Between memory and oblivion: the Holiday Inn, Beirut

When the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990 the conflict came to a halt, but the internal disagreements were not solved. In the divided Lebanese society this resulted in yet another struggle: that of memory and history. In Lebanon there is no consensus on what parts of its contemporary history should be remembered and what should be forgotten. It makes any possibility for reconciliation impossible, because without forgetting, there can't be any history. And without remembering, forgetting will only result in a superficial repression of an unsettled memory. The repression of the past has translated into different layers of the Lebanese society. Beirut's city centre removed the superficial traces of war and trauma. But this did not lead to a sense of collective forgetting, nor did it create an urban space that would ease the process of forgetting and healing. Instead, the memory politics of Lebanon have further deepened the fragmented society. It has allowed for remembering and forgetting to continue to take place within the communitarian spaces of that fragmented society.

The role of the urban space in these processes to come clean with the past is essential. Monuments, memorials and places of memory are intended to facilitate some kind of reflection, remembering, and forgetting. Beirut's post-war urban renewal was largely discussed and problematized by academics, historians and sociologists such as such as Davies, 1993; Traboulsi, 2008; Haugbølle, 2002; Khalaf, 2005; Osman, 2001; Sarkis, 1998; and Sawalha, 2003. There is a wide consensus among them that the reconstruction has failed., not only from an ethical, political and economic point of view. It has removed those places that could have served as a unifying un-political space to which people can relate their own memories in order to come clean with the past, to forget, and for a sense of history to emerge. As a consequence, Beirut's haunted memories, its ghosts, are largely dislocated, and re-emerging within the internal conflict of the country.

In this dissertation I examine one site in particular, the abandoned Holiday Inn hotel in the Ain el-Mreisse area of Beirut, and its role in today's collective remembering and forgetting in the city. The building only operated briefly as a hotel, before it was taken over by militias in a struggle for control over the city centre and the port area, during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Its peripheral location to the redeveloped city centre, and its complicated ownership, have kept it from being redeveloped ever since the end of the war. While other war ruins were consistently demolished or redeveloped, the Holiday Inn site was subjected to the workings of time and memory, making it available to all sorts of readings: as a ruin, as a piece of history, as an archive, as a war memory. It has created a specific relation to the city, its archive, and its collective memory. Recent plans to demolish the building threaten this relation and the site's integration into the memorial layer of the city's urban environment, which raises a number of questions about the relationship between the urban environment and memory.

This research is an exploration into the history of the building and its meanings in the city throughout time, to grasp a fraction of the archive it represents, the space it occupies within the city, and its importance for the city's processes of remembering and forgetting. It uncovers these complex relations of remembering and forgetting, and the archival framework at play in a city haunted by its past. I approach the site from its iconic legacy in the city's history. The term icon, here, refers both to the physical/mythical relation of the building to the city and its memory, and to its role as a purely visual signifier to the war, the city, and modernity. I will argue that the building's presence is imaginary: it is an image of itself which functions both as an archive and as a source of memory. It represents not only the war-loaded memory of that very specific site, but of an entire city, which has lost its traces of that war. The building I am entering with this research is a signifier of a much wider past than the one it might physically account for. I therefore argue that it has never been just a building. So how, then, can we approach this site? As a monument? A memorial? Or as an archive? What is at stake when thinking of its imminent demolition? And what will happen to the memory of the city once the building is gone? Can a monument, through its architecture, ever embody the pain and haunting memories of such violent past? I aim to examine these complex relations between the building, the urban space, the past and the present.

Unlike the reconstruction of Beirut, the past and present of the former Holiday Inn hotel is very poorly documented, and the current owners of the building are not keen on sharing any kind of information about its past and future. The building is nowadays hardly noticeable that the building was once a hotel, or a war landmark. As if it disappeared from the city, and from history, the building is nothing more than an empty carcass. In order to develop my argumentation I therefore place the building in the wider context of memory, history, and the archive. These themes will help problematizing the site, and develop a framework in which the relations between the building, the city and history can be examined. In chapter 1 the building is introduced next to monuments commemorating the Lebanese Civil War. The way people remember and commemorate, and consequently the way they forget, is further elaborated in chapter 2. The theoretical discussion is projected onto Lebanon's post-war policy in dealing with its contemporary past and Beirut's incessant reconstruction of the city, creating a framework for the Holiday Inn site to be discussed in detail. Chapter 3 sets out the primary issues embedded in the site, drawing upon its historic and geographic situation in the city, and its symbolic presence in Beirut. Against the background of the Civil War and its local, regional and global context, the Holiday Inn is discussed as an icon representing Beirut through the different phases of its contemporary history. The memorial issues arising from the building and its different meanings in history are discussed in chapter 4. What are its functions in the city, and how are these functions read, experienced, and remembered? The problem of the site in its contemporary circumstance is discussed in chapter 5. Both the physical and the imagined archives are discussed in terms of their relation to each other, and the present state of the actual physical structure which is about to disappear. I draw on the previous notions of the icon and the archive to argue that the building has become a source and an anchor for the collective memory of the city, which problematizes its imminent destruction. Throughout my argumentation I use a fair amount of photographs and postcards, to illustrate and examine the building's relative position in the city of Beirut in different stages of its history. These photographs do not constitute a parallel body photographic work, but illustrate my observations and argumentation. Occasionally I will also draw on selected artistic work as artists increasingly deal with the issues of history and memory in reflecting on Lebanon's recent past.

