![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay argues that the questions born of the conditions that marked the post-war period in Lebanon are folded over and replaced by another set of conditions of which neo-victimhood is most dominant. The time of the post war can be said to be over and now is followed by a time after time in which the figure of the neo-victim rehearses a monologue of victimisation allegedly beholden to the promise of a future liberated from all that is unfinished in the past. The figure of the neo-victim contaminates the historical anger of the unreconciled victim and further shuts down historical accountability as history becomes the horror of a history en abyme. Looking at documentaries, films and ex-combatant memoirs, this essay attempts to give form to this shift from post-war to a time after time.
Notes on Contributor
Walid Sadek is a Lebanese artist and writer. He is a professor of arts at the American University of Beirut and currently chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Although written Arabic distinguishes between Hawa’(wind) and Hawa (love), spoken Arabic, especially in the long tradition of song, poetically conflates the two.
2 In a highly mediatised TV documentary, Bashir Gemayyel is said to have been angered by those who took the decision to launch the attack. Gemayyel was then setting the stage and recasting his persona in preparation for his nomination to the nation’s presidency. See Bashir (Citation2012).
3 The official end of the Lebanese civil war was declared in phases, starting with the Ta’if Agreement in January 1989 and concluding in March 1991, when parliament passed an amnesty law that pardoned all political crimes prior to its enactment.
4 In the film, the director reluctantly cedes to Chaftari’s demand and allows him a ‘hidden’ conversion or perhaps a (second) confession with the aging ‘red Bishop’ Gregoire Haddad (1924–2015) bedridden in a retirement home.
5 Law 84, passed and promulgated on August 26, 1991, grants complete amnesty to those accused of political crimes including homicide, kidnapping and torture committed before March 28, 1991.
6 ‘Before the Law’ (German: ‘Vor dem Gesetz’) is a parable in the novel The Trial (1914–15) (German: Der Prozess), by Franz Kafka published posthumously in 1925. ‘Before the Law’ was first published in the 1915 New Year's edition of the independent Jewish weekly Selbstwehr (self-defense or self-help).
7 The following reading of Kafka’s parable is highly indebted to the leading work of Jacques Derrida. See Derrida (Citation1991).
8 Accordingly, and in line with his stated task of providing proof for the castration complex, Freud offers underclothing as an example of a fetish that ‘crystallize[s] the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic.’ See Freud (Citation1927).
9 The logic of protracted civil war employs violence as ‘return to order’. Fear of violence mobilises people to seek safety under the aegis of the various politico-sectarian factions. Artistic works that stage and offer release of this logic fall under two categories: cathartic therapy or aspirational overcoming of the past. What both categories share is an investment in the a-political individual and therefore a reduction of structural constraints to practices of personal betterment. See Sadek (Citation2015).
10 For some of the more recent examples see for example El Murr (Citation2014), Sneifer (Citation2006), Saadeh (Citation2015), Khoueiry (Citation2005).
11 Samir Geagea (b. 1952) became the executive chairman of the Lebanese Forces after ousting Elie Hobeika on the 15th of January 1986 following the latter’s ratification of the Syrian brokered Tripartite Accord. Geagea remained the uncontested strong man in the Christian controlled areas of Lebanon until the ill-fated and so-called Elimination War which began on 31 January 1990 and pitted him against the mutinous Army commander Michel Aoun. Unwilling to fully cede to the Syrian control of Lebanon following the official end of the civil war, Geagea was eventually tried in 1994 for ordering four political assassination and was sentenced to life in prison. He remained in solitary confinement until after the Cedar Revolution, and the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, when a newly elected Lebanese Parliament voted to grant him amnesty on 18 July 2005.
12 Elie Hobeika (1956–2002) was a commander in the Lebanese Forces. During Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, he was the liaison officer to Mossad. On the 16th of September 1982, he oversaw with Israeli officers the massacre of thousands of unarmed Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps by Lebanese Forces militiamen. In 1985, he changed his allegiances and rose to prominence as a key player in the Tripartite Accord signed in December 1985 under the supervision of Syria’s president Hafez al-Asaad. Following the official end of the civil war and the liquidation of the Tai’f Agreement, also known as the National Reconciliation Accord, in the summer of 1992, he, like other militia leaders, was elected to the parliament and named minister several times during the 1990s. He was assassinated on the 24th of January 2002 in the Beirut suburb of Hazmieh.
13 Backed by the al-Assad regime in Syria, the accord was signed on December 28, 1985 by Nabih Berri, Walid Jumblat, and Elie Hobeika on behalf of the three dominant militias at the time: the Amal Movement, the Progressive Socialist Party and the Lebanese Forces. The accord was short lived as Hobeika was ousted by Samir Geagea and forced to flee to Syrian controlled city of Zahleh in the Beqaa valley on January 15, 1986.
14 In his memoir, Maroun Machaalani, an ex-combatant in the special commandos Béjine (BJ) of the Kataëb Party, dates the attack on the Karantina encampment to 19th of January 1976. See Machaalani (Citation2018, p. 95).
15 On December 6, 1975, the day after four Béjine commandos were ambushed and killed, Kataëb militiamen led by Joseph Saadeh, the father of one the murdered men, lashed back by setting up roadblocks and killing innocent Muslims who happened to be passing by. The number of the massacred ranges between 150 and 400. See Saadeh (Citation2015, pp. 127–165), Machaalani (Citation2018, pp. 79–89).
16 Craig Owens makes a similar argument in his essay ‘Photography en abyme’. See Owen (Citation1994).
17 Translation of the prosecutor’s final intervention in The Insult. (Translation mine)
18 Translation of the court’s decree in The Insult. (Translation mine)
19 Rafiq el-Hariri was blocked from the position of prime minister between 2/12/1998 and 23/10/2000.
20 The narrative that concludes with Machaalani witnessing the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, begins with a transformative visit to the shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon in Harissa, Mount Lebanon. See Machaalani (Citation2018, pp. 315–324).
21 See note 4 above.
22 Bashir Gemayyel (1947–1982) was the son of Pierre Gemayyel, founder of the right-wing Christian Kataëb party. He founded and commanded the Lebanese Forces militia during the early years of the Lebanese civil war. Draconian and charismatic, he slowly engineered his military and political ascendancy and was controversially elected President on August 23, 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He was assassinated on September 14, 1982.