A New England-style Boarding School Opens in Jordan
By Andrew Lee Butters/Madaba

In the popular imagination, New England boarding schools are a cloistered world where the blond-haired children of America’s blue bloods pick up the arch manners and the strange affinity for boat shoes that will mark them forever as a class apart. But not if you are a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad and scion of the Hashemite dynasty, the erstwhile princes of Mecca who rule the Kingdom of Jordan. For Abdullah Ibn Hussein, now known as His Majesty King Abdullah II, the carefree years he spent at Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts (class of 1980) were formative. Deerfield introduced Abdullah to a much broader range of friends than is normally available to young Arab princes; and the character-building crucible of dormitory life taught him Yankee egalitarianism, self-reliance and how to clear dishes from the dinner table.

So, after he ascended to the throne in 1999, the king began to replicate the experience for some of his own subjects, planning an elite boarding school for Jordan. In 2006, he lured Deerfield’s then headmaster Eric Widmer and several other Deerfield teachers from the green hills of New England to his semi-desert realm with a heady challenge: Create a new generation of Middle Eastern leaders from all backgrounds and faiths whose commitment to global citizenship would help transform the region. King’s Academy opened this fall with about 100 students — the first co-educational boarding school in the Middle East. (Victoria College, a boys boarding school founded by the British in Alexandra in 1902, was nationalized and effectively gutted by the Egyptian government in 1956.) Though the students now hail mainly from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine and elsewhere in the Arab Middle East, King’s hopes to eventually attract students from Israel and the West as well.

A complete campus designed for an eventual enrollment of around 600 students has sprouted, as if from dragon teeth, on the edge of Madaba, a farming town about 30 miles south of Amman, Jordan’s capital. King’s copied many ingredients of the New England boarding school recipe: family-style meals at round tables, school-wide assemblies, blue blazers and khaki pants. More importantly, it has adopted the belief shared by Deerfield and others that the classroom should be an intimate place that fosters discussion and critical thinking rather than rote memorization, which is the default teaching method in much of the region. But most importantly, the environment created by Widmer and his colleagues emphasizes learning and leadership outside of the classroom, through athletics, community service and honor codes.

But if the school’s newly turfed lawns appear to have more grass than all of the rest of Jordan, its Levantine-style white stone buildings — and the tight security at its main gate — remind visitors that they’re not in Massachusetts anymore. The founders of King’s Academy quickly grasped that building an exact replica of Deerfield in the Middle East was neither possible nor desirable; they wanted an institution that combined the best of East and West. Arabic language classes are mandatory, and humanities courses taught in English draw on the canonical works of many civilizations. Anticipating the difficulty of convincing parents in this conservative society to send their children away to school, King’s set strict rules governing relations between boys and girls: no kissing, no holding hands, and no visiting each other’s dorms.

But perhaps the biggest challenge facing King’s is beyond the control of even the most committed faculty or enlightened royal patron: the ever-turbulent Middle East. As King Abdullah likes to say, Jordan is a country caught between “Iraq and a hard place” — i.e., Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Is an elite academy sustainable in a country that is flooded with Iraqi and Palestinian refugees? What will happen to King’s if turmoil in Iraq or tensions between the U.S. and Iran plunge the region into a new war? Safwan Masri, the Jordanian chairman of the academy’s board of trustees and a professor at Columbia Business School, is unfazed. “The one thing that almost everyone in the Middle East respects is American education,” he said. “The fact that this is a troubled region makes the case for this kind of school even stronger.”

Lebanon’s underground music scene sees its own demise in the fading promise of the ‘Cedar Revolution’

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

Despite a jihadist uprising in the north, a political crisis in the capital, and rumors of war swirling all around, it’s business as usual in Beirut’s packed nightclubs. The good-looking people in this good-time town have long partied to a familiar soundtrack of popping champagne corks, clacking high-heels, and the generic beat of computer-generated dance music — whatever it takes to drown out the sound of Lebanon’s continual crises. But for a relatively small number of Beirut hipsters, there’s another soundtrack, evoking rather than denying the instability of their lives.

Many of them gathered last Thursday for a performance by Scrambled Eggs, four nerdy-cool local guys in tight jeans and high-tops who strangle their guitars and have onstage seizures as if this was Manchester in the 80’s or Seattle in the 90’s. “I was locked in a cellar but it became my shelter,” sang frontman Charbel Haber on “See You in Beirut Whatever Happens,” one of the band’s original songs that convincingly channels the post-punk era of Sonic Youth and the Cure, but which seems somehow appropriate in the current Beirut setting: a subterranean nightclub called Basement, which coined its slogan “It’s Safer Underground” during last summer’s Israeli air raids.

For the past ten years, Beirut has been home to a small but artistically significant rock scene, where a handful of bands with names like Soap Kills, the New Government and, of course, Scrambled Eggs, have tried to put this tiny country on the musical map for something other than sexy Arab pop divas. As such, they’ve been part of a creative subculture of artists, architects, and designers who’ve tried to reconcile Eastern and Western cultural forms, as well as tradition with modernity.

A foreign visitor might find it strange to find a rock subculture in the Middle East, but Haber, a former Catholic schoolboy, sees a similarity between rock’s golden age during the 1950s and 1960s in America, and the Middle East today — sexually repressed conservative societies dominated by religion and an ideological cold war. Interviewed last week at the band’s studio in Gemmayze, a formerly working class neighborhood of garages and crumbling townhouses that’s become ground zero for Beirut’s young and restless, Haber places the Beirut rock scene in a wider Mideast cultural context: “At the end of the day, sex, drugs, and rock and roll means freedom.”