The discussion of the politics of memory and forgetting in post-war societies is not new. The relevance of this discussion in the Lebanese context, however, resides in the fact that the conflict is ongoing. The absence of a historical framework for remembering and forgetting the past is at the same time a result of that situation, as much as it plays an active role in these ongoing conflicts. In the light of the ongoing redevelopment of the city of Beirut as an economic and cultural centre in the region, and against the backdrop of continuing political and social strife, this research aims to contribute to the discussion evolving around memory and the urban space. It should be read as a an exploration into the layered experience of the city as a space of memory and fiction, of buildings and imagination, and the complexity of the layers of signification of collective memory, and collective forgetting.

My first visit to Beirut in 2005 left me with an unsettled feeling. I was confused and shocked to see a city where such clear traces of war and fighting lay next to shiny hotel towers and luxury shops. Part of my confusion was probably due to my lack of knowledge about Lebanon's contemporary history, and the prejudices I took with me when setting out for Beirut. At the time I was living in Damascus, Syria. Beirut, although only a 2-hour taxi ride away, seemed to be at the other end of the world. Ever since Syria's alleged involvement in the 2005 bomb attack killing Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, both countries weren't on the best terms. The Syrian army was forced out of Lebanon, which left many people in Syria to feel betrayed by the Lebanese [1] . For my Damascene friends, Beirut was that noisy, overcrowded city, with people not quite knowing where they belong.

Little did I know back then, that the Lebanese history is quite a bit more complex than that, and that the sentiments felt by my friends back in Damascus had, to the extent that they were true, specific historic and political origins which they did not necessarily understand or if, at all, want to acknowledge. My confusion and interest was thus in part caused by the contradicting cityscape. Its buildings pierced with gaping bullet and grenade holes turned me into a banal amateur photography enthusiast and tourist photographer: the old versus the new, the broken versus the renovated. Soon, however, the historic and political framework within which the city has to be read became another reason for me to be interested in the city. Never before had I experienced such a conflicting urban environment. And never before had I imagined that the past could be so very present today.

I was intrigued by the way the city's past is read from its present state, not necessarily through the contrast between the old and the new, but through the way different layers of narration, be they visual, textual, physical or memorial, come together in one place and form an extremely dense sense of history. This is probably best illustrated by the former Holiday Inn hotel, a ghostlike presence in the city, yet intriguingly alive. With its big hole in the wall of its upper floors, visible from almost every corner of the city, it was right there next to the luxurious shops and hotels, next to the renovated city centre, like a gaping wound. It seemed to tell so many stories. Although one quickly picks up notions of these stories, anecdotes and legends, the major picture remains a matter of imagination.

The Holiday Inn hotel was a luxury resort in the mid-1970's. Its 25 floors were home to 500 hotel rooms, an equal number of offices, a cinema, and a shopping centre: the Saint Charles Centre. The building is located at the centre of Beirut's hotel district, in Ain el-Mreisse, facing the Mediterranean Sea. It neighbours the famous Phoenicia Hotel and the Saint Georges Marina. Unlike most of the surrounding hotels, however, the former Holiday Inn hotel was never renovated after the war. It is an empty concrete carcass, a war ruin, surrounded by luxury hotels and exquisite boutiques, right next to the reconstructed city centre. It is well integrated in the urban grid and the skyline of the city, but with a little effort it becomes visible from nearly every corner of the city. The hotel has an infamous history, first as a hotel, and consecutively as a snipers hideout and urban landmark during the Civil War. After the war, disputes over its ownership, its history, and its future, caused the building to be left untouched, apart from a major cleansing of any references to its violent past. Today, the building is still empty, and inaccessible. Not being able to enter the building of course only adds to the mystery surrounding it; the curiosity for what might be inside, what could be found in there, the traces and remains of what happened inside. It has turned the building into a peculiar place in the city. On the one hand it represents the Civil War, and the impossibility of the city to forget this traumatic epoch. But on the other hand it harbours that what has gone lost throughout the years of reconstructing and cleaning up the city: a space that allows to remember, to commemorate, to reflect. Plans, seemingly final, to demolish the building in 2009 raise a number of fundamental questions about the building's complex relation to the city, its history, its memory, and its archive.

War monuments

Against the building's changing roles and meanings in the city's urban, social and political realm, and its complex relation to the past and present processes of forgetting and remembering, I argue that the former Holiday Inn hotel in Beirut has never been just a building. Like a true icon of the city, it was featured in pre-war postcards, in wartime propaganda posters, and in post-war memories. The fragmented and unsettled character of Lebanon's contemporary history seems to coalesce in this building, like ghosts, living inside it. As such, its current destruction plans need to consider the site's failure as a building, and its unintentional iconic and mythical legacies of the past and present. So how, then, can we approach this site? As a monument? A memorial? Or as an archive? What is at stake when thinking of its imminent demolition? And what will happen to the memory of the city once the building is gone?

Surprisingly few monuments and memorials commemorate the Civil War in Lebanon. Most of the country's contemporary memorials celebrate the heroics of one particular party or militia, or a specific victory appropriated by one of the fighting militia's. For example, in Christian dominated areas mountain villages often have statues of heroic Christian leaders decorating their central roundabouts. In the largely Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut, as well as in the villages in south Lebanon, streets are decorated with flags and posters of those who gave their lives for Hezbollah or the Amal movement [2] . One of the only monuments with a more Lebanese dimension is located outside of Beirut, in the suburb of Baabda, close to the presidential Palace. It does not, however, commemorate that much of a Lebanese struggle. Composed of a number of military tanks squeezed together in a concrete block, it seems to represent the dubious position of the Lebanese army during the conflict, rather than commemorating those who lost their lives disregarding which side they were on. One of the only commemorations in the name of all Lebanese is the Martyrs' Monument on Martyrs' Square in downtown Beirut. It was erected as a memorial for the liquidation of nationalist intellectuals and journalists by the Ottoman rulers in 1916. The monument was heavily damaged during the Civil War. After the war it was restored, but the bullet holes from the Civil War were left in the statue to symbolize the national struggle. But its location in the highly politicised space of downtown Beirut, which I will elaborate in chapter 2, makes it little suitable for commemorating the Civil War for all Lebanese.

