The Village Where Time Just Stopped

Up in the Chouf, the mountains that are home to Lebanon’s biggest nature reserve, a whirl of cedars, cypresses, golden broom and wildflowers, we make our way by a route most charitably described as circuitous to the village of Maaser al Chouf.

Our guesthouse is beautiful, a nineteenth-century stone house with cool, expansive, barrel-vaulted rooms that was once a farming family’s home. With the Druze men in their baggy black pantaloons and white skullcaps, some houses half-built, some mouldering away, Maaser al Chouf feels a little bit like time just stopped.

It feels Mediterranean. Mountainous. Middle Eastern. Exotic, yet familiar.

And the view into the valley is just gorgeous. Just as at Byblos, we love it here. And if we had the time, we’d stay for four or five days.

Z swings in the hammock on the terrace, stuffing his face with cherries and fresh apricots from the village store, while I sit with Ra’ed, the ex-monk who runs the place, drinking wine from the winery next door.

“When did this place stop being a convent?” I ask.

“Oh,” says Ra’ed, looking at me as if I know nothing, which, of course, I don’t. “The sisters had to leave. Because of the massacre…”

“What massacre?” I ask. There have been so many massacres in Lebanon.

The most famous is Sabra and Shatila, where Christian militiamen invaded Palestinian refugee camps while the Israeli army stood by.

An ex-boyfriend who was there in the aftermath told me that the Christians had cut the stomachs out of pregnant women to expose the foetuses, spreadeagled the men, and impaled children.

He was 19, on military service.

His job? “Cleaning up.”

“This one was bad,” Ra’ed says. “It was neighbour upon neighbour. Normally, during the war, one militia would come to a village and do the killing. Here, it was the neighbours, families who had lived side by side for generations.”

And this time, on a single day in September, 1983, the local Druze killed over 60 Christians. “The youngest was a baby – three months old!” Ra’ed says. “The oldest was so old they had to carry him out of the village to kill him…”

“How did it happen?” I ask.

“They went outside the village, fired guns, and came to tell the families that they had to leave – you know, ‘Quick, come with us! There’s shooting! We’ll take you to a safe place…’ And, once they were out of the village, they killed them.”

And, in the morning, Ra’ed says, “The nuns left. They had to. And the Christians left, too. That’s why there are so many empty houses here. Because people don’t want to come back and see the people who killed their families, still living next door to them…”

“Did you have a truth and reconciliation process here?” I ask. “Like in South Africa, and Rwanda?”

“Not really,” Ra’ed says, and shrugs.

I think again about the friendly 60ish Druze man who helped me buy my fresh green almonds and little cucumbers in the village store.

He could have killed.

He could, perhaps, have saved. A few brave Druze did help save some children.

He would have been young, then. Younger than me, probably.

What did he do back then?

Did he go against the will of the pack, risk his life and try and save his neighbours? Did he look away while others did the killing? Or did he shoot them down, himself, in cold blood?

Who was he then? Who is he now? What does he remember?

“It’s a secret religion,” Ra’ed tells me later. The Druze sect split off from the Ismaili sect around a thousand years ago, but have guarded their true beliefs extremely well. “They cannot know what’s in their own sacred books, unless they become a priest. And that, they start training them for as babies.”

“Oh,” says Z. “A mystery religion? That’s the worst kind.”

Ra’ed raises an eyebrow, amused by this interjection. “Why?”

“Because they don’t even know their own beliefs, so they’re taught not to think. And I bet they think of other people who are out of the secret as less than human,” Z says. “Monotheists are the worst. Religions with many gods are much more tolerant.”

“Yeah,” I say. “You can just add one to the pantheon and be done with it.”

Ra’ed laughs. He’s had his own long journey through monotheism – left the monastery a couple of years back and will be off to Nepal and India later in the year. I think Buddhism would suit him rather well.

“You know what’s really crazy about this?” I say. “The differences involved are so minute. All your sects here believe in one god. They all follow basically the same books. The differences — my god! I wonder how many of them even understand what the differences are in their beliefs?”

And, still, I can’t stop thinking about the old man in the shop.

Because, you see, people change. The cold-eyed fanatical killer in his 20s or 30s can morph into a genuinely loving grandfather who feels both guilt and sorrow for what he did.

Or not, of course. The men who ran S-21 in Cambodia are old now, but don’t evince much guilt or sorrow.

Someone can slaughter a 3-month old baby in the name of their religion, or an entire family because of a stolen sweet potato then grow in age, maturity and wisdom into someone who looks back in sorrow, horror and regret.

Or they can grow in the certainty that what they did was right. Sad, perhaps. Hard, perhaps – like Himmler’s speech to the SS praising their difficult work – but right.

And that, despite their age and wisdom, they would do the same thing over, and over, and over again.

“Are there people in the village now who did the killings?” I ask.

“Of course,” says Ra’ed. “I know a couple.”

“Who?” I say.

He doesn’t want to say. I’ve pushed too far. We move along.

Later, we are talking about places Z and I can go to safely in these newly troubled times.

Tyre and Sidon, everyone agrees, are safe (although Tyre remains on most countries’ do-not-visit lists, largely because it is close to Israel, so in the firing line should another war erupt).

Everyone agrees that Tripoli, where inter-Muslim sectarian violence is spilling over from Syria (Sunnis, who are backed by Saudi Arabia, versus Alawis, the sect to which Assad belongs) is not safe.

As to Baalbek, the site of supposedly the best Roman ruins in the Middle East, and arguably the world, I’ve had mixed reports. There has been one kidnapping and several car-nappings (the car is carjacked, then returned when a ransom is paid) in the Bekaa Valley of late.

Some think Baalbek itself is OK, but not the eastern Bekaa, others think the site is OK but not the town, others think we shouldn’t drive there without a Lebanese with us, and others think we are good to go wherever we want provided it’s not Tripoli.

“I can’t advise you to go there,” says Ra’ed. “You just don’t know. Because, we Lebanese, we know that in one minute, in one day, anything can change.”

As it did, one day, in 1983, in this lovely little village in the Chouf.