Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Over those two years, during which Khaled traversed the desert of the heart, he reorganized the ranks of the young men who had hovered around his uncle, forced them to attend the weekly meetings regularly, and discovered in Radwan Ali, a student at the Arabic Literature department of the Lebanese University, an intellectual on whom he could rely.

It was Radwan who suggested to Khaled that he meet Dr. Othman. The Egyptian communist doctor, who had joined Fatah in Jordan and taken part in the battles of September 1970 that came to be known by the name of Black September, had come to Lebanon and begun working with young men of the Lebanese Left eager to take part in the armed Palestinian struggle.

Khaled met Dr. Othman three times at the bakery and the man in his forties, who wore spectacles and smoked Egyptian Cleopatra cigarettes, aroused his curiosity and admiration. Dr. Othman spoke as one with full command of the language, clear ideas, a simplicity derived from deep culture, and a vision indicating he had profound human and political experience stored within him.

It was Dr. Othman who brought Danny back into the picture. At their third meeting he told Khaled and Radwan that he would organize a meeting for them with Fatah’s representative in Tripoli and that Brother Danny, who had been a close confidant of the martyr Abu Rabia, would handle the follow-up with them.

This was how, under Danny’s direct and daily supervision, the Socialist Popular Rally was reorganized, to become later a coherent political organization with a military wing whose influence extended not only to Qubbeh but to the districts of Bab el-Tabbana, the old city, and the port. The group would also play a major role in the civil war that broke out in 1975, while Khaled would be transformed into a political leader of the entire northern region.

Khaled and Radwan were preoccupied with the idea that the mistakes that had accompanied Yahya’s experiment with the Challenge Organization should not be repeated. They worked hard to educate the semi-employed youth who had joined the organization in scientific socialist thought and helped many to find permanent jobs. “We’re the organization of the working class,” Khaled told them, “not of the layabouts.”

The work took up all of Khaled’s time but he refused Danny’s offer of a full-time position with Fatah and decided to keep on working at the bakery. Like his uncle, he disliked the chaos of Fatah with its blocs linked to the founding fathers. In fact he went even further in his position on this because he’d been raised in the Popular Front and had learned the necessity of iron discipline from the pupils of Dr. George Habash. Still, he found something irresistibly attractive in Dr. Othman’s eloquence and Danny’s culture and therefore decided to amalgamate his organization with their Fatah-affiliated group, unaware that it was closely linked to Abu Jihad — was, in fact, his leftist arm within that forest of diverse ideological arms that this leader knew how to exploit for a variety of functions, creating a breathtaking concord out of their ideological contradictions.

Khaled made no attempt to destroy the legend of his uncle the martyr. He had his reservations about the chaotic, off-the-cuff methods used by the hero of the Qubbeh district in leading his boys and was critical, especially, of the October 15 uprising against the increase in electricity charges, which had led to his uncle’s imprisonment and death. The rebellion indicated a naïve faith in the spontaneity of the masses, for while Yahya had been directing, from his hiding place in an apartment in Qubbeh, the groups of young men who threw explosive devices in the streets and in front of the Qadisha power station, he was also waiting for the people to rise and assume power in the city. But the people, instead of going out onto the streets, were terrified by the explosions and hid in their houses, so that in the end Yahya found himself besieged in his hideout. He tried to shoot his way out but was wounded in the stomach, taken captive, and condemned to death, the sentence being reduced subsequently to ten years. He died in prison three years after his arrest.

Abu Rabia had wanted to make October 15, 1971, a turning point in the history of the city. The Akkar peasants’ revolution had evaporated following the intervention of the Syrian-controlled Sa’iqa organization at the point when the peasants’ anti-feudalist struggle had appeared to be in danger of taking on a sectarian dimension, as though it were between Sunnis and Alawites. This had forced Yahya to withdraw from the area in which he’d believed he could establish the nucleus for a Guevarist revolution. He’d returned to Qubbeh, where he succeeded in restoring his image as a popular hero when a cholera epidemic broke out in the city. The Ministry of Health, whose duty it was to vaccinate all inhabitants free of charge, started distributing the vaccine to clients and supporters of the minister, who sold it on the black market. Faced with a worsening situation, Abu Rabia and a group of his boys took to making armed break-ins into pharmacies and the Ministry of Health headquarters and distributing the vaccine free to clinics. And Abu Rabia turned the bakery he’d inherited from his father into a vaccination center, to which people came in droves.

Following this experience, Yahya put on a display of political strength in the city, exploiting a festival held in honor of the anniversary of the death of Egyptian president Abdel Nasser. He brought in tractor-loads of his peasant supporters from Akkar chanting slogans against capitalism and feudalism and threatening a workers’ and peasants’ revolution.

In the wake of these two experiences, Yahya had become convinced that the time was ripe to proclaim the revolution. He wrote in his memoirs of “the necessity of depending on the principal of the Guevarist nucleus and of linking it to the factory workers’ struggle” via the Socialist Popular Rally. Yahya’s understanding was that the strike against the Qadisha Electrical Company would make it possible for the revolutionary nucleus to work in the city, and so he decided to proclaim the popular uprising.

In the event, however, things went in the opposite direction. “Authority can be overturned only through the building of a parallel authority, so Lenin taught us, and that was the reason for the failure of the uprising,” said Danny.

Khaled didn’t ask how a parallel authority was to be built or who would build it, or whether this new authority would be less repressive than its predecessor. Khaled was content to listen to Danny theorizing and drawing up plans, while vehemently refusing organizational interference by anyone.

“Khaled is like his uncle,” Danny wrote in a report he submitted to Dr. Othman, “but more aware and disciplined, and will probably meet with the same end.”

When Yahya went to prison with a bullet in his stomach he believed his time there would be an opportunity to take some rest. He was therefore overjoyed to meet Dr. Sadeq Jalal Azm, a Syrian Marxist intellectual living in Lebanon who’d been put in prison because of his book A Critique of Religious Thought .

In a letter to his wife, Hayat, Yahya wrote, “Yesterday, after being transferred to Ramal Prison in Beirut, I met Dr. Sadeq Azm in the dispensary and we had the following dialogue:

“ ‘You’re Dr. Sadeq Azm, author of Self-Criticism after the Defeat , aren’t you?’

“ ‘Yes, I’m Sadeq Azm. How did you know who I was?’

“ ‘I read your book.’

“ ‘You read my book? What’s your name?’

“ ‘I’m Yahya Nabulsi from Tripoli, leader of the Qubbeh uprising.’

“I was astonished to find that he knew a lot about me and was sympathetic to our movement but said we had to join a revolutionary party that could lead our struggle.