None of these monuments can claim to make a unifying commemoration of the war, a message addressing all Lebanese and their internal strife which is, as I will explain later, an ongoing course of complex conflicts involving foreign as well as Lebanese forces. This is, however, not unique to the Lebanese commemoration of its Civil War. In Spain, for instance, it took decades before the Spanish Civil War became publically discussible. Only now, 70 years after that war, discussions on how to remember are taking shape, with some memorials being built here and there [3] . The problem is not so much that these events should be remembered. Rather, the issue is how to remember, and how to memorialise. Which parts of that episode from history should be memorialised? It is a fragile balance that needs to be found because each statement against the war can easily be interpreted as a statement against an individual, or a group, involved in the conflict. Germany, too, has been struggling with ways to commemorate its contemporary past [4] . How can the atrocities committed by the Third Reich be commemorated without blaming an entire population for the gruesome crimes committed by their government? What kind of memorials can commemorate such nuances? And how can a society remember the atrocities and all its victims without creating a hierarchy of victims [5] ? However, the most pertinent question is: can a monument, through its architecture, ever embody the pain and haunting memories of such violent past?

People remember in different ways: through objects, monuments, photographs, and writings. Each of these artefacts holds a meaning, a memory, of a person or event that it keeps alive. Collective remembering, however, is more complex, as an object cannot contain the diversity of memories that is kept within a group of people, let alone the different takes on a specific event that object might embody. Therefore monuments and memorials are all about forgetting as much as they are about remembering. This problematic situation sheds doubt over Aristotle's notion that objects can act as analogues for memory [6] . However, the differentiation between the individual memory and the collective memory was first made by Maurice Halbwachs, a few centuries after Aristotle, in the 1950's [7] . So I don't want to condemn his notion of memory and objects too harshly.

It was Freud who first described remembering and forgetting as conscious mental processes. The one includes as much of the other as they are opposed to each other. Remembering always requires something to be forgotten. And forgetting requires the specific memory to be remembered in a certain way, before it can be forgotten. It makes collective remembering, or forgetting, very complex processes within a society. Freud noticed that there is a difference between forgetting and repressing. There is a sense of coming clean with the past, which allows this past to be forgotten. Repressed memories always risk re-emergence in the future [8] . Lebanon faces similar problems in its urge to forget the trauma of the Civil War. The cities were cleaned up, and the traces of the war were removed. The effect, however, was the opposite: people did not forget. They started remembering, each in their own communal context. Objects cannot thus act as analogues for memory. But they do have the capacity to help us to remember, or to forget, by representing events in the past. Such objects can be monuments or kept in museums and archives. In The Art of Forgetting Adrian Forty argues that every nation is built on a collective forgetting. National archives and museums preserve artefacts and documents which have been carefully selected to document and construct the history of a country. At the same time, these institutions exclude those documents and artefacts that do not belong in the narrative of the country's history; representing, for instance, the negative internal power struggles questioning the country's creation, its legitimacy and that of its leaders. When memories are being turned into history it replaces those memories and requires other memories to subscribe to one specific reading, or interpretation, in order for history to be effective in a sense that it subscribes to a national sense of belonging or nationhood. This process, however, also causes to forget that what has been excluded from history. Turning this process around, means that in order to forget, memory needs to be exteriorized. In Archive Fever (1995) Jacques Derrida identifies this aspect of forgetting as the death drive of the archive: there is a need to exteriorize memory, in history, in archives, in monuments, in order for the process of forgetting to take place [9] .

History is an interpretative reading of the past, a selection of events taken out of their natural habitat of memory to be kept in the institutionalized space of the archive. Derrida was very critical of to these institutions of history. Unlike Foucault, who considered the archive to be a reliable discursive framework [10] , Derrida sees the archive as a very unreliable and fragmented space of forgetting. History means forgetting. Derrida supports this argument by pointing out that the process of making history is a 'hypomnesic' and 'prosthetic' experience [11] . In his work on the archive and the notion of a Lebanese identity, Ely Dagher elaborates on this argument stating that forgetting the Civil War in Lebanon would require a common history for all Lebanese to provide the framework of this forgetting. For him, the archive is a constructive tool:

'The archive and the impression that it is, is not only a reconstruction of the deconstructed memory. Through its technical structure it is also a determining factor of the archivabale content in its coming into existence and its relationship to the future. I would like to emphasize on the term reconstruction here for it contains a reference to the interpretation formed by piecing together chosen bits of the deconstructed body under certain rules of categorization, thus creating a new entity that is now independent from the memory and history; one that replaces them.' [12]

Derrida concludes that the process of producing the archive, and therefore producing history, is essentially amnesic. A few years prior to Derrida's contemplation on the archive, Pierre Nora elaborated on a similar critique of the archive with his rereading of French history in Les Lieux de mémoire [13] . Rather than going through dusty, dim archives and museums, Nora finds France's history in these realms of memory, 'national, ethnic and other social commonalities in a given social group' [14] , such as churches, traditions, and legends. According to Nora they are 'an unconscious organization of collective memory' [15] . They embody the forgotten memories of France, but, contrary to what Aristotle argues, they are not analogues of memory itself.