Rock and freedom — if not necessarily sex and drugs — got a big boost in Lebanon in 2005, during what outsiders called the Cedar Revolution, when huge crowds gathered in central Beirut to demand an end to the Syrian occupation and an end to the country’s sectarian divisions. But the creative and intellectual frenzy that accompanied the Syrian withdrawal was cut short after the country’s ruling sectarian political class co-opted the Cedar Revolution, and turned Lebanon into battlefield between regional superpowers. Spurred by last summer’s war with Israel and by the current struggle between Iran and the U.S. over Lebanon’s government, talented young people have been leaving in droves. “We’re not a country that can handle big missions,” said Haber. “One side wants us to spread democracy in the Middle East, the other side says that we’re the country that’s going to bring about the downfall of the Israelis and the Americans. They have been pushing the country into a state of survival, and in a state of survival, art doesn’t survive.”

The music of Scrambled Eggs isn’t overtly political. But Haber’s lyrics, which focus on his “entourage of completely wasted people” reflect what it’s like to live in a society fraught with uncertainty and violent change. “We do everything as if the world is going to end tomorrow,” he said. “The Syrians might come back, Israel might attack, Hizballah might start another war. In a situation like this, you do a lot of self-destructive things.” One recent song, “Let It Go,” is both a rousing exhortation to ignore one’s mounting problems, but also an elegiac farewell to the city’s golden moment that followed the Cedar Revolution. Its haunting melody is meant to conjure the orange and violet melancholy of a Mediterranean sunset. “It’s an Arab thing,” explains Haber. “They always go back to the ruins and cry and remember their lovers. In Beirut, it happens every decade, the city is destroyed and then rebuilt. It disappears and then appears. That’s why it’s raw.”

By Andrew Lee Butters/Gaza City

On Patrol in Shijaiyah, the toughest neighborhood in Gaza City, Lieut. Naim Ashraf Mushtaha, 31, an officer of the Hamas Executive Force, spots a man in civilian clothes carrying an M-16 assault rifle and walking through the street suqs in broad daylight. His officers quickly encircle the suspect and demand that he identify himself and turn over the weapon. The man turns out to be a member of one of the neighborhood’s most powerful clans, and he refuses to give up his gun. “What’s my name, boys?” he shouts to the gathering crowd of curious onlookers. “Mohassi Abbas!” they shout back. “See, everyone knows who I am,” says the gunman. “I don’t care who you are,” says Mushtaha calmly, without raising his voice or his weapon. “No one is above the law.”

The rule of law has returned to Gaza. Just two months ago, this beachfront slice of sand dunes and concrete jungles, home to about 1.5 million Palestinians, was one of the most dangerous places on earth. In June, after a few days of internecine warfare, Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, took control of Gaza from its rival, Fatah. Since then, Gaza has been under siege. Almost all shipments except for basic humanitarian supplies are barred from entering, and almost nothing comes out. The blockade is part of an Israeli and American strategy to isolate Hamas in the hope that Palestinians will turn away from its Islamist leaders, who have never recognized Israel, and toward Fatah, which is willing to restart the peace process. So far, the plan isn’t working. With a free hand to govern as it pleases, Hamas is building popular support and military capability that may well outlast the international blockade.

Security is key to support for Hamas. Within a week of the takeover, crime, drug smuggling, tribal clashes and kidnappings had largely disappeared. According to human-rights groups, the ability of the Executive Force to achieve such a result is an indictment of the corruption and criminal collusion at the top of the Fatah-dominated security services that once controlled Gaza. “For the last year and a half, there has been an orchestrated escalation of chaos by some Banana Republic officers to show that Hamas does not have control of Gaza,” said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. “Gaza became like Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Thugs and gangsters were ruling, and some were supported and protected by our own security forces.”

There have been isolated cases of civil rights abuses by the Executive Force since the takeover. But Hamas hasn’t set up Shari’a courts. Without any help from the regular police, prosecutors and judges–all of whom have been barred from returning to work by the Palestinian government–Hamas is slowly trying to train itself in the administration of Palestinian law. Mushtaha and his officers spend most of their time delivering subpoenas and telling the families of wanted men to turn the suspects in. In Gazan neighborhoods, everyone knows everyone else, and there’s no place to hide: crooks certainly can’t flee to Israel.

With peace on the streets, civil society is returning to Gaza. On Friday night in downtown Gaza City, the streets are clogged with motorcades taking newlyweds and their families to seaside banquet halls. Just one thing is missing: celebratory gunfire. Gazan weddings were once as dangerous as firefights, until Hamas banned the practice of partying with firearms. Now Executive Force troops arrest anyone who gets carried away with an AK. And if Hamas wedding crashers can’t find the gunmen, they arrest the groom until the culprits turn themselves in.

Nor has been no cultural crackdown since Hamas took over. Gaza has long been more religious and conservative than the rest of Palestinian society–alcohol disappeared from public view here long ago. But secular women who walk the streets of Gaza City without headscarves or veils say they were more likely to be harassed by criminals in the old Gaza than by religious conservatives today. Rumors that Hamas is ordering barbers not to shave beards are just that. I got mine shaved off by Hossein Hussuna, the barber of Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, who told me that most of Haniya’s eight sons are clean shaven.

Gaza’s beaches may be packed and its streets safe, but its factories are shut, and its stores have almost no customers. Mohammed Telbani owns the largest factory in Gaza, making cookies and ice cream. But he can’t get his raw materials and packaging through the Israeli embargo, and he can’t send his finished products to the West Bank, where distributors have started buying cookies from Lebanon instead. “I’ve worked on creating that market for 30 years, and now it’s gone,” Telbani said. The economic damage caused by the siege is immense, with unemployment at around 44%; about 80% of the population receives food aid from U.N. agencies. Nasser el-Helou, a hotel owner and a spokesman for the Chamber of Commerce, said the Gazan economy would collapse within weeks if the siege continues.

