Living with an indiscriminate enemy

Declaring war on coronavirus has proved popular with government speech writers around the world over the past few months.

Rhetoric evoking Blitz spirit and national duty has been employed to elicit a sense of history and unity in efforts to confront the virus.

But, as attention turns from avoiding Covid-19 to living with it, the more accurate comparison to war may not be the fight against an enemy, but the living of normal life in a war zone, when the routine act of stepping outside your front door exposes you to indiscriminate threats.

Civilians in Lebanon during that country’s civil war faced such a dilemma. As conflict raged around them, how could everyday life continue?

Lebanon’s civil war broke out in 1975. One of the many proxy wars of the Cold War, it pitched right-wing mostly Christian parties, backed by the US, against left-wing majority Muslim groups, allied with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and supported by the Soviet Union. It would divide the country for 15 years.

The capital Beirut was a central battleground. Shortly after fighting began, the city split. Damascus Street, which ran roughly north to south through the city, divided the two camps.To the west were the city’s Muslims. To the east, the Christians. The road famously became known as the ‘Green Line’ as it was so dangerous and consequently so uninhabited that vegetation grew freely where it had never before.

Professor Hilal Khashan, former Chairperson of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut, was in the city between 1984 and 1990.

He said: “There is no question the civilian population was the primary casualty during the Lebanese protracted civil war."

Beirut did not exist in the state of siege that the world has become accustomed to during Syria’s civil war. Rather, it often sat in suspension between all out conflict and ceasefire. Still, for the duration of the war, random mortar attacks, kidnappings, sniper fire, skirmishes and, most terrifying of all, car bombs, were a regular occurrence.

Much like coronavirus, to step outside your front door was to put yourself at risk.

Civilians were executed for their religion at pop up road blocks while walking down the street for groceries. Snipers caused traffic jams. Rockets killed people driving home from the beach.

Hilal Khashan, Professor of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut

But life carried on.

“Since the very beginning, people started to cope with it,” said Professor Khashan.

They still went to work. They went out for dinner. They got married. They moved houses.

New York Times correspondent Thomas L. Friedman, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war, wrote in July 1983:

“What makes Beirut a truly wild, occasionally insane and often absurd place to live is not its raw violence. It is the fact that such violence is always framed against some of the most carefree and prosaic activities of daily existence. Life in this city is absurd not because people get killed, but because they get killed playing tennis or lying on the beach or shopping in the market or driving home from work.”

Of course, comparisons to coronavirus should not be overplayed. As Robert Fisk, another civil war correspondent, pointed out in a recent column in the Independent: “such parallels can prove embarrassing.”

The coronavirus has become synonymous with quiet streets, socially distanced queues and sudden ambulance sirens. For most, it has been easy to avoid its more grisly aspects.

Beirut’s war was characterised by loud explosions and very visible, physical violence and destruction. There was no furlough scheme, no Zoom, no Uber Eats. The violence caused by war, and the fear that such violence instils, is different.

One Maronite Christian who lived through the war, but did not wish to be named, commented that the stakes were much higher in the civil war than with coronavirus. It was deadlier and more indiscriminate. There were no government guidelines to avoid danger.

Yet, the principle stays the same: it is safer at home than not.

As pressure mounts on governments to return society to normal, individuals worldwide are turning their attention to how to deal with a daily life that all of a sudden comes with much more risk.

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Speaking on the BBC World Service’s The Real Story programme last month, Lenore Manderson, Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, said:

“One of the big challenges for many public health epidemics was to translate an epidemiologic concept of risk to everyday behaviour. What people tend to do is make a personal balance: if I do X, will I live or will I die? And they're not necessarily able to articulate the epidemiologic picture of what percentage of the total population might be at risk for particular activities.”

Coronavirus has led to suggestions that certain cultures are better suited to managing risk. In particular, some argue that those in the West, less accustomed to balancing such existential dangers, have frozen in the face of a threat that they no longer considered relevant.

Frank Furedi, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, also speaking to The Real Story, suggested that some cultures are more risk averse than others:

“I have discovered that in some cultures, particularly in Asian cultures, but also in parts of East Europe, people are pretty good at calculating risk. In the Anglo-American sort of world, we become extremely risk averse.”

But he concluded that this aversion to risk is situation specific.

“Those calculations may suit the life of certain people who have no choice but to live according to certain pressures that kind of bear down upon them,” he said.

When Professor Khashan returned to Lebanon in 1984, nine years after the war began, he found his neighbours had adjusted to their new environment.

During the civil war, the Lebanese trait of fatalism dominated social discourse.

Professor Khashan said: “People in Lebanon tend to be fatalistic. And they assume that if you are going to die, nobody can stop you from dying. Therefore, if you die, then it is God's will. Therefore, you take to the street, you venture, and if you are destined to live, you will live.”

In Lebanon, coronavirus does not seem to have hit hard with only 32 deaths according to its Ministry of Public Health. People are not worried either way.

“The Lebanese people view themselves as survivors of the war,” said Professor Khashan.

“If we survived a 15 year war, if we survived a litany of Israeli incursions and Israeli invasion, of Lebanon, then we can cope with this situation. We are used to adversity.”

Like during the Lebanese civil war, what is considered an acceptable level of risk is changing for many around the world. Hopefully unlike Lebanon, the change will not last 15 years.

Living With An Indiscriminate Enemy