It is within this framework of Derrida's critique on the archive and Nora's notion of the Lieux de Mémoire that I approach the former Holiday Inn in the first place as a place of memory, and secondly as an archive, a collection of subjective memories [16] . It is an empty building inhabited by the ghosts of Beirut's contemporary history.

Closing the files

In Lebanon the process of externalizing memory is extremely difficult as there is no consensus on what to forget, and what to remember, of the country's contemporary history. Internal strife and political unrest have made it impossible to develop any kind of narrative of the past without harming at least one of the different factions at stake. The memories of the Civil War reside in the fragmented communities of the country. There is no national archive or museum documenting these events. There is not even a national consensus on what actually happened, nor the acknowledgement that the Civil War was wrong, unjust, or unnecessary [17] . In fact, such questions have been avoided for a long time. The Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990 with a ceasefire, the Taïf agreement ^[18] . The agreement did not resolve the fundamental issues leading up to the war in 1975, nor did the 15 years of fighting since. Instead, the Taïf agreement created a preliminary political framework for the fighting parties to resolve their disagreements peacefully. It set out a series of reforms to develop the government institutions towards instruments of a legitimate secular state. But its immediate plan of action was limited to affirming the stalemate that had been holding hostage of the country for all those years. Since the agreement did not solve the country's problems, it ended the armed conflict without a winner or a loser.

In order to overcome the immediate disagreements between the rival political entities, and to create an initial space of reconciliation within the Lebanese society, a policy of forgetting, or closing the files, was adopted by the political leaders. This policy largely persists today, and puts severe pressure on any kind of reconciliation, needed to straighten out the tensions among the country's divided ideologies and sects. After all, today's political leaders are the same as the ones leading the country into the war, now 34 years ago. The majority of the reforms initiated by the Taïf agreement in 1990 to stabilize the country have until today remained dead letter. In fact, the agreement still serves as a national consensus over substantial political disagreements, almost 20 years after it ended the fighting. It is a legitimate reason to argue that this war in fact never ended. And it is no surprise that questions of national history and identity prevail as a political consensus to openly discuss or at least acknowledge the events of the recent past is missing.

The state of amnesia in Lebanon is in part a political movement, and in part a social one. It reminds one very much of the silence of Germany after the Second World War, or Spain after its own Civil War. But what is different to Germany is that there is no national shame about the traumatic events of the Lebanese Civil War [19] . Everybody is a victim and perpetrator at the same time, which makes it an impossible topic to discuss without blaming one another. The past is forcefully repressed and re-emerges, as Freud warned earlier, each time tensions rise high in yet another political dispute. Haugbølle rightfully remarks that 'the way the Lebanese remember says more about their social situation then what really happened' [20] . Memory is created under pressure from society. Personal memories are always matched with more general ideas and images from the social setting around them, but become collective only as long as they are shared in public. The Lebanese society is, however, deeply divided between rivalling political ideologies, under the cover of religious hostilities. Under these circumstances a sense of collective memory becomes communitarian. And so does history. It is a patchwork of stories and memories, which can only be understood through its fragments. It can't be grasped as a full image. The Holiday Inn provides a framework to bring together such fragmented history, as it is a space which leads itself a very fragmented existence in the city's memory.

Forgetting the city

The problem of memory and history, and creating a space which allows for such traumatic memory to resonate for all parties involved in the conflict, is illustrated by the reconstruction of Beirut's Central District (BCD). Although it was probably not intentional, the undertaking had a large impact on the way people remember the Civil War today. In 1994 the government granted exclusive rights to a private shareholders company, Solidere S.A.L. [21] , to rebuild the city centre. The area was shattered in ruins as it became the front line of the 15-year civil war. It had been largely abandoned in the middle of the 1970's, when militias were fighting for control over the city. The battle resulted in the division of Beirut into a Christian dominated East, and a Muslim dominated West. Plans for the city centre's reconstruction were already made in the late 1970's, when the conflict seemed to run towards an end. But the fighting flared up with Israel's invasion and shelling of Beirut in 1982. By the end of the war the BCD lay completely in ruins, overgrown with trees and grass. Animals had taken refuge in the ruins of the city. It was, however ironic, a peaceful no-man's-land.

The reconstruction plans envisioned a partial restoration of the city's pre-war plans, and the development of large building projects to accommodate the city's new business and hotel district, and luxury apartments. Both parts of the plan were, and still are, extremely controversial [22] . Not the least because of its political dimension, as the owner of Solidere S.A.L. was at the same time the country's prime minister and a businessman. Combining these functions was quite ambiguous, as he represents a slice of the fragmented and largely communitarian Lebanese electorate, which, of course, he would not want to lose over their misrepresentation in the city's reconstruction. But also the proposed reconstruction was fiercely criticized. It was seen by many as an attempt to neglect an opportunity to deal with the country's recent past. According to Michael F. Davie (1993) the reconstruction of Beirut should not mesmerise on the fantasy of what the city would have been like if there had not been a war. Rather it should be a reflection on what Beirut's new function in the region could be, and how this function can incorporate the different factions of the city's and the country's population. Building a completely new city, or taking Beirut's new structure with its multiple centres and hubs [23] as a starting point would therefore have been a much more legitimate take on rebuilding the city. In 2005 Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf noticed that Beirut has always been a place of construction and destruction [24] . Its consecutive rulers have always left their mark or vision of the city, after which it would be destroyed again, either by wars, or by nature. Reconstructing the city, even if only in part, thus raises the question: which city should be reconstructed?