Yet Gazan business owners like Telbani and el-Helou–practical, apolitical men–are unanimous in their criticism of Israel rather than Hamas for economic problems. “If we are free, we should control our own borders,” said el-Helou. “But we do not, so the full responsibility is on the Israeli side.” And business leaders point to a paradox of the embargo; it is destroying the only class of Palestinians who looked favorably on Israel. Most of those in commerce speak Hebrew and have–or used to have–Israeli clients, partners and friends. They had once looked forward to the day when there would be no trade barriers between an independent Palestine and an Israel with which it was at peace. “The majority of Gazans do not like Israel,” said Amassi Ghazi, the chairman of a company that imports building materials. “Until now, only the private sector had good relations with Israel. So please open the border before all Gaza will be enemies of Israel.”

Some Gazans take being Israel’s enemies seriously. At midnight, at what used to be a training ground for the Palestinian coastal police, a couple of dozen men are practicing small-arms drills. They are in the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade, the military wing of Hamas, and ready to bolt at a moment’s notice if they get a warning that Israeli warplanes are overhead. But since Fatah was driven out of Gaza, said Abu Ahmed, the commander of the unit, there have been fewer collaborators spying on Hamas for Israel, and Israeli strikes have hence dwindled. Qassam Brigade soldiers have been able to operate with relative impunity. Later Abu Ahmed takes me to a Qassam Brigade position a couple of hundred yards from the Erez crossing into Israel. Soon an Israeli surveillance drone starts buzzing overhead, and we leave quickly, back over the sand dunes into Gaza City. On the streets patrolled by Mushtaha and his men, all may seem peaceful. But at night, the long war between Hamas and Israel continues.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Arbil

A Kurdish family celebrates Nowruz, a holiday marking the Kurdish New Year and the start of spring. Since 2003, no U.S troops have been killed in Kurdish Iraq. Kate Brooks/Polaris for TIME

LIKE RESIDENTS OF BERLIN DURING THE AIRLIFT, inhabitants of Arbil–capital of the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq–get a little flutter in their hearts when they see a plane coming in to land. Built after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Arbil’s international airport is a symbol to Kurds that their years of isolation as an oppressed ethnic minority are over and that the Kurdish region, unlike the rest of Iraq, is open for business. Passengers flying into Baghdad have to endure a corkscrew landing to avoid possible surface-to-air missiles. But a trip to Arbil is so safe that on my flight I was the only passenger packing body armor. When I arrived, my biggest problem was the $50 fare charged for a 10-minute cab ride by the drivers of Hello Taxi–and finding a room at one of the city’s packed hotels.

Such is life in Iraqi Kurdistan, the last beacon of stability amid the wreckage of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq. Of course, stability is a relative term. True, the airport is putting in a runway long enough to accommodate jumbo jets, but for now it will be used mainly for U.S. military flights. That’s because only one Western carrier–Austrian Airlines–is brave enough to land there. Other flights are run by off-brand charters with names like Flying Carpet and Middle Eastern carriers like Iraqi Airways. And even those are unreliable. Many of the officials at Iraqi Airways are former Baathists who deliberately try to delay flights. Flights from Turkey often get canceled when there’s a public dispute between Kurdish and Turkish politicians. And all flights in and out of Kurdish Iraq still have to receive clearance from both the civil-aviation authority in Baghdad and the American air base in Qatar.

Iraqi Kurds have been in control of their region since 1991, when, with the help of the U.S.-enforced no-fly zone, they drove Saddam’s forces out of northern Iraq. But now, four years after the liberation of the rest of the country, Kurdish Iraq is undergoing an identity crisis. On the one hand, it is a rare success story in the Middle East: a stable territory run by a secular leadership committed to economic and political reform and sitting on a huge pool of oil. On the other hand, it is tiny and landlocked, uncomfortably attached to a war-ravaged nation and surrounded by unfriendly neighbors. Despite the region’s outward signs of tranquillity, the fate of Kurdistan–whether it will continue as an inspiring example of what the rest of Iraq could look like or become engulfed by the country’s violence–remains unresolved, dependent as much on what happens to the barely functioning Iraqi state as on the Kurds.

For the Bush Administration, the central question is how long the Kurds can be persuaded to remain part of a united Iraq. The overwhelming majority of Kurds would like to break free of Iraq and form an independent nation. So far, Kurdish leaders have been a constructive force in holding Iraq together, helping to write and adopt a national constitution that, although it gave great powers to the regions, has kept Iraq intact as a federal state. Kurds are serving at the highest levels of the Iraqi government, including as President, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.

But it’s doubtful that spirit of cooperation will last. The further that Iraq slides into civil war, the more the Kurds will want to insulate themselves from it, by carving out more political and economic autonomy. Even if they stop short of outright secession, the Kurds could still unleash new conflicts in Iraq if their impatience with the fecklessness of the Baghdad government prompts them to take action on their own. The most explosive flashpoint is Kirkuk, the disputed oil-rich city that the Kurds lay claim to. As Iraq’s Kurdish President, Massoud Barzani, said on March 22 during the farewell visit of departing U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, “Our patience is not unlimited.” So what happens to Iraq when it runs out?

WHEN I FIRST TRAVELED TO THE KURDISH north in August 2004 to escape the heat and violence of Baghdad, the so-called Switzerland of Iraq was disappointing in one respect: summers on the high plains of Arbil are almost as scorching. Otherwise, Kurdistan was a refuge. In Baghdad, journalists had begun hiring security entourages and erecting guarded compounds. To the north in Arbil, as a visiting American, I was practically given the keys to the city. I did my reporting by foot or hailed taxis from the street, spent my evenings in beer gardens or pizza parlors, and slept on the roof of the house, with the sound of crickets rather than Kalashnikovs in the cooling night air.

Since then the differences between Kurdistan and Iraq proper have become even more dramatic. The plains around Arbil–once a glaring semidesert wasteland–are exploding with luxury housing developments. They have names like British Village, which resembles a gated California suburb, and Dream City, which supposedly will have its own conference center, supermarket and American-style school. The Turkish developers of Naz City, a high-rise condominium complex, are trying to sell house-proud Kurds on modern apartment living. An American company wants to build Iraq’s first ski resort in the mountains near the Turkish and Iranian borders. While citizens in Baghdad struggle to survive, a sign in Arbil declares that the city is “striving for perfection.”

