DAYS 16, 17 LEBANON (BEIRUT) & EGYPT- HEZBOLLAH & PYRAMIDS
Hello friends and family,
So Zach, Andrew and I safely arrived to Egypt (with quite a bit of trouble though I might add!)… Before I get into that little adventure with airport security at the Cairo International Airport, I should probably tell you about our final day in Beirut
which was also an adventure…
We left at 7:30am for Tyre in Southern Lebanon with Robert Fisk who was out chasing a story about why the Hezbollah were building roads in Southern Lebanon. He was meeting with a source from the UN who was going to tell him the real story.
Southern Lebanon is known as Hezbollah territory and as we drove down there and interviewed him in the car, Robert nervously asked us to lower our cameras over and over again since he thought we were being watched by them. Andrew was in the car behind us, filming us from the outside which Robert was also very nervous about..Since he seemed so nervous, we wondered how our meeting would go that afternoon with the member of Hezbollah, who was also a member of parliament and to make sure to ask him why anyone would need to be nervous driving down south…
Anyway, we got to Tyre and before Robert met with his source, he took us to the most beautiful and in tact Roman ruins I’ve probably ever seen right on the Mediteranean Sea, a stone’s throw from Israel (right across the way). The conversation we filmed between Zach and Robert as they walked through the ruins culminating at the edge of the Sea where you could see Israel in the distance was beyond insightful. When Robert pointed to Israel and asked Zach, “Who’s fault is it?”, the conversation that ensues is an integral part of the message we’re wanting to say in the film and you’ll just have to wait and see what they say! But would love to know your thoughts on the question Robert asks…
He left us to meet with his anonymous source and we headed back up to Beirut to meet with the Hezbollah MP. On our way there, we decided to see the site where the Marine barracks were bombed in 1983 (where 241 Marines were killed with a suicide bomb). The site was at the airport and had been turned into a long-term parking lot. No plaque, no memorabilia. Zach was visibly upset that there was no trace of the incident…in any case, while we were at the site filming, we get stopped by an airport guard who then calls in that we have cameras on airport grounds, and we are then requested to go to the main offices and meet with his superior who was going to question us about the camera and what we were filming. We ended up going through a maze of hallways into a small office where four young men in civilian clothes were sitting around watching a Dustin Hoffman movie with arabic subtitles, while chain smoking. No one spoke English, no one had any decision making power and no one was willing to make a call. So we sat there, different men in military uniforms coming in and out speaking curtly to eachther, until Zach, after asking five times what the problem was, whipped out his business card and told them to call him if there was a problem and said, “let’s go”…(meanwhile, I had Andrew covertly filming the entire time which just goes to show how vulnerable these main offices are when no one is really paying attention and no one is willing to make a decision, or be thorough with the security.) It also made me realize how easy it would have been to execute the Mumbai killings since no one ever expects any nefarious intent. Anyway, when Zach said we were leaving, the security guard said he’d take us to see another superior so off we went. When we got down there (filming the whole time), we met with the boss, who told us to erase the footage from the airport at which time we pulled out the blank tape in the camera and handed it to him, saying, “just take it” (since again, we had a dummy blank tape in the camera in case this situation ever arose and since we were actually filming on digital cards that were tucked away in the back of the camera….) Before Zach gave the blank tape to him though, nervous that they would watch the tape and realize it was blank, he took the spool of film out of the cassette casing in a dramatic fashion to emphasize the “destruction of material” and handed the destroyed tape to the sheepish boss…It was actually hilarious since all this effort was expended for ten minutes of footage of a parking lot, but also scary at how easy it was to dupe these people.
Anyway, we left the airport, late for our meeting and rushed to the Parliament to meet with Nawar El Sahale, the Hezbollah MP. We went through five or six levels of security to get inside the Parliament to meet him. Two “thugs” were guarding his door in the small waiting area outside his office. We finally meet him, a large framed man (think football linebacker) with thick eyebrows and a one o’clock shadow. After Zach shakes his hand, I extend mine and he politely declines! I was immediately put off…were women not worthy of shaking hands with? But I was too scared to say anything…Zach sits down and starts firing questions about Israel, about their processes, their violence in the past, and the way they’ve evolved. Zach and I were literally shocked at how moderate he was, how willing he was to bring us to the schools and hospitals they had built for the poor, and when questioned about Robert’s nervousness, he said, “We aren’t going to hurt anyone, but we are very big on security. It could be anyone coming in to film our position. You never know. But we are here to protect our people.” When I asked him why he didn’t shake my hand, after I realized he was a nice man who wasn’t going to chop my hand off, he said it was culture more than anything else…I said I hoped someday the culture would change to include a woman’s handshake. He laughed and then offered us sweets. All the political issues aside, Hezbollah’s primary goals seem good. To protect the poor, build schools and hospitals for them, provide them with basic necessities when no one else would. We honestly left the meeting shaking our heads and wondering why they were lumped in the same category as Al-Quaeda and the Taliban. Even Lena, who is very harsh on every group in Lebanon, said that while she didn’t agree with all their practices, Hezbollah were known as honest businessmen in a corrupt middle east. We are likely going to come back in february to do a little more investigating on them and visit the schools and hospitals with Nawar.
