Tue, Jul 25, 2006 page4

• Beirutis defy bombing by going to pubs

  NOT AFRAID Even as the Israeli bombs pound southern Lebanon, some in Beirut's safer areas are showing their resistance by continuing their favorite leisure activities

  • AFP
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  Queen's iconic anthem We Will Rock You takes on a new meaning when you hear it in a Beirut bar just a few kilometers from the booms of Israeli missiles.

  But in the capital of besieged Lebanon, once the top nightclub destination in the Middle East, the choice of music is very deliberate -- a message of defiance shared by the dozens of Lebanese patrons pressed into one of the handful of trendy bars still open on a weekend night.

  "It's a form a resistance. We want to show that we can still go out and live like before, show that the bombings will never annihilate us," said Tony Kairouz, a 32-year-old who looks like he's stepped out of an Italian summer fashion shoot.

  

  A blackboard advertising cocktails named after two different types of rockets used by Hezbollah, the Katyusha and Raad-3, hangs at the Club Social bar in Beirut on Saturday. Despite the violence, a small and tenacious coterie of clientele have clung to Beirut's famed nightlife, hoping for a moment of reprieve.

  PHOTO: AP

  "The war's not our problem. I'm a human being, I want to live normally. We have to breathe, you know?" said Mary Hanna, 26, his glamorous, almond-eyed girlfriend.

  The bar they are in, the Dragonfly, and the three or four establishments around it form a pocket of illusion in Beirut's Gemmayzeh area that everything is normal.

  Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall succeeds Queen, followed by the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction. Beer and cocktails are delivered by a white-coated waiter amid laughter and light-hearted chatter.

  In another bar, a television shows the day's destruction, but the sound is off, and the customers are ignoring it, bopping to the pop music and knocking back g;asses of chilled vodka.

  But the rest of the street is deserted. Taxi drivers standing around outside shake their heads, muttering that two weeks ago, just before the Israeli offensive, this place was a bustling chaos of flashy cars and brazen, moneyed youths looking for a good time. Tourism was booming. Beirut was busy carving out its place alongside Ibiza and Miami as a red-hot partying capital.

  Now that dynamism has been wiped out. Almost.

  With no other way of responding to Israeli bombs, a hard core group of young Beirutis -- those who can shake off their parents' strident demands to remain in the safety of their homes -- are intent on showing they will not be cowed.

  "It's their sole form of expression in what's going on. I mean, look around and think to yourself: this is a war zone after all. And they are going out regardless," said Nida, an expatriate Lebanese who had come from France to help get his elderly parents out of the country.

  A barman, Eli Issa, said that with most of the Israeli attacks taking place in the Shiite-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut, people felt relatively secure in the Christian district of Gemmayzeh, just 4km distant but thus far untouched.

  "They feel safe here," he said.

  In one of the cheaper cafes, a couple of old men -- refugees from Tyre in the blitzed south of the country -- talk at a table over cups of strong Arabic coffee, the sea framed behind them.

  "We had to get away from the television. It's 24-hour stress," Ahmad Hijazi, 60, said.

  "Staying in, all we do is look at the television or keep the radio next to the ear," he said, adding that, after 12 days of bombardments, Lebanon's population is tired of being constantly on edge.

  "We're no longer afraid," he said.
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