User:Sara/Trials

On 21 September 1994, Lebanese president Elias Hrawi stood across the ruins of Martyrs’ Square, wearing his white suite and blue tie, and he declared the war over and never to return. As he laid down a symbolic brick in the middle of the vastly destructed city center, he welcomed the establishment of a new order. Lebanon was about to receive an extensive economical reform based on neo-liberal models of global finance, and Beirut’s central district was about to undergo expensive reconstruction that would soon cost the country billions of dollars in public debt. The project was brought to us by a private real estate holding company created but ___ That day was supposed to not only mark the end of an era and the beginning of another, but also assert that Lebanon had to enter the order of capitalist globalization .

It had been already three years since the Taef agreement was declared, ending an episode of fifteen years of brutal civil wars. The agreement passed an amnesty law that pardoned all war crimes committed prior to its enactment. Everyone had to forget, but no one did.

In one of the early chapters of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta, sixteen-year-old Evey Hammond recalls how the war had changed the weather and how the sky of London had turned yellow and black as the city slowly drowned under water and flooded sewage. For the little girl she was, the armed riots and all the chaos and confusion of a collapsed world had ended when someone or something, a disaster yet bigger than death itself, had happened.

To start a story of horror and despair, it is almost always appropriate to talk about the weather. A clear blue sky or a cool gentle breeze on a summer day, and a barrage of normalcy that draws the final line between an undisturbed natural condition and the inevitable disaster it preceeds. A storm or a cloud induces a momentary a shortage of sight or a temporary blindness. The drone will strike, only not today. The weather allows us to allocate the catastrophe on a set of defined coordinates, a sudden fall or a loud burst. But then again, just as we can no longer attribute the weather to the realm of nature, the disaster can no longer be locked in the realm of pragmatic futures. As Mark Fisher would put it, 'there is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.'

On that one summer night of 2014, the sky wasn't clear nor the breeze cool and gentle. The air was saturated with the usual suffocating odor of bones, urine, blood, and cow guts coming from the city's public slaughterhouse. The surrounding nightclubs sunken into the ground like communal graves and bomb shelters, and their light-heartedly featured tables shaped like coffins and war memorabilia fail to disguise the stench of the forgotten massacres of Karantina and Tel al-Zaatar. As I drove across the Charles Helou highway at the Northern entrance of Beirut,

As we arrive to the city center, he was still there sitting with his family and a few other . I could see the military bed stretched out on the grass. With his bright eyes and his tired body, hollow and folded, he extends his arms, leans forward and grabs a piece of cardboard. “Don’t forget to take a picture of me with the banner as well,” he smiles. He had been on hunger strike for twelve days already. No protests, no press, no sit-ins, just him, his wife and a few friends occupying a spot in a city so detached from their exhausted flesh. Between his protruding bones and the empty financial hub surrounding us there is large silent black

It is almost midnight and everyone is waiting. They say a colonel from the Internal Security Forces (ISF) is coming to negotiate the terms of erecting a tent for our friend to sleep in along the duration of his protest. Across the street, a Gucci boutique peers at us with a suspicious eye across a metallic barrier. The A private security guard sits on a bench, waiting. A corporate figure or a colonial general, his face was a metamorphic testimony of decades of struggle.

It is midnight. The sky looks foggy. Not an ordinary fog, just a colloidal and viscous substance dominating the sky. We see a light. Lightening. It never rains in June. What could it be? The colonel stands abruptly. The bodyguards and the policemen are alert. The colonel points south and says, “explosion!,” and then a trembling moan travelled softly under our feet. It came from the Southern Suburb of the city. Where exactly, we couldn’t know. Mobile connection would be out for a few minutes. During these minutes, no one cared about hunger or labor unions. No one remembered the face of the corporate figure or the colonial general. We all had to think of one thing. We all had to find ways to communicate with our families or friends.

Upon the spark of the Arab revolutions between 2010 and 2011, social media netwroks had already been quite a sensation on the global political arena. As social media networks proved to be successful tools for recruiting and mobilizing young people into action, it was not long before we were were referred to as the “Facebook generation”. The label initially was a way to prove that our efforts were merely __