The Kurds’ most important achievement has been to keep their region free of Iraq’s insurgency and sectarian warfare, thanks to their army of 70,000 peshmerga soldiers. Not a single American soldier has been killed in Kurdistan since the start of the war in Iraq, and there hasn’t been a major terrorist attack in Arbil since June 2005.

Take a walk, however, in any of this city’s safe and prosperous neighborhoods, and you will quickly see that the other Iraq isn’t so far away. Some 150,000 displaced Iraqi Arabs have taken refuge in Kurdistan from the conflict in the central and southern parts of the country. Kurdish officials require Iraqi Arabs trying to enter Kurdistan to have a Kurdish resident vouch for their character. As a result, the Arab refugee population is largely middle class, with a preponderance of doctors, lawyers and other professionals.

But as the number of newcomers swells, tensions are rising. Not many Kurds have forgotten the years of repression by Iraq’s Arab majority, and many now blame Arabs for rising home prices. While I was waiting to speak to the president of Salahaddin University in Arbil, which has added some 200 Arab professors to its faculty, a visiting Kurdish archaeologist offered his expert opinion on the subject. “From Muhammad until now, Arabs are rotten to the bone,” he said, “even when they are being friendly to you.” Non-Kurdish Iraqis, for their part, resent being treated as second-class citizens in Kurdish Iraq. “Why do I need permission to live in my own country?” said Walaa Matti, an Assyrian Christian who fled his home in Mosul and works in the business center of a hotel in Arbil. “I’m Iraqi, and this is my country, but I feel like a stranger.”

The Kurds’ tenuous relationship with Arab Iraq is even more combustible some 47 miles south, in Kirkuk. The city is less than a two-hour drive from Arbil, but the road trip into the other Iraq is a spooky one. To the left, there’s a chain of forts left over from the Iran-Iraq war, crumbling masonry monsters that look as if they were built to World War I specifications. The Hamreen Mountains to the right are practically deserted save for a series of sentry posts silhouetted along the ridge line. And waiting straight ahead at the gates of Kirkuk is a natural-gas flare, an eternal flame that the locals call Babagurgur, which is the symbol of this oil-rich city.

Kirkuk, with its mixed population of Kurds, Arabs and Turkomans, has long had the potential to be a sectarian powder keg. Under Saddam’s Baathist regime, the Iraqi government forced out a large number of the city’s majority Kurdish population and resettled the city with Arabs from the south. Now ethnic tensions are erupting as Kurds demand the return of Kirkuk to their control. The day I visited in March, a series of two car bombs and three roadside bombs killed 18 people. On April 1, at least 15 people, including eight schoolchildren, died in a suicide truck bombing.

The violence in this city of about 1 million people hasn’t reached a level comparable to that in Baghdad. Infrastructure and services in the city are functional by Iraqi standards despite the central government, which delays projects by sheer inertia, say U.S. and Kurdish officials. Such neglect may soon reach a crisis point in Kirkuk. The Iraqi constitution calls for the city to hold a referendum by year’s end on whether it should remain under the control of the central Iraqi government in Baghdad or become part of Iraqi Kurdistan.

A growing number of voices outside Iraq–including the Baker-Hamilton commission–have called for the contentious issue to be shelved. But Kurdish leaders say further delay only increases the chance that the political process for settling the Kirkuk issue will turn into an ethnic struggle. Kirkuk is a major staging ground for Arab insurgents trying to infiltrate Kurdistan, and Kurds say they could do a better job than the Iraqi government of maintaining security there. “If we had control of Kirkuk, we could clean it out in two months,” said Abdullah Ali Muhammad, head of Kurdish security forces in Arbil. Other Kurdish officials warn that if the referendum is delayed, Kurds forced out of Kirkuk by the old regime’s ethnic-cleansing program would try to return on their own. If that happens and if the Iraqi government hasn’t moved out the “new” Arabs transplanted there under Saddam, “there will be civil war,” according to Kamal Kirkuki, vice president of the Kurdistan Parliament and head of a committee overseeing territorial disputes. Delay would give insurgents that much longer to set off car bombs and push the city closer to Baghdad-style sectarian revenge killings.

And that’s just the beginning. U.S. officials and Kurdish leaders know that unilateral moves by Kurds–to take Kirkuk on their own or drop out of the Iraqi government–would not only provoke the ire of Iraq’s Arab majority but also risk intervention by Iraq’s neighbors, such as Turkey, Iran and Syria, which all have restive Kurdish minorities of their own. Turkey, for instance, would likely shut the borders with Kurdistan and stop all flights coming in from over its airspace. Of all the problems that would follow, the most ironic could be that a newly independent oil-rich Kurdistan, without any refineries or pipelines, would run out of gas. Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of the Kurdish government’s office of foreign relations, told me that declaring independence would be “political suicide.”

But even that worst-case scenario might not be enough to dissuade the popular clamor inside Kurdistan for more assertive action. Just four years since the fall of Saddam, most Kurds may be willing to remain a part of Iraq for now, but few want their destinies to remain tied to a poor, failing state beset by sectarian carnage. Over time, the push for a free and independent Kurdistan may become irresistible. In a bid to manage expectations, the Kurdish leadership is putting out a new party line, echoed in mosques and newspaper editorials: “Be grateful.” But as Americans have learned in Iraq, gratitude is a wasting asset.

Thursday, Mar. 08, 2007
By Andrew Lee Butters/Fardis

Every weekday morning, a detachment of Indian soldiers from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) embarks on an unusual kind of peacekeeping mission—one that doesn’t require guns or ammo, or even shoes. They operate what must be the first roving yoga ashram ever to appear in south Lebanon, a region better known for guerilla warfare and air strikes than for deep breathing and headstands.

