Lebanon Grenades Are Bad for Business

The bar of the Commodore Hotel in West Beirut had been a place where journalists congregated to relax and trade war stories. Today, it is so deserted that the bartender "feels guilty for even being here." Most evenings, there is not enough in the till for his salary. Just before one of the last remaining U.S. journalists, Associated Press Correspondent Ed Blanche, finally left the war-torn city last month, he stopped off at the bar. A well-known gunman, slightly wobbly from drink, approached Blanche, tucked an object into his pocket, then burst out laughing. "I failed to see the funny side of it," Blanche reported afterward. "The present was a fragmentation grenade." The gunman, a veteran killer who seemed to be losing his nerve after years of firefights in the shattered city, took back the grenade and proceeded to place it between the legs of a Lebanese official sitting on a barstool. As he laughed, the unsuspecting fellow spilled his drink, then fell off the stool. "The barman closed up early," wrote Blanche. "Grenades are bad for business."

Such perversity is now commonplace in the city that was at one time a cosmopolitan gateway to the Middle East. Last week in the Muslim-controlled western sector, new depths were achieved when gunmen turned their vengeance on an 84-year-old Frenchman. Camille Sontag and his wife Blanche, 85, were driving along a seaside boulevard when a cab blocked their way. Gunmen leaped from the vehicle and pressed a pistol to Sontag's temple. Seconds later he was packed into the cab and driven away, bringing to nine the number of French currently believed to be held by extremists. The Sontags, who made their home in Lebanon for more than four decades, had decided to leave this month.

The couple were among the 60-odd survivors of Beirut's once thriving European and American communities, which at their height numbered in the tens of thousands. The staunchest Western holdouts: the academic fraternity, which had made Beirut into the regional center of higher education. But the execution of three hostages--two British teachers and an American librarian --in retaliation for the U.S. bombing of Libya in April persuaded most of the few remaining Westerners to leave. Explains George Miller, a professor at American University of Beirut, who has lived in Lebanon for 40 years: "We stayed until there was no longer any hope." Those who remain behind bemoan the university's deteriorating academic standards and the lawlessness of campus life. "We've had students demand better grades at gunpoint," laments a Lebanese professor.

A similar exodus has occurred at the American University Hospital, once one of the most prestigious teaching facilities in the region. In April, Dr. Dennis Alexander, a research lecturer, became the last Westerner to quit the hospital staff. "In the past year morale has gone," he says. "At present, the hospital is just barely viable." Administrators estimate the 420-bed facility's annual loss at about $8 million.