The highway south from Beirut to the coastal city of Tyre was a symbol of Lebanon’s love for the open road and proof of revival after the bitter 1975 to 1990 conflict. But that was four weeks ago.
Today, Lebanon’s dreams of recovery from years of civil war have been shattered by Israel’s devastating month-old offensive.
Twenty-eight days of Israeli bombardment have plunged the Lebanese back to a past they were trying to forget — one of tortuous, perilous journeys.
It is 11am in Beirut. The motorway tunnels, which hug the shoreline outside the capital, are empty, too tempting a target, perhaps, for the Israeli warplanes which have pounded Lebanon since July 12.
The driver accelerates down the empty road.
The coastal highway, stretching for about 85km to Sidon and then Tyre, marked the rebirth of Lebanon.
Constructed under the leadership of assassinated former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, it was meant to strengthen ties between the capital and the isolated south.
The region had been sidelined by the central government for years, and its poor have long been ready to back the cause of hardliners such as the Shi’ite Hezbollah militia, which is battling Israel.
To the right, the beaches are empty. Just like the houses, the hotels and the restaurants.
It is now 11.07am and the highway is blocked, its paving broken by heavy bombs. The diversions begin, as the few vehicles risking the motorway are forced to take to a dusty, potholed side road lined by shuttered shops.
Sidon, 43km south of Beirut, should now be only a few minutes away. But that would be in peacetime, and today [Tuesday] a bomb has dictated otherwise.
The tiny bridge that crossed a wooded valley has been destroyed. It was so small that drivers might have expected it to escape the wrath of the Israeli air force.
A left turn leads to the steep slopes of the Shouf mountains, a stronghold of the Druze, members of an offshoot of Islam.
A shadow-dappled road heads along a stream in an idyllic setting where empty restaurants wait in vain for customers.
In the village of Baaqlin a young man struggles to ride his bicycle up the hill, men drink coffee on a terrace and the shelves are groaning with fruit and vegetables.
The road bends right and begins to zigzag down the other side of the mountain.
The local villages here have been swamped by hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Israeli bombardment of Hezbollah’s south Lebanon stronghold.
On packed roads people push and shove, and tempers are easily lost. Columns of cars, decked with white flags, stream in from the south.
Finally, our car reaches the empty outskirts of Sidon. A voice on the radio announces that the Israeli navy is shelling the coastal road.
That means another detour to the central square, the gathering point for the refugees from further south.
By 1pm, what should have been a 20-minute journey has taken two hours.
On the final stretch of the highway to Tyre a petrol station has gone up in smoke. Fields of untended vegetables are drying up under plastic sheeting.
A handful of cars head at breakneck speed through banana plantations, under the watchful eyes of great men of Shi’ite Islam, Imam Mussa Sadr of Lebanon and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, whose faces are plastered on billboards.
The highway ends abruptly. The tarmac disappears, swallowed up by sand.
Israeli bombs have destroyed the bridge over the Litani river and transformed the surrounding area into wasteland. The gap has been part-filled with rubble.
A dirt track through orange groves is now the main road into Tyre, which has been all but cut off from the rest of the country.
The ”road”, lined with bomb craters and car wrecks, winds down to a majestic bay, which echoes to the sound of shelling. — AFP