But yoga is catching on in Fardis, a small town in the foothills of Mount Hermon, where the Indians began their program with about 20 Lebanese schoolchildren. The kids, aged 5 to 13, appear to enjoy the opportunity to roll around the floor before class, and a flexible few look like yoga prodigies. School teachers say the yoga class leaves their charges calmer and more attentive throughout the day, and the Indians hope this soothing effect will be contagious. “If you are at peace with yourself, you can be at peace with your neighbors,” says Lieutenant Colonel Karan Singh, infantry officer and amateur yogi.

Still, it may take more than meditation to keep this particular neighborhood peaceful. UNIFIL’s core mission is to monitor the ceasefire that ended last summer’s war between Israel and Hizballah, which is complicated by the fact that Hizballah still considers Israel to be occupying a small patch of Lebanese land, while Israel believes Hizballah wants to retain the capacity to rain rockets on towns in northern Israel.

Still, the 850 soldiers of UNIFIL’s Indian contingent may be just the chaps for the job. At home, they are known as the 15th Punjab Infantry Battalion—the oldest, most decorated and, according to them, the most admired unit in the Indian army. Founded in 1705 by the Mahraja of Patiala, they earned their stripes fighting wherever the British Empire needed them, including the Middle East. During World War I, they fought in Gallipoli, Sinai, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Since India’s independence from Britain, they have seen action in their country’s grim conflicts with Pakistan. Their last mission was counter-insurgency against Islamic militants in Kashmir.

On an a recent visit, the battalion displayed an attention to detail and an esprit de corps quite startling to someone who has spent too much time around Middle Eastern armies. “We hope for the best but prepare for the worst,” said Colonel Advitya Madan, the unit’s commander, as he served tea with the battalion silver, which also includes tug-of-war trophies from the 1930s. Then he went off to drill the battalion, which was waiting on the parade ground in full dress uniform, in preparation for a medal ceremony to be held several weeks away.

Most of the rank-and-file soldiers in the unit are Sikhs, members of a religious group native to the plains of Punjab, who wear their long hair covered at all times, usually with a turban. Sikh soldiers are renowned in British Empire military lore for their bravery and fighting skills, although so far in South Lebanon, those attributes have not been tested. The 15th Punjab reports that it hasn’t had a single encounter with armed Hizballah elements, despite constant patrols in the 12-village area for which it is responsible. Does this mean Hizballah has given up southern Lebanon? Probably not. The group itself admitted that it has rearmed since Israel destroyed much of its weapon stockpile last summer.
Meanwhile, the Israeli press is full of talk about finishing the job. As one of the Indian officers says after a tasty lunch of basmati rice, papadoms and mango pickle: “This could be the calm before the storm.” In which case, yoga and inner peace may come in handy.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus

Just days before the American invasion of Iraq, Nahdi Mahdi, one of Iraq’s most famous comedians, was starring in a play called The Wanderers at the National Theatre in Baghdad to a packed house of almost 2,000 people. Like many then living in the misinformation bubble created by Saddam’s regime, war was the farthest thing from his mind. “It was such a surprise,” he said. “We never thought it would happen.” Now war is constantly on Mahdi’s mind, and he himself is sort of wandering, one of the million Iraqi refugees now living in Syria. But unlike many of his refugee compatriots, Mahdi at least has a job. Every evening he performs one of the star roles in Homesick, a play written, directed and performed by Iraqi refugees at a dingy theatre in downtown Damascus for an audience composed almost entirely of other Iraqi refugees.

Homesick is a featherweight farce about a an illiterate fool who stumbles into a bankrupt satellite television company in Baghdad — the Hot Hot Channel — and is mistaken for the new station manager. Its sensibility leans heavily toward slapstick of a kind that finds humor in the sight of a dwarf with an Egyptian accent being tossed offstage, and unlike in real life Iraq, there are no car bombings or beheadings and none of the characters are kidnapped.

The director of Homesick, an Iraqi Kurd named Suran Ali Sharif, had in the past staged a more topical, political play in Syria. But as anything recognizable as normal life in Iraq fell apart, and as the ranks of the refugee population in Syria swelled, Sharif decided that serious theater was out of the question. “It’s impossible to present these troubles on stage,” he said. Iraqis in Syria “are under such psychological pressure, all we can do is try to make people laugh.” Still, there is at least one reflection of the new abnormal of Iraq in Homesick: Mahdi’s character is a bodyguard.

One evening last week a few moments before curtain call, Mahdi and the other actors lounged backstage while an actress with platinum blonde hair and a heavy application of kohl-eyeliner berated a stagehand in the timeless manner of prima donnas the world over. But any sense of show business as usual ended when one of the theater managers came by to collect passports and identity documents. The Syrian government is in the process of tightening its generous residency laws for Iraqi refugees, and the fear of deportation looms larger over the production than a newspaper critic with a grudge.

The cast has other burdens and traumas in common with its audience. “The killers in Iraq make no exception for artists, writers and actors,” said one man. “All of us have lost a relative.” Indeed, radical fundamentalists in Iraq long ago started targeting actors as members of an immoral profession. Mahdi, who is 43, left his family in Iraq in March of 2006, and he dares not return. A satellite news channel once erroneously reported his demise, a warning, he said, that he is marked for assassination.

But of course, the show must go on. “The tragedy fills you with all this suffering and you still have to go on stage,” said Mahdi, as he excused himself to go to his dressing room and change into the black dish-dash and checkered headscarf that is his bodyguard costume. “The audience doesn’t care about your pain. They have their own.”

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

On any given evening in Beirut for about the last month, crowds of often angry demonstrators – mostly Shia Muslim supporters of Hizballah — have gathered downtown in hopes of bring down the Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim-led government. At the same time, crowds – though less large and less angry – have also formed at the city’s movie theatres.

While it’s not surprising that Lebanese have sought refuge in cinema from the country’s sectarian tensions, it does seem strange that many of them are going to see a movie about, at least in part, sectarian tension in the United States. When it opened on Thanksgiving, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” was the third most watched movie in Lebanon, only trailing the usual blockbusters like Casino Royal.