A few years prior to Khalaf's lecture this question was no less pertinent, as the reconstruction work uncovered Roman and Phoenician ruins expanding underneath most of the city centre. Beirut became the largest archaeological digging site in the world. Against the background of an already controversial redevelopment of the area, the question that now arose was: which city was to be rebuilt: the French Beirut, the Ottoman Beirut, or the Roman or Phoenician Berytus? Which part of history was to be buried, or forgotten? A compromise was made which left a small part of the archaeological findings uncovered in a series of archaeological parks. But the largest part was buried to create valuable building lots for luxury apartments and office towers. The reconstruction was thus not so much a historical reconstruction, as it was a visual imitation of a carefully selected portion of pre-war Beirut, by erasing the war from its memory.

But apart from fixing up the bullet holes and replacing roofs and windows even the imitation did not go very far. What used to be narrow streets, tiny shops and souks, became luxury apartments, exclusive hotels and bars, designer shops and tourist attractions. The old Ottoman souks are due to open at the end of 2009 as the Beirut Souks shopping mall. The historical framework of the reconstruction thus has an economic one: it has to be profitable. The owners of the buildings were forced to sell in exchange for market shares in the reconstruction company. Being one of the most stable shares on the Lebanese stock market this was definitely not a bad exchange for the land owners. But it turned the once inaccessible city centre of Beirut, due to war and destruction, into an equally inaccessible city centre, at least for the average Lebanese who do not shop at Gucci and Armani. The city centre thus became an exclusive consumerist playground, not with a historical value, but a historical theme: a fantasy of pre-war Beirut.

Samir Khalaf brings the discussion of the reconstruction of the BCD back to its historical and conceptual essence by reminding us once again that both forgetting and remembering are related: 'the problem is how to recall the hideous episodes of the war without sanitizing them by making them more tolerable to remember' [25] . Historically, Beirut had always been a fragmented city, disconnected from its rural hinterland [26] . The massive migration from rural Lebanon to Beirut was not paralleled with an urban lifestyle. The new arrivals in the city retained their rural, and patriarchal, lifestyle. And so are the workings of a collective sense of belonging (and memory). The Civil War has only strengthened these fragmented urban spaces which have not loosened after the war. Khalaf noticed however that architecture, urban planning and design have previously been applied to ease the unresolved tensions of the country, and to overcome the forgetting of the traumatic pasts. Yet, these previous times were attempts to create a national identity from a unified political perspective: the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Ottomans, the French, and even the early years of independence of the Lebanese republic. But today's reconstruction of Beirut simply can't embody any national feeling, as there is no such political nor social base. On top of that, the reconstruction is a private initiative, which does not address a section of all Lebanese through what connects them, but a global audience of financial investment, real estate and luxury tourism. Ironically, the downtown area is today frequently referred to as Solidere, the company that bought and redeveloped the land. This answers Michael F. Davie's earlier question about post-war Beirut's possible functions in the region. But it also tells us what we can expect from Beirut's new city centre as a space of national identity, a space of history, and a space to deal with and commemorate the traumatic haunting of the past.

The reconstruction has failed to create a common space for all Lebanese to remember and forget the trauma of the Civil War. As a consequence, memory does not find root in Beirut's physical environment but in a deeply fragmented social space. This fragmented social space is not new to Beirut, as Khalaf pointed out earlier. But the war and the urban and political policies of post-war Beirut have further deepened this fragmentation into a multicentred realm of disconnected communities, each building their historical and social identities on equally disconnected memories and stories. The city as it is today does not provide any spatial framework for a collective memory to emerge. There are, however, a number of spaces in Beirut that have escaped the process of erasing time. Due to their location and relations to the past, they have been able to accommodate the dislocated memories of the city. Such a space is the former Holiday Inn hotel.

The allegedly successful operation of Beirut's reconstruction was documented some time after the completion of its first phase, that of the Place de l'Étoile and its surroundings, in a book published by Solidere depicting the destroyed houses of the city centre next to the their reconstruction. What the book documented most prominently, however, was not the successful reconstruction. It was the erasure of time from the city centre.

The Lebanese Civil War is often considered a religious conflict between Christians and Muslims. This may definitely be true for certain episodes of the war, considering the division of Beirut into a more or less homogenous Christian East Beirut, and a largely Muslim West Beirut, during the war. But the conflict's origins and ongoing divisions are significantly more complex than that. It goes without saying that the entire conflict needs to be placed in a regional and global context of post-World War II political and economical constellations [27] . In the mid 1950's the Middle East was a playground for Western powers in their struggle for control and influence over the global divisions of the Cold War. US and USSR economic alliances with local regimes and emerging oil economies put serious tensions on these young countries and on their own internal cultural, political and ethnic power balances. These balances were further disrupted by the growing tensions between Israel and Palestinians. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict became the symbol of this geopolitical struggle, and fuelled an already growing sentiment of pan-Arab nationalism opposing these foreign interventions and their post-colonial policies. This pan-Arabism became a political ideology when Gamal Abdel Nasser became the president of Egypt from 1956 until 1970. Nasser tried to unite the Arabs politically with a secular socialist nationalist ideology which was largely mediated through an increasing regional production and distribution of culture and media [28] .

