140 Between Private and Public
an “unscupulous minority of leaders,” they externalize the guilt that they
know is widely attributed to them. Kamal, who had entered the Sunni
militia Murabitun at the beginning of the war to fight for the Palestinian
cause, soon realized that he had been deceived and left the group in 1978:
They told me I was isolationist [sympathizing with Kata’ib]. I
began thinking, who is an isolationist? We were actually fight-
ing ourselves, Lebanese against Lebanese, and I started telling
the other fighters this. We were drinking tea with Kata’ib at
the frontline, and then: back to the fighting! Neither he nor I
understood what the war meant.Many others left their respective militia in the time of the “little wars”
between and inside different sects after 1982. They all reject sectarian-
ism today; in fact, to them the most important lesson of the war is that
there has to be room for all opinions and that Muslims and Christians are
equally worthy citizens. In hindsight, most of these militiamen discover
that they were actually Lebanese nationalists all along, who had merely
been led astray momentarily. Today they are united by a common under-
standing that the war was pointless and that they were, and still are, hood-
winked by al-kibār. When the talk comes around to the violence and the
atrocities of the war, they describe with disbelief and detachment what
their comrades or soldiers on the other side of the divide committed. A
typical story goes:
One time, we were in Ras en-Naba’ [in West Beirut, close to
East Beirut] and one of my comrades shot a woman who was
hanging up her laundry in Ashraffiyeh [East Beirut]. He came
down and told us, and I lost my temper. I wanted to kill him.
I tried to bite his throat. The other guys beat me up. How can
a person possibly kill a woman? And another time we were in
a battle. I saw a man running back and forth on the rooftop of
a building. I tried to aim for him. But I told myself that he was
civilian and that I shouldn’t injure him. Then I changed my
mind and thought: he is a fighter. And in the end I managed to
fire, missing by far. He ran away. A third time, we captured a
spy during a mission. And I took his belt and started to pound
him. It felt like electricity was running through me, and I gave