense of meaningless understanding of the past and making it practically impossible for them to make sense of the violence and the trauma they went through (Haugbolle, 2005). The issue of responsibility is not, however, strictly limited to the leaders who waged the war. Hannah Arendt defines collective responsibility as an individual’s responsibility for something he or she did not do but that is assumed because he or she is member of a group. Being a member of a community implies that we live our lives among our fellow men and when a crime is committed in the name of the nation, all of its members are morally bound to this crime because it is the duty of all members of the group to take a moral stance towards the crime that was committed in their name (Arendt, 2003). But when the civil war becomes “the war of the others”, no one assumes responsibility thus rendering collective responsibility a mere fantasy. If an individual recalls the past for his own personal interest, then constructing a national narrative of the past would be pointless. Arendt distinguishes between personal and collective responsibility claiming that “in the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self” whereas “in the center of political considerations of conduct stands the world”, thus implying that one does not live on his own and that this otherness is at the basis of collective responsibility (Arendt, 2003). Recognizing that otherness and assuming one’s membership in one’s own community should be the starting point in the construction of a collective memory.

It is also essential to recognize that otherness in order to evaluate the past according to the principle of moral justice that Todorov refers to. By placing the other in favor of the self in the process of constructing a collective narrative of the past, it becomes possible to put the past in service of the present. Indeed, the second reason that Todorov presents in favor of memory is that one must remember the past to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It is the duty of those who have suffered, as well as those who have witnessed suffering to remember those sufferings and to resist against suffering in the present or in the future. It is also one’s duty not to allow that suffering to perpetuate itself or to be forgotten. Memory should be used both in the service of the present, as well as the service of justice (Todorov, 2001).

From Foucault’s perspective, the culture of amnesia in the Lebanese society can be explained as a direct result of how politics in the present influence what is remembered and what is forgotten. He argues that linear narrative in the past is constantly constructed by the quest of power in the interest of certain groups. In the Lebanese case, it is in the interest of the political leaders to promulgate the culture of amnesty because they have no desire to shed light on the past, or to open the war files. Labeling the war as “The war of the others” and defining “the others” as the common evildoer allows for the construction of a linear narrative that excludes the responsibility of those who waged the war in the past and are currently in power in the present. By questioning the truth of that linear narrative, one attempts to ask who and what is being excluded from that construction of the truth. Foucault aims at introducing discontinuity into our very identity in order for history to become a differential knowledge invested in multiple points of view. He argues that “effective history” is not merely about accurate representation of the facts, yet it is a critique of the present and of how the present views both its past and itself. By putting ourselves in the historical picture and allowing history to affect our lives and our lives to affect history, history can be usefully put to use (Foucault, 1977). In other words, breaking through the culture of amnesia and questioning the official sanitized version of the war is to question the current structures of power in the Lebanese society and to critically face the reality of acute political problems that directly result from an unresolved civil war. The sectarian civil war that raged the country for fifteen years had an unjust outcome resulting in the reinforcement of the sectarian divisions in both the political class and the civil society. By accepting the culture of amnesia, Lebanon is ignoring the roots of the conflict thus increasing the possibility that it might repeat itself.

A COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
The reconstruction of Beirut’s downtown is clearly a state-controlled attempt to construct a sanitized image of the past. The conservation of historical monuments as well as archaeological ruins that were uncovered is an attempt to promote culture over memory and to root the Lebanese identity in its culture heritage (Fricke, 2005). However, culture, as Todorov argues, is a matter of memory. And collective memories greatly shape a society’s identity. If Beirut’s reconstruction fails to account the memory of the civil war, Bernard Khoury’s architectural work marks the urban space in an attempt to question the state-sanctioned amnesia. Khoury’s projects work as constant reminders in the public sphere that one should not forget past events and that one should seek remembrance and learning across generations. His projects provide a spatial account of a past that has left profound wounds in the society. Khoury does not attempt to provide a critical understanding of past events, nor does he try to identify the heroes and the victims. In the discotheque BO18, the tables are tombstones but there are no pictures of martyrs. Instead, there are pictures of artists, musicians, singers. Khoury symbolically attempts to promote a selective amnesia. By integrating the scars of the war in the structure of his work, he is asserting that the war should not be forgotten. And by substituting martyrdom with art, he is suggesting that some aspects of the war are not meaningful to recall and should perhaps be “buried in the muddled knowledge that they took place rather than how they took place” (Haugbolle, 2005). Furthermore, his suggested project for the restoration of the Bubble Dome directly challenges the structures of power established in Beirut’s Down Town. Khoury aims at inserting in the sanitized version of Down Town a quite vibrant symbol of the consequences of the civil war that would ultimately serve as a medium in the construction of national narrative.

CONCLUSION
The Lebanese state’s attempt to suppress memory reveals that the wounds have not healed. There is no official memorial, apart from a monument that was offered to the Ministry of Defense in 1995 by the French sculptor Arman. And there is no reason to expect any official initiative to remember the war. There has been, however, numerous initiatives in the public sphere to engage in the construction of a national narrative and to work a way towards collective memory. Before the war even ended, an aesthetic movement has taken up the task of inscribing the trauma that the Lebanese society has been through: prolific literature works account for invaluable memories of the civil war and are certainly crucial in the formation of a certain narrative to remember the civil war. Examples of such artistic work include the novels of Elias Khoury and Hoda Barakat, only to cite a few, and their numerous attempts to romanticize the civil war in their writings. Moreover, a number of young artist and architect have centered their works on the topic of post-war memories and amnesia among them Lamia Joreige’s videos, Walid Raad’s multimedia art work and Ziad Doueiri’s cinematographic work (Cooke, 2002). However, that type of remembrance fails to confront the larger public sphere with the necessity to critically approach emotionally and politically charged memories. The growing sectarian divisions within the Lebanese society are a clear signal that the national Lebanese identity has yet to be shaped and that the state’s unresolved political problems need to be addressed. It doesn’t matter if the reconstruction of the city center has erased the traces of the war because the scars, the real scars, are still visible.
The war has yet to end.

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