In 1958 Egyptian president Nasser and Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli united both countries in the United Arab Republic. Hopes were that the initiative would be followed by other countries in the region, such as Lebanon and Iraq. But political tensions in Syria ended the union only a few years later, in 1961, when the Syrian government was overthrown in a coup d'état. Other efforts to unite Arab nations, such as the Arab Federation (1958) and the Federation of Arab Republics (1972-1977), all failed. These years of Arab nationalism did however not solve the major tensions resulting from foreign interference in regional policies and economies, nor did it create the necessary consensus to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, I believe that these nationalist escapades largely neglected emerging internal imbalances caused by those forces pan-Arabism wanted to defy. It resulted in further disrupting the cultural and economic life which used to include large portions of Jewish communities. When tensions between Israel and Palestine started gaining a more regional dimension these communities emigrated to the Jewish state or the West. Military interventions from either side only entrenched a growing number of regional states in this seemingly endless conflict. [29]

In Lebanon, the years leading up to the Civil War were marked with protests and occasional street clashes in Beirut and other cities around the country. At the basis of these protests were a series of political disagreements and differing ideologies. Lebanon's political structure was laid out in 1943 in the National Pact. The pact gave certain powers to specific sectarian groups, based on their representation in the Lebanese population. It gave presidential power to the Maronite Christians, the Prime Minister to the Sunni Muslims, and the Speaker of Parliament to the Shiite Muslims. This division of power took into account the religious segregation of the country, yet it did not reflect the ideological split that was developing in Lebanon. The first sparks of this internal split emerged in the late 1940's when the first wave of Palestinian refugees arrived in Lebanon. For some it was the duty of every Arab nation to stand by the Palestinians in their struggle. However, not everybody in the country saw Lebanon as an Arab nation. Mainly the Christians had objections to this because the term Arab held a number of historical references to Islam [30] , undermining the historical presence of Christians and other minorities in the country and thus the National Pact. In 1958 tensions ran high in Lebanon after repeated blows to the pan-Arab movement by president Camille Chamoun. Not only did he repeatedly refuse to join the Arab initiative to stand by Egypt in their struggle to nationalise the Suez Canal over the British [31] . He also refused to consider joining the United Arab Republic, the first political framework for the pan-Arab ideology. The second wave of Palestinian refugees arrived in the late 1960's, after the 6-Day War [32] . In 1970 the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was expelled from Jordan after a failed attempt to bring down the Jordanian King [33] . The PLO seat was moved to Beirut, causing the already relative fragile political balance to derange. The situation was fuelled even more when the PLO pressured the Lebanese government into an agreement giving the Palestinians the right to attack Israel from Lebanese soil, obliging the Lebanese army to give way to the Palestinians, on condition they share their plans with the army [34] . This move implicated Lebanon directly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The imbalance came in handy for the American versus Soviet struggle for power and control in the Middle East. Although the Cold War did not lead to any direct military confrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union, it was at the basis of a number of strategic, military and political interventions in the Middle East, deepening already existing regional and international divisions. Both countries appropriated the internal Lebanese conflicts, and sidelined each with one of the struggling ideologies. The American administration was traditionally supportive of the Western-minded Christians in Lebanon, whereas the Soviets sidelined with the Palestinian struggle and their Lebanese allies and pan-Arab ideology.

The ongoing internal strife in Lebanon, against the backdrop of regional and global conflicts, built up towards a climax of violence. On the morning of the 13^th of April 1975 unidentified gunmen in a speeding car killed 4 when shooting at a church in Ain el-Rummaneh, a Christian suburb of East-Beirut. Later that day, the Phalangist party killed 27 Palestinians travelling by bus from Ain al-Rummaneh to the Tal al-Zaatar refugee camp in revenge for two of their men that were among the dead earlier that day. These events are traditionally considered the start of the Lebanese Civil War. But as outlined above, they were definitely not the only events that sparked the war.

During the early months of the Civil War the fighting was mainly between Christian militias and pro Palestinian fighters. But the more the conflict developed, the initial fronts and opposing ideologies were blurred into a spiral of violence with changing alliances, cultural, religious and political motives, and foreign interventions on all sides. The Civil War was actually a series of smaller conflicts throughout a period of 15 years. Today, the tensions and regional political, cultural and social problems leading up to the Lebanese Civil War still shape Lebanese and regional politics.

The image of the city

In order to understand the particular role the former Holiday Inn hotel in Beirut plays in the city's collective memory it needs to be placed within this wider context of these internal and regional conflicts. Ever since the hotel's opening in 1974 it became actively entrenched in these conflicts as the hotel came to stand for a set of ideas amidst those that were at stake during the heated political atmosphere in the country.

In great contrast to the political and ideological conflicts haunting Lebanon during its pre-war years stood the country's reputation as The Switzerland of the Middle East, and Beirut was also known as the Pearl on the Eastern Mediterranean, and The Paris of the Orient. It was a bustling city with hotels, nightclubs, cinemas, theatres and restaurants, and the favourite hideaway for the world's celebrities. At the tip of Ras Beirut, the peninsula of Beirut, a hotel district was booming with luxury hotels such as the famous Phoenicia and Saint Georges hotels (Figure 2). On the other side of the city, in the modernist district of Raouché, large hotels sprung up one after the other. The Holiday Inn and the Four Seasons hotel were the latest additions to Beirut's bustling tourism economy. The latter however, would never open due to the start of the Civil War. In the early 1970's tourism contributed up to 20% to the Lebanese GDP [35] . The openness and foreign presence in the country had clearly brought some benefits to the country. But it definitely did not benefit the ongoing climate of clashing ideologies.

The opening of an American hotel chain amidst the contradictory and tense political and climate in Lebanon was, to say the least, inconsiderate of large portions of the country's population and regional developments. But it was nothing new. Most of the large hotels in Beirut were owned in one way or the other by foreign companies and holdings. Even the famous Phoenicia hotel, right next to the Holiday Inn hotel, was and still is owned by the American Intercontinental group, which was back in the 1970's a subdivision of Pan American Airlines. Yet, it was the Holiday Inn that would come to symbolize the Western political and ideological interference in Lebanon. It came to stand for the materialization of a policy that had fallen into disgrace for some. With the Holiday Inn, the Western hand in Lebanon became visible. It became a building, a specific place in the city.

