Read An Evil Cradling for Free Online Page A

religious leaders of both the Jewish and Muslim communities in London had been meeting in conference to formulate some protest against the banning of ritual slaughter. I thinking how I had watched the TV a few days before and seen the rememberse people killing one another in Lebanon; now here they were in London sitting together at a table sharing ideas about the merits of ritual slaughter. I loved the incongruity of it, especially since another column in that day’s paper spoke of how the South Lebanese Army, backed by Israeli military advisors, had made several armed raids into south Lebanese villages, killing five men and taking several more prisoners.
    There were other prophetic pieces that I would also remember. They were articles about the film Rambo, which was very popular at the time.
    One small column spoke about how the BBC was postponing the showing of the film, saying that it was unsuitable for family viewing.
    And another much larger article, entitled ‘Revisionist Rambo’, spoke of how the film had been making huge sales in the Middle East and how it had been dubbed and redubbed to be made suitable and more acceptable to Middle Eastern audiences. The article spoke about how Rambo’s anti-communist antics would not go down well in such places as Syria, which still had close associations with the USSR.
    I recalled these articles because later this man, this image of Rambo, was to haunt me for a long time. But the article I most remember and quote at length was about the Lebanese economy by Robert Fisk, one of the best writers on the Middle East, if not the very best.
     
    New notes a hollow boost to ill economy
    A few weeks ago, one of the Middle East Airlines’ ponderous old Boeing 707s flew into Beirut national airport on a scheduled flight from London with a six ton cargo of cash. De La Rue’s printing works had just produced the latest financial drip-feed for Lebanon’s collapsing economy; and there, next to Runway 1-8, the Lebanese army was waiting to collect it.
    Stashed in boxes, the brand new bank notes were loaded into armoured personnel carriers. The Army’s Sixth Brigade had brought along heavy machine-guns, rocket launchers and even a couple of Saladins to guard the cash on its four mile journey to Central Bank in Hamra Street.
    However, it was not until the powerful little convoy actually left the airport runway that the real protectors of the national treasury revealed themselves; four scruffy youths in combat jackets holding AK47 rifles, waiting to climb on board one of the vehicles. They travelled into Beirut perched atop an armoured personnel carrier with the government troops sitting meekly beside them. Nor was anyone surprised: if Lebanon’s economy has to be defended by the Army, the Army has to be defended by the local militias.
     
    It is not just a question of erosion of power. The legitimate state authorities in Lebanon long ago forsook even the basic governmental duty of raising taxes. So many illegal ports have now been built by the Christian and Muslim militias that the Finance Ministry believes the private armies are now collecting taxes worth more than Ł175 million sterling that should rightfully have gone to central government funds. Every militia in the country -Christian Phalangist, Shia Muslim ‘AmaT, Druze, Palestinian, pro-Syrian and pro-Israeli -now levies its own taxes on shopkeepers and businessmen.
    If corruption and smuggling permeate Lebanon’s financial affairs to an unprecedented degree, however, the civil war militias have ironically become a mainstay of the economy. Many of the leftist Muslim groups are paid in dollars by other Arab states while Mr Yassir Arafat channels millions of US dollars -funds given him by the Saudis -into Lebanon to buy the continued loyalty of his PLO guerrillas. The Syrian Army, whose troops are spread across more than a quarter of the country, generates its own economy. Militias have meanwhile initiated their own housing projects,