The fact that a movie satirizing anti-Jewish stereotypes opened around the same time that Hizballah launched its campaign is surely mere coincidence, and not evidence of a very subtle Hollywood-Jewish plot to undermine the Islamists group’s anti-Israeli agenda. Nevertheless, it is something of a remarkable event that Borat played in Lebanon at all.

When Georges Hadadd, the head of Empire cinema, one of the largest distributors in the Middle East, decided to buy the rights to distribute Borat, half his staff thought he was crazy. “And not for reasons you might expect,” he said from his office above the company theaters in a Beirut shopping mall. “Not because of all the Jewish stuff.”

The risk was less political than it was commercial: Would anyone get the joke? Would Middle Easterners enjoy a movie that casts a British comedian as reporter from Central Asia on a road trip across America to marry Baywatch star Pamela Anderson? Or more to the point, would a region known for its piety tolerate, let alone patronize, a movie that shows the jiggling hindquarters of a prostitute in hot pants riding a mechanical bull, or, in another scene, two guys rolling around naked at a mortgage brokers’ conference? “I don’t want to call Borat an ‘art’ film,” said Haddad. “But it is a special film that requires special handling. Watching two men rolling around naked is not acceptable in our culture. Two women? Maybe.”

Haddad decided right away that Borat was not ready for prime time in most of the Middle East, in part because it portrays Kazakhstan as a country rife with incest, rape, and disco dancing. “Many of these countries, especially in the Gulf, have economic ties to Khazakstan, and the idea of turning a poor Muslim country into something ridiculous would be insulting. They are not going to understand that that’s being exaggerated to make people laugh.”

So Empire distributed the movie only Haddad’s native Lebanon, which is arguably the most sophisticated media market in the Middle East, and thus familiar with Borat’s creator, Sasha Baron Cohen, and his other farcical work such as the “Ali G. Show.”

But movies in Lebanon are no laughing matter. They are tightly monitored by a film censors board which is part of the General Security Directorate, the country’s most powerful intelligence institution. The board has traditionally banned or censored movies that contain anything that might be construed as Israeli propaganda, anything sexually explicit, and anything that might incite or insult one of Lebanon’s 17 different recognized religious sects.

All this would seem to doom Borat to oblivion as far as Lebanon is concerned. The sight of Borat in fishnet underwear is enough to make even the most hardened advocate of free media cringe. And the scenes of Borat speaking in tongues at a Pentecostal prayer meeting, a rodeo cowboy equating Arabs and Muslims with suicide bombers, and Borat’s attempt to buy a handgun suitable for Jew-killing, would seem enough to offend the sectarian sensibilities of any Lebanese. (There are still, rumor has it, a few Jews left in Lebanon, but they have kept a low profile since the Israeli invasion of 1982.)

But Borat, which closes here in a few weeks, has gone almost the length of its commercial run without public outcry, and as far as I could tell, not a single cut from the original. In a random sampling, Lebanese audiences laughed at the same excruciating moments in the film as did audiences in New York, though film critics at a special preview arranged for the Lebanese press were surprised to learn that there was anti-Semitism in America. “In the Middle East, all we know is that America and Israel are always together,” said one.

One reason for Borat’s smooth ride in Lebanon is that the country’s intelligence services aren’t what they used to be. The former head of General Security, Jamil Sayed (who was also the former head of the film board) is currently in prison under suspicion for involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the event that led the end of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon last spring. Since the Syrian withdrawal, several movies have been shown in Lebanon that would never have made it past the old regime, including the gay cowboy love saga Brokeback Mountain, and Munich the Stephen Spielberg’s drama about Israel’s campaign to avenge athletes slain by Palestinian terrorists at the 1976 Olympics. (On the other hand, Syriana, an espionage thriller set in the Middle East in which George Clooney has his head stuffed in a bag by Hizballah militants, didn’t make the cut.) More commonly, Lebanese are getting used to seeing their R-rated fare with the spicy parts intact.

It would be tempting to read the success of Borat and the newfound openness in Lebanese cinemas as signs of the health of the Cedar Revolution, the name given by the US State Department to the ant-Syrian, pro-democracy rallies last spring. But just as likely, Borat could mark a sad high water mark in a Weimar-like interregnum before the forces of reaction and rejectionism reassert themselves. While satirical movies like Borat and faux news programs like the “Daily Show” market themselves as the latest thing in political engagement in the United States, irony is not yet a potent political weapon in the Middle East. When a Lebanese television comedy show poked fun at Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah last year, his followers rioted, and cut off the road from Beirut airport. And with Hizballah firmly ensconced in central Beirut, no on dares laugh at the Sheik now.

Instead, Borat’s equal opportunity offensiveness is on par with the Baker report and so much else that the US exports to the Middle East. It represents freedom without responsibility. As one Lebanese film critic said after seeing the movie: “The real message of Borat is that America is ridiculous.” But people in the Middle East don’t need to go to the movies to learn that.

By Andrew Lee Butters
Sunday, July 30, 2006; B03

BEIRUT

Not even a week after Israel started bombing Beirut, an act of war that
inadvertently revived my failing journalism career, friends began e-mailing
their concern and wondering whether my suddenly frequent appearances on
television would finally change my luck with the ladies of Lebanon. But the
reality of life under siege is not so glamorous. When the two French
students living next door snagged a last-minute berth on a Greek ferry bound
for Cyprus, they asked me to take care of their hamsters. “We’ll be back in
September.” Great.

I plan to be here when they return. I’m making the usual preparations:
buying a generator, setting up a satellite phone and finding a flak jacket
for my driver. I’m also making the not-so-usual ones: After the Israeli air
force attacked a dairy processing plant, I filled my freezer with yogurt.
But if journalists thrive on other people’s misfortunes, I’m not even sure
that will last. Because Israel will probably never disarm Hezbollah by
force, the war in Lebanon could become just another of the world’s seemingly
endless, certainly stupid and ultimately boring conflicts.

