Khaled Sabsabi: Peacefender
On his return to Lebanon in 2003 for the first time since escaping the civil war with his family in 1978, Khaled Sabsabi was struck by déjà vu. Along the route from Beirut airport to Tripoli he saw the familiar roadside murals of the Maronite Phalangists competing against propaganda from Islamist parties. “It was like I never left”, he recalls, “I actually remembered that mural that was on the wall. It was still there, the same thing as we escaped out of the place. Nothing was changed”. But while his own childhood memory had been rekindled, in Lebanon he found “a country and a region that was living in amnesia. Its senses and its ability had been bashed to numbness”.
