Book. In bookstores, where a series of works dedicated to the attack of October 7, 2023 in Israel and the war in Gaza, whose first anniversary we will soon celebrate, are beginning to appear, there is the book by the Franco-Lebanese journalist Marwan Chahine, entitled Beirut, April 13, 1975. Autopsy of a spark. (Belfond, 560 pages, 22 euros), could prove intriguing. What is the point of retracing the genesis of an old war, the one that bloodied the country of Cedar between 1975 and 1990, when another coastal territory, a few hundred kilometres further south, is buried under bombs?
In the face of forty thousand deaths in the Palestinian sand strip, the words of this former correspondent of Release in Cairo – reenacting the attack on a bus of Palestinian fedayeen by Lebanese Christian militiamen on 13 April 1975, the inaugural massacre of the Lebanese civil war – might seem out of place. But the opposite is true: his book is a wonderfully endearing wandering tale. Weaving together large and small stories, somewhere between research, essay and autobiography, it says a lot, not only about Lebanon, but also about the Middle East, this region plagued by violence, often a prisoner of its myths and its martyrs.
On the issue of the bullet-riddled bus, called “Bosta”, which became the emblem of the civil war, to the point of being put on public display in 2011, each side has its version set in stone. An ambush, argue the Palestinians, who accuse the Kataeb (Phalanges), the main Maronite formation at the time, of having deliberately started the conflict. A spontaneous act of retaliation, maintain the Christians, who maintain that just before the bus arrived in the district of Aïn El-Remmaneh, in the south of Beirut, their leader, Pierre Gemayel, narrowly escaped the fire of the fedayeen.
“A war of memories”
“There is no memory of the war in Lebanon, but a war of memories”Marwan Chahine rightly underlines as he ventures into this minefield. Stubborn and passionate, the author delves into the press of the time, unearths police reports and follows the footsteps of witnesses and protagonists of the drama who are still alive, more than forty years after the events. A treasure hunt, told with an alert pen, through the poor Christian suburbs and Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut, recruiting grounds, in the 1970s and 1980s, of abadayé (henchmen), the proletariat of the civil war.
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