Haugbolle 131women into the public sphere of the labor market. Some research suggests
that, although they suffered, many women appreciated the social respon-
sibility that came with their new role and sense of importance for soci-
ety.^35 The war brought about if not a revolution then at least a good basis
for social change, yet neither Tabbara, Makdisi or Beshara picks up on
this theme in a consciously feminist way. Other women writers, like Etel
Adnan and Hanan al-Shaykh, suggest that the war was intimately linked to
sexual repression and male domination. However, this can be a disturbing
conclusion to draw in public, since it points the finger at Lebanese society,
or even worse, Lebanese culture. It is more comforting to point to the fact
that the militias never represented a large proportion of the population,
and that many men were active in the peace movement in the late 1980s.
In the words of Charles Corm, the truth of the war is that it was never
based on mass mobilization or popular participation, only on a rule of ter-
ror by a scrupulous minority legitimized by pseudo-ideologies which the
ordinary population rejected.^36 This idea of a “war of the others” certainly
became one of the most prevalent “common sense” explanations of the
war, and one which jeopardized the role of the 10,000–20,000 involved.^37
law of general amnesty in 1991 allowed former militiamen to take A
up peaceful occupations. While many managed to find jobs in security,
the army or the transport sector, others were less successful in secur-
ing a role for themselves in peacetime Lebanon. They found themselves
frowned upon and mostly preferred to keep quiet with their former pro-
fession. If the war was “a war of the others,” as many Lebanese have it, how
can we then explain what motivated Lebanese to fight Lebanese? Perhaps
the memories of these people were repressed, by themselves and others,
because their experience potentially holds the answer to the most nag-
ging question of them all, namely what drove the war. Is it really true that
the Lebanese who participated were orchestrated from the outside? How
did ordinary citizens transform themselves into professional killers, where
did the violence come from and who bears the responsibility for it? How
did the “banality of evil,” in Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation, enter
everyday routines during the war, not just of those who carried out the
violence but also of the masses who accepted it?
roubling as these ethical questions are, the Lebanese press did not T
completely fail to confront them. And who better to ask than the soldiers