For one thing, the world — or at least its only superpower — seems to care
more about Jewish than Arab suffering. How else do you explain that the
United States has aided and abetted its client state as it creates half a
million refugees on the pretext of two kidnapped soldiers? When I recently
wrote a feature about Lebanon’s refugees for a major U.S. newspaper, the
editor deleted a story about the father of one displaced family who said he
survived an Israeli massacre in 1983. Israeli atrocities during that time
are well documented. But the editor explained that this was a major
allegation and that we had only the man’s word to back it up. I didn’t put
up a fight; after all, I just wanted my article to run. But I wondered: If I
had written about a Hezbollah rocket hitting the house of a Holocaust
survivor, would any editor have doubted that Jewish person’s story?

Of course, I’m just as disappointed in Lebanon. When my country was attacked
on Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of us lined the streets of New York to give
blood that day. There has been no comparable outpouring of civic feeling in
Lebanon. Most of my Lebanese friends with money and options and foreign
passports left their country — during a time when it needs them most — to
sit out the war in Paris or London or New York. Others seek comfort and
safety in resort towns in the mountains, where the air is dry and cool and
the hotel bars are packed and you can’t hear buildings disintegrating and
illusions shattering.

The other day I found about 150 refugees living without assistance in a
public school in south Beirut. It had taken them a week to make the
three-hour trip from the war zone in the south, stopping in towns where
they’d been gouged by taxi drivers and shopkeepers and had run out of money
and food for their babies. Meanwhile, just a few blocks away, there was an
American-style supermarket groaning with goods. I started filling three
shopping carts with water and bread and infant formula to donate, but when I
told the other shoppers and the store managers what I was doing, not one
person offered to help, chip in or give me a discount.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. How can you care about your country
when your country doesn’t care about you? The warlords who run Lebanon and
pretend to be leaders have reverted to type. They aren’t out filling
sandbags or having their pictures taken with war widows, or doing what
politicians do when they believe in democracy or the appearance thereof.
They’ve retreated to medieval mountain fortresses or ersatz hillside villas,
where they polish their gun collections and their armored Mercedes-Benzes as
though readying for a gangland war. No matter how many hundreds die or
thousands become homeless, they’ll still be here when the fog of war clears.

But if the Lebanese have their failings, then I also have mine. I left New
York three years ago to write about America’s involvement in the region –
not about Arabs and Israelis killing each other. Somehow I thought I could
separate those two things, and write about the Middle East in a new way,
avoiding the same old debates and the same old categories. So I worked in
Iraq and used my Beirut pied-à-terre to blow off steam and hit the nightclub
scene and I didn’t read books about Israel or care about Palestinians or go
looking for Hezbollah. Instead, I wrote about Arab pop stars and Kurdish
feminists and grouse-hunting trips in southern Iraq, and thought that the
worst thing happening here was runaway development and environmental
decline.

But sooner or later in Lebanon, history returns, usually in the form of a
bomb.

So now I sit with my unpublished stories and my illegible notes in my
spacious hipster hideaway in Christian East Beirut, the same home that I am
wary of sharing with even a hamster, and I think about a 12-year-old Shiite
girl and her refugee family living with 20 other people in a schoolroom not
far from here, and I remember she told me that she wasn’t angry at the
Israelis for destroying her neighborhood. “God sees everything,” she said.
The thought gives me no comfort.

Andrew Lee Butters is a freelance journalist in Beirut.

As the bombs fall, the nightlife capital of the Middle East grows desperate

By ANDREW LEE BUTTERS/ Beirut

When the electricity finally failed in my East Beirut neighborhood, I set up shop at a rooftop hotel bar and waited for the next Israeli bombs to fall. Almost immediately, the sky erupted with what sounded like antiaircraft fire but turned out to be red and green fireworks garishly flashing over the hot, dark city. The Shi’ite residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs, pummeled all day by the Israeli assault, were celebrating Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s declaration of war with Israel.

That’s what passes for a party in Beirut these days. Monot Street, Beirut’s main nightclub drag, is normally throbbing with oil-rich Arab playboys and European hipsters on such a steamy summer night. But with the city under siege, the only buzz coming from Beirut’s bars is the hum of power generators. There’s not a bikini in sight on the city’s sunny shoreline or a parked Porsche in the chic shopping district. Few Lebanese saw it coming. After this country’s 15-year civil war ended in 1990, the nation transformed itself from a byword for urban violence into the nightlife capital of the Middle East. Elites who had fled during the war poured back in, pumping billions of dollars into the redevelopment of downtown Beirut. The rebranding of the city was so successful that with every condominium high-rise and every new shopping mall, the Lebanese began to believe their own advertising and forget that they live in a fragile country in a dangerous part of the world. That illusion now lies in tatters.

The foreigners were the first to panic. At the Phoenicia Hotel, the city’s fanciest, the lobby was filled with fashionable women fleeing the country in high-heeled shoes. The embassies circulated fanciful evacuation plans involving small airplanes and ferries to Cyprus. The U.N. told its employees to stock up on a month’s worth of prescription medication and take a long weekend.

The problem is that there’s almost no place to go. Poor Beirut airport, recently rebuilt, was famously attacked in 1968, when Israeli commandos blew up 13 Lebanese civilian planes as they sat on the tarmac. This time the attack came in slow motion: first the runways, then the fuel-storage tanks, then the runways again, then the terminals.

With Israeli warships attacking ports and running blockades, the only way out of the country is by land through Syria. Fleets of taxis carried hotel guests on the three-hour trip to Damascus until an air strike knocked out a key bridge. Now cars have to take back roads through the high mountain passes or head north up the coast road toward the Syrian city of Homs. Given the conditions on the roads, staying in Beirut while the bombs fall is as good an option as trying to make a run for it. “You share your bed with a Lebanese girl?” a staff member at the Tourism Ministry asked me. “Get married, and you won’t have to leave.”