We ran into Robert Fisk on our way out of the meeting and had lunch with him and Lena before heading to the airport.
More security issues lay ahead. First, after literally fighting our way through customs through angry mobs (took us over an hour to get through customs), we tried to leave the airport and were detained yet again by the airport security. The cameras were the problem yet again. Another group of about ten security guards got together and collectively decided that we needed all kinds of clearance to get our “professional” cameras through security. To their credit, people come into Egypt to sell cameras all the time on the blackmarket so every electronic item we bring in supposed to be serialized, but they were being bullies about it and were clearly trying to get paid off…After waiting around for two hours, after a shift change, and again more people who didn’t want to make a decision, the big boss finally comes in and he doesn’t speak a word of english, no one did. Long story short, they were trying to get us to leave our equipment at the airport overnight and come back in the morning, which of course we were not prepared to do. Zach, having lost his patience by then, made a couple phone calls to an old friend from highschool, who saved the day by calling in a big favor for us. Zach has some pretty amazing friends, I must say. But then the big boss, angry that he had been overruled, started harrassing our driver to find out where we were staying and tried to take down our names, and Zach grabbed our passports from his hand and said, “Don’t you dare find out where we’re staying. We’re leaving now.” It was a pretty tense moment.
Anyway, we finally made it to our hotel, and met up with our fixer, Magdi, when we got there (at around midnight) to go over what we wanted to accomplish in Egypt. After that hour and a half long meeting, we finally headed to bed. Longest day in history!
This morning, we went to the Pyramids and the Sphynx! It was literally the most incredible feat of human art and architecture I had ever witnessed. The pyramids are bigger than I ever would have imagined! It took 100,000 men over 22 years, 4000 years ago to build the pyramids! We went inside two of the three Pyramids and climbed and scaled through maze after maze of tombs. After another hour of hassles dealing with the Pyramid officals about having our “professional” cameras on their premisise, and going to see yet another big boss from the Ministry of Antiquities, he allowed us “ten minutes for free” with our big cameras and anything after that would cost us thousands of dollars and days of paperwork to get approval…He sent one of his tourism guys with us to ensure that we only filmed for ten minutes….Well, we befriended him, and he ended up taking us for a three hour tour of every single pyramid, sphynx and tombs that no one else had access to. Zach and I held the skull of a 4000 year old man who was buried in one of the tombs and he let us film the entire time! It was an incredible tour as well since this tour guide had done a Bachelors in Egyptology and knew how to read hieroglyphics… If you’ve never been, while Egypt isn’t my favorite country so far, thePyramids are absolutely worth seeing once in your life. It truly is a feat of human art and architecture if I’ve ever seen any. Another interesting thing to note: On one side of the Pyramids is the populated city of Cairo and on the other side is a sea of open dessert further than the eye can see….
Another side note: the tour guide mentioned that 5% of the 80 million Egyptians live along the nile and the other 95% are in land…He said that tributaries could be created using the Nile to branch off and build other communities in the dessert but that the government wasn’t doing that for political and greedy reasons. I wondered if there was another reason and made a note to look into that.
We returned to the hotel awed by the human achievement we had just witnessed.
My eyes are burning again from the haze of smoke at this internet cafe (seems they really like to smoke in the Middle East–not to mention Cairo is supposed to be one of the most polluted cities in the world–the pollution is worse this time of year too apparrently because they burn the husks from the rice fields at the end of the year) but the pollution and traffic are bad here.
We’re meeting with a few folks tomorrow–one of which is the wife of a politician who tried to run against Mubarek and was thrown in jail for “signature forgery”… So much for “democracy” in Egypt right? Should be an interesting meeting…I didn’t mention all that I learned about US involvement in Egypt and why they’ve been giving the Egyptian government 2.5 billion dollars per year since the Carter administration, but will try and touch on it in my next installment if you don’t already know…
Wow, this was yet another looooong email…
Missing you guys, and thanks again for reading my ramblings!
Love Radha
