Former fighters cross Lebanon’s sectarian lines to put on play

A Lebanese playwright and director is bringing together young men and women from rival Tripoli neighbourhoods in a rare stab at conflict resolution, reports Josh Wood.

Ghassan Chahni (from left), Khaled Rustom, Samir Atris, Khider Mukhaiber, Ali Amoun, and Zulfikar Shahroon listen to director Lucien Bourjeily talk about the importance of theatre in Tripoli, Lebanon on April 24, 2015. Alex Potter for The National
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TRIPOLI, Lebanon // Less than a year ago, 19-year-old Khodr Mukhayber was a seasoned gunman patrolling the streets of Tripoli’s Bab Al Tabbaneh slum with an automatic rifle. As a member of a Sunni militia in Lebanon’s rough-edged second city, he frequently engaged in gun battles with the Lebanese army and Alawite militias from the hilltop Jabal Mohsen neighbourhood next door.

As Tripoli fought its own version of Syria’s civil war, Mr Mukhayber hated his neighbours, ardent supporters of Syrian president Bashar Al Assad who share the same religion.

Today, things are different. For several days a week Mr Mukhayber sits in a room alongside former fighters from Jabal Mohsen and his own neighbourhood, exchanging thoughts and ideas and slowly building friendships. Together, 13 young men – most of them former fighters – and three women from both communities are working to come up with a play about their lives and distance themselves from the violence that has consumed so much of their youth. Aided by a Beirut non-governmental organisation and a director, it is a rare stab at conflict resolution in a sharply divided city.

“I hated them [Alawites from Jabal Mohsen] so much,” said Mr Mukhayber. “But after I saw them here in the play, I changed my mind.”

Director Lucien Bourjeily envisions the story as a kind of play within a play. He says it will revolve around young men from Jabal Mohsen and Bab Al Tabbaneh who set out to make a play about their neighbourhoods that parallels a Romeo and Juliet story — a boy who loves a girl from the wrong side of the line. The audience will see scenes from the play the characters produce as well as the events and discussions surrounding its production. But the real focus, Mr Bourjeily says, is the actors and their journey away from violence.

“At the end, they are the protagonists. Not them as actors, them as people in real life,” he said. “And the journey they are going through is from being a fighter in a mini civil war to an actor.

“If we manage to bring them from being fighters to voices of moderation, that’s a very big transformation.”

A Lebanese filmmaker, playwright and director known for his works targeting censorship, Mr Bourjeily said he had been thinking about doing a play involving actors from divided sectarian communities for a while, but saw an urgent need in Tripoli due to the high level of violence there.

Mr Mukhayber first picked up a gun four years ago as Syria’s civil war inflamed sectarian tensions in Lebanon and threw Tripoli into strife. He was only 15.

Young men from his generation were born into the conflict. Tripoli’s Alawite and Sunni militias have been fighting on and off since the time of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war. Both sides have committed atrocities. Crippled by some of the worst poverty in Lebanon, few young men from Jabal Mohsen and Bab Al Tabbaneh see any other path in life other than being a fighter.

As the war across the border began, militant Sunnis in Lebanon were emboldened by the gains of the mostly Sunni Syrian rebels and sought to confront their domestic enemies. Prominent Sunni sheikhs in Tripoli began railing about the subjugation of their communities by the state and Syria’s powerful allies in Lebanon like Hizbollah. They called on Sunnis to rise up.

What quickly transpired was a small-scale, intermittent war between Tripoli’s Sunni and Alawite communities. Frequently militias would clash for days, exchanging gunfire, hissing rocket-propelled grenades and occasionally mortars.

Participants started viewing the battle as part of Syria’s civil war and the neighbourhoods started resembling Syrian battlefields. In Sunni areas, the flag of the Free Syrian Army and later ISIL flew. In Alawite Jabal Mohsen, huge posters of Mr Al Assad hung over streets and the red, white and black banners of the Syrian government staked out the area.

In Bab Al Tabbaneh, gunmen knocked out walls between buildings so they could navigate the district without their enemies seeing them. Apartments at the tops of buildings were transformed into sniper nests with sandbags piled high around windows. Large tarpaulins were rigged up over alleys to block the view of enemy snipers.

A relative calm finally came to the city after Lebanese security forces – which had mostly sat on the sidelines of Tripoli’s battles – began cracking down on militants. Hundreds of fighters have since been arrested and a number of major militia leaders were either imprisoned or sent on the run.

The city has been safer since then, though smaller gun battles still occur here and there and residents warn that the peace is temporary.

During the height of hostilities, it was difficult to leave the warring neighbourhoods. Logistically, a play would have been nearly impossible to coordinate, and even today the security situation can get in the way.

The day before the play’s first rehearsal in early April, the Lebanese army launched a raid on Sunni militants in Bab Al Tabbaneh, sparking clashes in the neighbourhood. Such incidents can easily spill out of control and devolve into sectarian clashes, so the Alawite actors stayed up all night watching the situation. In the morning, things were still tense and none of the actors from Jabal Mohsen showed up for rehearsal.

Mr Bourjeily, the director, said while he was prepared for people with hardened views to take part in the play, he had not expected fighters to show up for the casting call.

“They are not moderates, they do not [only] have strong views – they have done acts, they have done things, they have participated in shooting,” he said. “So it’s not only thoughts about the other, it’s acts.”

The former fighters in the cast say years of bloodshed and losing friends wore them down and made them disillusioned with the conflict.

“I decided to quit when I was no longer able to take it anymore,” said Mr Mukhayber, the former Sunni militiaman. “My friends died, my cousins died. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Another cast member, Zulfiqar Shahroun, is a 20-year-old Alawite who began fighting when he was just 14. Over his years on the front line he was shot in the back and in the arm, but kept fighting. It was only when a friend in his unit was killed in battle by a sniper early last year that Mr Shahroun and two other friends quit. An image of their dead friend’s face is tattooed on all of their forearms with “RIP” inked underneath.

They are taking part in the play hoping it will lead to reconciliation.

But even though Mr Shahroun says he has laid down his Kalashnikov, he is not optimistic about Lebanon’s future and does not rule out his own return to war.

“If I’m in danger, of course I’ll fight,” he said. “In Lebanon there will never be peace. We love peace, we want peace, but that just doesn’t work here.”

Like Mr Shahroun, Mr Mukhayber says he could participate in future conflicts. Asked if he would return as a gunman if fighting broke out now he said “we would definitely go and fight, especially if it was against the army.”

But he would go back begrudgingly, because he feels he has to in order to protect his community, his friends and his family. For Mr Mukhayber, there is little ideological fervour left in battle.

“We found out they are all liars,” he said of the sheikhs and militia leaders whose words once drove him into battle. “Previously sheikhs used to convince us to do things, as did militia leaders. Now our brains work.”

Mr Mukhayber says he is also willing to stand up and fight for his new Alawite friends, like Mr Shahroun.

“If a stranger comes now to do any harm to my friends, I am willing to defend my friends. They would do the same thing for me,” he says.

Mr Bourjeily is producing the play with MARCH Lebanon, a non-governmental organisation against censorship and sectarianism. They hope to put on shows in Beirut and Tripoli this summer.

foreign.desk@thenational.ae