The Lebanese–who lived through far worse than this during the civil war–are determined to put up a steely front. Every time I go to a supermarket to collect quotes from supposedly terrified families stocking up on essentials, I end up being the one with the largest shopping-cart load of canned goods and batteries. But it’s hard to escape the sense of dread that looms over the country. “Twenty years of reconstruction are being destroyed in a few days,” the Tourism Minister, Joseph Sarkis, moaned to me from his nearly abandoned ministry. The owner of a subterranean nightclub called the Basement is trying to rally his patrons with a new slogan: “It’s safer underground.” Even in Beirut, that may not be enough to keep the party going.

When People magazine asked me to interview Haifa Wehbe, a Lebanese pop singer, for its 2006 “100 Most Beautiful” issue, the assignment seemed like a welcome break from the usual high-risk, low-paying jobs I receive as a freelance journalist in the Middle East. After all, how difficult could it be to throw a few softballs at the sexiest woman in the Arab world? Several of my normally serious colleagues among the Beirut foreign press corps practically begged to be taken along as photographers or assistant pencil sharpeners. But then People sent a list of questions the editors wanted me to ask–What’s your best feature? What’s your worst feature? What kind of moisturizer do you use?–and I knew I needed to do this alone.

Haifa and I show up for the interview–at a lawyer’s office in West Beirut–wearing nearly the same outfit: blue jeans and a dark blazer. But, wow, does she look better than me! Raven-haired and curvy, she’s nothing like the aerobicized Hollywood blondes who normally fill the pages of People. Embarrassingly, I catch myself staring at her famously ample bosom, though only to avoid her mesmerizing genie-in-a-bottle blue eyes. She makes polite noises–in fluent English–of being flattered by my interest in her beauty secrets, but I’m in an excruciating quandary: What kind of facial expression do you use when you’re sitting next to an Oriental sexpot while she complains about her jawbone structure? Do you nod sympathetically? Or act horrified by any suggestion of imperfection? I try to remain impassive, but eventually the strain begins to show. “How does it feel to be a man asking a woman these questions?” Haifa asks jokingly, but the damage is done. I don’t feel like much of one.

Perhaps I should take comfort in the fact that Haifa has a strange effect on men–and just about everyone else in the Middle East. She is the most exciting of a generation of female Arab singers, most of whom are Lebanese and most of whom go by their first names: Haifa, Nancy, Elissa. In the past, Arab divas seemed to stand for something political. The Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum was the Ur-mother of Nasserite pan-Arabism in the ’50s and ’60s, while Fairuz, who refused to pick sides or even perform in her native Lebanon while its civil war raged, became one of the few symbols of Lebanese national unity. And, though it would be unfair to say that the Arab divas of yesteryear had faces made for radio, they were (how to be polite?) very talented singers. But this new bevy of Lebanese hotties, who came of age in the era of globalization and Britney Spears, stands for just one thing: sex, or at least the mass-mediated illusion of it.

Haifa’s music, like most of Lebanese pop, is an unremarkable combination of machine-generated drumming, tambourines, and synthesized shepherd pipes that sounds as if an ’80s band like Bananarama were performing for Ali Baba and the 40 thieves. It’s her booty-shaking that sells tickets. Onstage and in her videos, wearing tight jeans and black kohl eyeliner, Haifa mixes Eastern belly dancing with Western nightclub moves in an MTV update of the Dance of the Seven Veils that promises all and delivers nothing.

All of this is shocking to many in this conservative region, but not in the way you might expect. The reactionary mullahdom of the Middle East is mostly too busy declaring fatwas against foreign depravity to pay much attention to the local variety. So, in February of this year, while a couple thousand fundamentalists burned the Danish embassy in Beirut, no one really noticed when as many as 200,000 people gathered for a Haifa concert in Oman. In Lebanon, she’s practically a national treasure, especially in the conservative Shia-dominated South, where she was born in a small farming town. The Lebanese attitude is that their country may be totally screwed up, but at least their women are hot.

And yet, Haifa touches a cultural nerve that manifests itself in a weird phenomenon: Haifa jokes. There are hundreds of them, and they typically involve Haifa having car problems in a remote redneck town and a local mechanic who suggests payment in kind. The joke suggests the insecurity of a region caught between the sexual modernity represented by Haifa and the sexual backwardness of traditional village life. Or, as Edward Said might say if he were alive and well and watching satellite television: After centuries of being Orientalized–colonized, victimized, and sexualized–by the West, the East is embarrassed to discover it has Orientalized itself.

Two days after my interview with Haifa, I wake up to find that she is filming a music video in the apartment beneath mine. I live in the kind of shell-shocked Mandate-era Beirut building favored by wannabe bohemians and location scouts, and one of my neighbors is on the production crew. I go downstairs with a cup of coffee and a bedhead, only to bump into Haifa’s manager, who gives me a look that says it’s too early in the morning for questions about bikini waxes and breast implants. Haifa slinks her way onto the set wearing naught but a nightie and hot pants, and, when she recognizes me, I call out in Arabic, “Kifak, Haifa?” and she starts laughing because I’ve just said “wassup?” using a male pronoun. My humiliation is complete when, moments later, her makeup artist lets me know that my fly is open.

The shoot is for her recent single, notoriously known as the Wawa song. Supposedly, it’s meant for children–a “wawa” in Arabic is what we would call a “boo-boo” in baby talk. “See the wawa, kiss the wawa, and help it get better,” Haifa sings, dressed as various fetish archetypes like Little Red Riding Hood and a naughty schoolgirl. You don’t have to be a member of Al Qaeda to think this is a little too kinky for kindergarten. But, as I return upstairs to attend to my personal grooming and file my interview for People, I wonder if perhaps that’s exactly what all the lost boys of this lost region need: a beautiful woman with fantastic tits to kiss them where it hurts.

Andrew Lee Butters is a writer based in Beirut.