A 'Deep Deep Horror'

Looking out across the gently rippling waves of the Mediterranean early last August. Paul Salem '83 sat on the beach of Jounieh. Lebanon in the early morning hours and watched his home, the city of Beirut, "melt under a red glow of fire. "As Salem listened to the continuous rumbling of bombs, a "deep, deep horror" filled his heart, confirming his deep desire to someday, somehow help reconcile differences and bring peace to the Middle East.

For Salem, now a Dunster House senior, war has been a daily reality since his youth. His mother is American; his Lebanese father, an administrator at the American University of Beirut, was recently appointed Foreign Minister of Lebanon's new government. Born in Washington, D.C., Salem grew up in Beirut and attended a Lebanese school run by American missionaries.

He recalls the conditions during the war of 1967 when the headlights on cars were painted black "like one sees in the old World War II movies."

Despite the constant but relatively low-key fighting that marked the 1960s, Salem says his feeling of "violence coming home, coming close" began to grow in the early 1970s when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), evicted from Jordan in 1971, began building a base in Lebanon. The Lebanese government at that time was "delicately balanced" to satisfy relations between the five major religions in the country--the two Moslem minorities, (Shiites and Sunnites), Christian Marinates, Christian Greek Orthodox, and Druses. The entrance of Palestinian forces "tipped the balance of the Lebanese political system," but, Salem adds, that was only one of the problems. Civil war broke out in 1975.

Salem remembers those years as formative. "Having nothing else to do, I used to play basketball outside in the court alone. Often I would be playing and a shell would drop, so I would have to run home. It was a very risky and sobering experience--dealing with death every single day."

"The society I was living in was collapsing, reverting to a hostile state of man against man where all the essential rules and regulations one takes for granted were just falling apart."

When he left Harvard last spring. Salem expected to go to home to witness one of a family's greatest joys--the marriage of his sister Lisa to her finance Mark Instead he met with one of the most fearful summers of his life.

Mark and Lisa, who both study at the University of North Carolina, arrived in Beirut in late May, along with Mark's parents from Omaha, Nebraska. The families congregated on the American University campus, where the Salems live, to begin making plans for the big wedding.

In early June the Israeli ambassador to London was shot. Salem says his family and the Lebanese braced for retaliation when they heard the news, but expected nothing more after they heard Israeli forces had fired into refugee camps in Beirut and in the South. That was Friday, Sunday morning, though, during a big family lunch, someone heard on the radio that Israeli forces had advanced across the bans border and were quickly pushing up the coast.

"The news sent everybody into a panic, especially Mark's poor parents, who had never been out of Omaha," Salem says. "Seeing that the air raids on the camps were getting fiercer, we decided that it would be best if all those concerned with the wedding left Beirut."

Salem's father had to stay in Beirut in his official capacity to see that hospitals remained open and water was available for the patients. The rest of the family fled to Ba'abda, Lebanon, a little town overlooking Beirut which houses the Presidential palace and the American embassy residence.

Even our of Beirut, the air raids were ever-present. "What was really cerise was that we could watch the air raids from our house in Ba'abda. The magnitude of the air raids--which could go on for hours and hours--was something which no one had ever seen before, never of this intensity."

As the Israelis approached Beirut the family planned to have Lisa and Mark married in Ba'abda as soon as possible, however, a few days later the Israeli army rolled into Ba'abda itself and set up artillery and surveillance positions next to their house. "The whole night was very dangerous. We were all huddled together in the basement Mark's parents were very shattered, worried and scared." The family was forced to escape to nearby Byblios in the midst of the bombings.

Finally Mark and Lisa were able to marry in a Crusader Church in Byblos, Lebanon. After the wedding, the newly weds and parents escaped on an evacuation ship going to France.

Salem spent the rest of the summer in a beach cabin in small town of Jounieh up the coast of Lebanon. While he remained relatively safe, his father was still in Beirut, where the family could only occasionally, "miraculously" hear how he was. Near the end of the summer, however, Salem heard his house in Beirut had been bombed. "As my father was walking into the house an air raid began," he relates. "When plans come in from the sea you can't hear them because they are flying faster than sound, but you can see a flash when they're there and the sound follows. My father didn't hear an explosion because the sound of the jet was very loud. But he had a very strong concussion and he had hit the ground by that time and was lying in the hallway. When he opened his eyes and looked around the hallway was filled with dust and smoke and he couldn't see anything.

"Eventually he felt around and the air cleared up a bit and he walked around the house and into the living room. There was a big gaping hole in the living room ceiling; the whole living room was devastated. Fortunately, he was not hurt, but that is as close to home as it gets."

Salem says he spent the summer fearing for his father, unable to concentrate on anything. He says, however, that in the midst of the country's pain, he noticed new feelings rising between religious groups. The world he uses is "love."

Instead of distinct friction between the religious factions. Salem says a nationalistic feeling began to unite the Lebanese people. He points to the unanimous election of the new President--Amir Gemayel as an indication of this unity.

"All the Lebanese can do is turn to each other. There's a growing feeling in Lebanon that, after all, we're all Lebanese, so we have to turn to build on what we do have, a common Lebanese back.... browned. [Gemayel] is a very solid Lebanese and the people recognize that it is in everybody's best interest to support and agree on something Lebanese, father than to raise the banner of this or that."

His experiences and the appointment of his father to the post of Foreign Minister have intensified Salem's hope that some day Lebanon will be able to stand on its own without the intervention of foreign forces.

"When you have gone through war for eight years and you see an opportunity to get out of it, you do whatever you can," he says. "We have a lot to build on, and we just realized it."

"It's also a very nationalistic feeling People, especially the press [in the United States], which is the only medium through which Americans can understand what the opinion is, don't really recognize that there is this turnaround in Lebanon.

"In a way they are surprised about what is going on. They don't really understand and ask. 'Why are the Lebanese getting together' Don't they see they have killed each other since 1975? Shouldn't the Moslems hate the Christians because of the massacre?'"

Salem, however, hopes that Americans will recognize that there is hope for peace in the Mideast. He said he doesn't see any immediate solutions, but for now. "All I can do is explain."