In its sheer size and luxury the Holiday Inn hotel was to compete with its neighbouring hotels in Ain el-Mreisse. It was there to impress. The 25 floor tall tower was home to 500 hotel rooms, and a similar number of offices. It accommodated a shopping centre, the Saint Charles Centre, and a cinema. Positioned parallel to the seashore, the colossal tower building reclaimed the splendid view on the sea and the port district. And of course, towering out from behind the Phoenicia hotel, the Holiday Inn was to be seen from the many yachts in the Saint Georges marina and lingering around on the shore of Beirut. In stark contrast with Beirut's more playful modernist tradition in, for instance the Raouché district (Figure 7), the Holiday Inn was a boringly straight-forward modernist building, a concrete monolith on the city's skyline.

It was thus only in part because of its direct relation to the West, and in particular to the USA, that made the Holiday Inn come to stand for the foreign hand in Lebanese politics. Rather, its wealth and splendour, and its overwhelming presence in the city materialized such claims. The political and ideological associations made with the Holiday Inn, as foreign investment and a controversial pied-à-terre in Lebanon, also found root in the physical structure of the building. It was a modernist landmark, an icon of Beirut's standing as a holiday destination.

Even before its completion the Holiday Inn was a prominently present icon of the city in postcards of Beirut (Figures 2-6). The postcards largely documented the splendour Beirut's successful tourist sector. Although they were produced mainly in the late 1960's and early 1970's, these postcards are often still on sale today in old bookshops in Beirut, probably because they stocked up so many of them before the war. Because most of the postcard photographs were taken over a period of several years, these postcards also depict the changes to the city's structure. One of these changes was the rising of the Holiday Inn tower, visible in several postcards of the early 1970's. The finished Holiday Inn remained undocumented, most likely because it was shut when the war started 9 months after the hotel's opening. The only images of the hotel before the war are these postcards.

The Holiday Inn's symbolic legacy in Beirut resided both in its physical and ideological associations. Although these associations were relatively marginal in the beginning, they soon took on a more political character. When the Civil War broke out on the 13^th of April 1975, Lebanese Front [36] , and in particular Christian Phalangist militiamen, took up positions in strategic buildings in and around the city centre, including the Holiday Inn building and the surrounding hotels. Besides the symbolism the Holiday Inn had acquired in the months before the war, and the urban landmark it had become, the central location of the hotels, all looking out over the port and the city centre, was strategic for the protection of the city centre. The port was one of the major entry points for all sorts of goods, including petrol and arms. The city centre was home to the government institutions and was thus the symbolic powerbase for the Christian pro-Western president, and the legitimacy of the Lebanese government and its political ideology. The tide however changed when on 21 March 1976 the socialist Murabitoun militia conquered the building during the so-called Hotel Wars. During these severe clashes, the Murabitoun not only expelled the Lebanese Front from the Holiday Inn and the surrounding hotels: the entire city centre was conquered and cleansed [37] , all the way until the central Martyrs' Square. The Murabitoun was a Nasserist movement, deeply embedded in the ideology of pan-Arab socialism of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Murabitoun were also involved in the unrest in 1958. During the Civil War however, they re-emerged as a socialist movement closely allied to Palestinian and Sunni Muslim movements. Where the Lebanese Front largely opposed the presence of Palestinian fighters in Lebanon and pushed for an international solution, the Murabitoun supported the Palestinian cause and the ideological framework of pan-Arabism to oppose the American-sponsored Israeli state.

The taking over of the Holiday Inn hotel was thus a very symbolic act, not least because of its associations with Western and pro-Israeli ideologies and influence in the country, as mentioned earlier. It was a symbolic act of destroying the foreign rule in Lebanon that the building came to represent. Strategically, it undermined the Lebanese Front, and the Christian political legitimacy in the country as they lost their grip on the most strategic and symbolic part of the city: the city centre, its thriving tourist business and government institutions. The battle moved from floor to floor, until the last remaining Lebanese Front militiamen jumped off the rooftop to escape the Murabitoun. The images of the battle quickly circulated in the international media (Figures 8-11). Leftists seize Holiday Inn in heavy Assault was the headline of the New York Times on 22 March 1976 [38] . The front page of the Washington Post read Lebanon Left Captures Key City Fortress [39] .

The symbolism of the fall of the Holiday Inn reflected the importance of this event. Although the hotel became the symbol of the deep ideological divisions at play in Lebanon, the conflict took on a different direction with the takeover by the Murabitoun. Whereas many had hoped that the violence that erupted in 1975 was only temporary, the battle for the Holiday Inn pushed the entire conflict into a new direction, ideologically and geographically. It established a new front, cutting right through the city centre, which would later be declared the Green Line or Demarcation Line separating the mainly Christian East Beirut from the mainly Muslim West Beirut. Ideologically, the conflict moved away from the initial two opposing ideological policies, to a much wider body of conflicts throughout the country and the region. In this realignment, alliances changed so many times, and in such a way, that there is hardly a logic to be found in those conflicts. The Holiday Inn remained in the hands of the Murabitoun and its allies until the end of the conflict in 1990.

The Hotel Wars were thus a strategic battle as much as a symbolic one. It established the Holiday In once again as a visual landmark of Beirut, an icon of the city. This time however, its iconic legacy was not laid out in postcards and travel pictures. Newspaper articles, propaganda videos (Figure 12) and posters now staged the Holiday Inn as an iconic reference to the battle. The destruction of the pre-war icon was at the same time the establishment of the same building as a new icon.

