«Under the Skies of Beirut»

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Posted on Apr 01 2018 0 minutes read
December 1983, I had just come back to Lebanon after studying in California for 3 years. I had missed something important, the Israeli invasion of 1982. I say missed, because I felt guilty about not having shared with my fellow Lebanese one of the hardest episodes of the war. I went to the Shatila refugee camp, eager to meet the people who had survived the massacre a year before. I walked in some deserted streets, spoke to people, found some traces of the massacre. There was a mass grave at the entrance of the camp, some say hundreds, others thousands of victims were and are still buried there.

I met an 8-year-old boy who said he was the only survivor from his family. His tiny corpulence had allowed him to hide in a washing machine while his entire family was being shot to death.

That mass grave hasn’t changed today, it’s still a flat wasteland. Only a monument in the memory of the dead has been added. In front of it, there are some faded bouquets of flowers wrapped in cellophane, a few murals of black silhouettes on the surrounding walls and a cage with some chicken running around on one side of the «graveyard».

This photograph was taken in one of the narrow alleys of the camp, on the day of my visit in 1983. There are no people in it, only an eerie silence, some scattered objects and perhaps the ghosts of some innocents who ran through those narrow alleys in September 1982, hoping to escape the savagery of their executioners. 

 
 

Photo by Aline Manoukian, photographer and picture editor

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