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  • FISK: Prisoners In Their Own Fortresses

    Prisoners In Their Own Fortresses
    By Robert Fisk

    CounterCurrents.org, India

    04 April, 2005
    The Independent

    I drove Pat and Alice Carey up the coast of Lebanon this week to look
    at some castles. Pat is a builder from County Wicklow, brave enough
    to take a holiday with his wife in Beirut when all others are thinking
    of running away. But I wanted to know what he thought of 12th-century
    construction work.

    How did he rate a Crusader keep? The most beautiful of Lebanon's
    castles is the smallest, a dinky-toy palisade on an outcrop of rock
    near the village of Batroun. You have to climb a set of well-polished
    steps - no hand-rails, for this is Lebanon - up the sheer side
    of Mseilha castle and then clamber over doorsills into the dark,
    damp interior.

    So we padded around the battlements for half an hour. "Strongly made
    or they wouldn't be still here," Pat remarked. "But you wouldn't
    find any company ready to put up the insurance. And in winter, it
    must have been very, very cold."

    And after some minutes, he looked at me with some intensity. "It's
    like being in a prison," he said.

    And he was right. The only view of the outside world was through
    the archers' loopholes in the walls. Inside was darkness. The bright
    world outside was cut off by the castle defences. I could just see the
    splashing river to the south of the castle and, on the distant horizon,
    a mountainside. That was all the defenders - Crusaders or Mamlukes -
    would have seen. It was the only contact they had with the land they
    were occupying.

    Up at Tripoli is Lebanon's biggest keep, the massive Castle of
    St Gilles that still towers ominously over the port city with its
    delicate minarets and mass of concrete hovels. Two shell holes -
    remnants of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war - have been smashed into
    the walls, but the interior of the castle is a world of its own;
    a world, that is, of stables and eating halls and dungeons. It was
    empty - the tourists have almost all fled Lebanon - and we felt the
    oppressive isolation of this terrible place.

    Pat knew his Crusader castles. "When you besieged them, the only way to
    get inside was by pushing timber under the foundations and setting fire
    to the wood. When they turned to ash, the walls came tumbling down. The
    defenders didn't throw boiling oil from the ramparts. They threw sand
    on to the attackers. The sand would get inside their armour and start
    to burn them until they were in too much pain to fight. But it's the
    same thing here in Tripoli as in the little castle. You can hardly
    see the city through the arrow slits. It's another - bigger - prison."

    And so I sat on the cold stone floor and stared through a loophole
    and, sure enough, I could see only a single minaret and a few square
    metres of roadway. I was in darkness. Just as the Crusaders who built
    this fortress must have been in darkness.

    Indeed, Raymond de Saint-Gilles spent years besieging the city,
    looking down in anger from his great fortress, built on the "Pilgrim's
    Mountain", at the stout burghers of Tripoli who were constantly
    re-supplied by boat from Egypt. Raymond himself died in the castle,
    facing the city he dreamed of capturing but could not live to enter.

    And of course, far to the east, in the ancient land of Mesopotamia,
    there stand today equally stout if less aesthetic barricades around
    another great occupying army. The castles of the Americans are made
    of pre-stressed concrete and steel but they serve the same purpose
    and doom those who built them to live in prisons.

    >>From the "Green Zone" in the centre of Baghdad, the US authorities
    and their Iraqi satellites can see little of the city and country
    they claim to govern. Sleeping around the gloomy republican palace
    of Saddam Hussein, they can stare over the parapets or peek through
    the machine-gun embrasures on the perimeter wall - but that is as
    much as most will ever see of Iraq.

    The Tigris river is almost as invisible as that stream sloshing past
    the castle of Mseilha. The British embassy inside the "Green Zone"
    flies its diplomats into Baghdad airport, airlifts them by helicopter
    into the fortress - and there they sit until recalled to London.

    Indeed, the Crusaders in Lebanon - men with thunderous names like
    Tancred and Bohemond and Baldwin - used a system of control remarkably
    similar to the US Marines and the 82nd Airborne. They positioned
    their castles at a day's ride - or a day's sailing down the coast in
    the case of Lebanon - from each other, venturing forth only to travel
    between their keeps.

    And then out of the east, from Syria and also from the Caliphate
    of Baghdad and from Persia came the "hashashin", the "Assassins" -
    the Crusaders brought the word back to Europe - who turned the Shia
    faith into an extremist doctrine, regarding assassination of their
    enemies as a religious duty.

    Anyone who doubts the relevance of these "foreign fighters" to
    present-day Iraq should read the history of ancient Tripoli by that
    redoubtable Lebanese-Armenian historian Nina Jidejian, which covers
    the period of the Assassins and was published at the height of the
    Lebanese civil war.

    "It was believed that the terrorists partook of hashish to induce
    ecstatic visions of paradise before setting out to perform their
    sacred duty and to face martyrdom..." she writes. "The arrival of the
    Crusaders had added to .. latent discontent and created a favourable
    terrain for their . activities." Ouch.

    One of the Assassins' first victims was the Count of Montferrat,
    leader of the Third Crusade who had besieged Acre in 1191 - "Saint
    Jean d'Acre" to the Christians - and who met his death at the hands
    of men sent by the Persian "terrorist" leader, Hassan-i Sabbah. The
    Assassins treated Saladin's Muslim army with equal scorn - they made
    two attempts to murder him - and within 100 years had set up their
    own castles around Tripoli. They established a "mother fortress"
    from which - and here I quote a 13th-century Arab geographer - "the
    Assassins chosen are sent out thence to all countries and lands to
    slay kings and great men".

    And so it is not so hard, in the dank hallways of the Castle of St
    Gilles to see the folly of America's occupation of Iraq. Cut off from
    the people they rule, squeezed into their fortresses, under constant
    attack from "foreign fighters", the Crusaders' dreams were destroyed.

    Sitting behind that loophole in the castle at Tripoli, I could
    even see new meaning in Osama bin Laden's constant reference to the
    Americans as "the Crusader armies". The Crusades, too, were founded
    on a neo-conservative theology. The knights were going to protect the
    Christians of the Holy Land; they were going to "liberate" Jerusalem -
    "Mission Accomplished" - and ended up taking the spoils of the Levant,
    creating petty kingdoms which they claimed to control, living fearfully
    behind their stone defences. Their Arab opponents of the time did
    indeed possess a weapon of mass destruction for the Crusaders. It
    was called Islam.

    "You can see why the Crusaders couldn't last here," Pat said as we
    walked out of the huge gateway of the Castle of Saint Gilles. "I
    wonder if they even knew who they were fighting."

    I just resisted asking him if he'd come along on my next trip to
    Baghdad, so I could hear part two of the builder's wisdom.

    Copyright: The Independent
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