In 1977, the Murabitoun published a series of posters commemorating the victory of the 21st March 1976 (Figures 13 & 14). The posters depicted the Holiday Inn, along with the martyrs who died during the battle. The symbolic destruction of the building was supported with the unsubtle inscription:

"On 21 March 1976, the Murabitun destroyed the symbol of fascist treason and took an oath of continuing the journey at whatever cost – Ibrahim Koleilat.” [41] .

The term fascist treason here refers to the strong ties between the Christians and the West. And as such, the caricature of the destruction of the Holiday Inn does not only symbolize the downfall of an apparent Western stronghold in Lebanon, but also that of its allies, the Christian militia's who occupied the building: 'The local opponent is alienated from the community, portrayed as treacherous and identified through symbols of communal hostility normally attributed to foreign entities' [42] .

Post-war iconoclasm

The sentimental meanings attached to the Holiday Inn building before and during the war have each time turned it into an icon of a certain Beirut. If it were the postcards of Beirut that depicted the hotel's standing in the city during Beirut's Golden Age, its standing as an icon of the war-torn Beirut was depicted in the media and through the communication channels of the militia's occupying the building. But also the building itself became a medium depicting its own history and role in the city. Throughout its occupation, the many changing alliances and militia's passing through Beirut, and the Holiday Inn, left their marks on the walls of the building, not only in terms of destruction and bullet holes, but also with inscriptions and tags on the walls (Figures 15 & 16). The different groups laying claim to the Holiday Inn branded the building to leave a mark of their presence, their dominance over the building. Tiles were taken out of walls, to spell PLO and Fatah [43] . On the entrance to the former hotel, a wall painting displayed the logo of the Amal movement, the largest Lebanese Shiite militia during the Civil War.

The branding of the building left a clear trace of history in the building, and its appropriation by a certain political ideologies. This appropriation of the building through visual signs, and the political symbol it could therefore become after the war, was in stark contradiction with the neutral policy of the status quo that was adopted through the Taïf ceasefire agreement. Although it used to be nothing more than a hotel, the building's visual appropriation by some of the movements involved in the war seemed to pose a problem to the fragile peace and its policy of erasing the traces of war. Unlike other buildings, the Holiday Inn was completely closed off. It seems although the war had ended and the militias had left the building, its legacy as an icon of the war in Beirut, and its notorious role throughout the conflict, was not that easy to get rid of. Furthermore, the situation in Lebanon remained relatively unstable, and there were fears that radical groups might re-occupy such a strategic landmark in an attempt to disturb the peace. For the same reason other large buildings were also closed off, such as the 40 floor tall Murr Tower, only a few hundred meters down the street, which was built gradually before and during the war.

By the end of the 1990's, in the middle of Beirut's reconstruction fever as seen in chapter 2, the hotel district too was cleaned up. Renderings of the reconstruction plans of Beirut featured the Holiday Inn with a new shiny facade, next to the Phoenicia and Saint Georges hotels and new high rise residential and hotel towers (Figure 16). The Phoenicia Hotel reopened in 2000, while the Saint Georges hotel was entrenched in a legal struggle with Beirut's reconstruction company Solidère over access rights to the marina and waterfront [44] . For a short period, the Holiday Inn too saw workmen climbing up and down its 25 floors. However the hotel was not renovated. Instead, it underwent yet another iconoclasm as it was completely cleared from the tags and inscriptions on its walls. In addition, all inside walls were torn out. Not only the political tags and inscriptions were removed, but also the Holiday Inn signs on the outside walls of the building. It is unclear what the official reasons for this cleanup of the building are. Since the building was clearly to be renovated at some point, as the plans and renderings of Solidère show(Figure 16), it is not unlikely that this was a first attempt to do so. But then it is also unclear why the works suddenly stopped. Although Solidère is one of the owners of the former Holiday Inn, it is not keen on sharing any information about the building and its future. Nor is the lawyer's office managing the building.

On the other hand, the sealing of buildings with similar symbolic attachments to the war suggest that it was clearly understood that the building's symbolism was not quite in line with the policy of forgetting that was part of the country's politics of peace. It seems almost as if cleaning up the building was an attempt to remove the building's memory, by removing everything that reminds of the buildings past functions and uses. No longer could the building make claims to this notorious memory from the Civil War, nor to the controversial icon it was before the war, since it was reduced to a simple concrete structure with no references to anything else. Interestingly though, the big Amal sign on the entrance of the building were not removed. The wall closing off the building passes right in front of it, making it invisible from street level, but from the higher floors of the buildings on the opposite side of the streets the logo is still very eye-catching (Figure 17).

After the cleansing the building was again completely closed off from the street. Except for the security guard living in a makeshift house on the ground floor, nobody can enter the building. But the cleansing of the building did not undo it from its iconic presence in the city. Nor did it lead to forget what the building used to be, or used to stand for. It might not be a strategic building anymore, nor a luxurious hotel. But with its size and location, squeezed in between the reconstructed BCD and the new luxury hotels and boutiques, the gigantic concrete structure still bares the memories from its previous functions in the city. Its walls are perforated with bullet and grenade holes. The contrast with the surrounding city makes it an often photographed sight in Beirut, and a physical reminder of the war. A simple Google search for "Holiday Inn Beirut” will show more images of the old Holiday Inn war ruin than of the new Holiday Inn resort in the Dunes district on the other side of the city. And so, the former Holiday Inn has become yet another icon in Beirut, as a confronting memory of the city's contemporary past. It is no longer present in postcards of posters, but in the many photographs taken by tourists and passers-by.