By Robert Fisk in Beirut @indyvoices

Maybe it’s because I live in Lebanon, and return to Beirut from Aleppo and Damascus, that the place seems so “normal”. While all around this little jewel, the Middle East burns – Syria, the occupied West Bank, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, increasingly Egypt and, alas, Turkish Kurdistan – Lebanon glistens brightly in the darkness, largely untarnished by the horrors on the other side of its borders. Or so it seems.

We might be forgiven for believing that this little paradise still exists in the Arab world. True, Lebanon has no president, no functioning government and constant power cuts (I currently have three electricity outages a day, sometimes totalling six hours, without a generator). Reading by candlelight might seem as romantic as Milton – preferably without its physical effect on him – but it gets a little boring after a while.

True, the Syrian war has stained Lebanon. Mosque bombings, the attempted destruction of the Iranian embassy by suicide killers, the brief capture of the Lebanese town of Ersal by Isis and the beheading of Lebanese soldiers who were seized there, seemed to foreshadow a replay of the country’s old civil war. Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon receive military funerals when they are driven home by the dozen from the Syrian battlefields. Sunni and Alawite (Shia) gunmen have fought in the northern city of Tripoli.

But the new Lebanese war didn’t happen.

I have a few pet theories about Lebanon’s survival. It has the most educated population in the Arab world and the most talented (in the literal sense of the word) people. Its own civil war, with its 150,000 dead – a little common grave compared to Syria today – taught the Lebanese that no one wins, although the Christian minority continued to hold the presidency and the Shia Hezbollah continued to keep their guns. 

For their own safety, tens of thousands of Lebanese children – offspring of the middle classes and the elite, of course – were sent abroad by their parents during the 1976-90 war. They lived in Geneva, Paris, London, New York. They studied at Oxford, Harvard and the Sorbonne. They grew into adulthood in Western nations where dignity and freedom were natural rights rather than privileges.

They returned to their country appalled at its sectarianism, its corruption, the hatreds of the family “zoama”, the seigneurs who believe they have a blood-right to power. The returning children loathed the stigma of mixed marriages and their self-righteous priests. Good on them, I used to say. They’ve even forced the government to accept civil marriages – to the meddlesome fury of both Muslim and Christian prelates.

Yet the old traditions persist. I recall a Muslim friend whose son attended a British university and whom I would meet in the UK from time to time. He enjoyed his freedoms – beer, girlfriends, the freedom to speak his mind – but in his final term he asked his mother back in Beirut to find him a Muslim bride. I was saddened. He enjoyed the good life, and then wanted mummy to find him a teenage bride of the right religion.

Almost every six months I encounter a Muslim or Christian friend whose parents threaten to disown them if they marry a man or woman from a different religion. Up in the Chouf mountains at Beit Eddine, I attended a conference on sectarianism at which a worthy Western academic suggested that the youth of Lebanon must be encouraged to marry whomever they love, whatever their religion. No, I said. It’s their parents to whom they should preach.

And what do you do about corruption? It’s a cancer in the Middle East (and a lot of Western countries, I might add). I regularly meet with men and women who have dodgy backgrounds. It’s part of my job as a journalist. They defrauded a bank, or have civil war blood on their hands, or are trying to smear a rival politician. I used to frequent a vegetable shop whose owner had murdered another man in a family feud. He kept a rifle beside the cauliflower stall. Last week, an internal security force officer used his service pistol to shoot his neighbours in the Kesrouan region over a dispute about their pit bull dogs.

Banks which levy outrageous charges on current accounts threaten their customers. My own bank in Beirut (its charges are not outrageous and it’s owned by former prime minister Saad Hariri, of whom more later) used to send me a letter in which I was supposed to promise not to break US federal banking laws. The bank was so frightened of US money-laundering threats – if a bank can’t deal in dollars, it’s out of business – that it went on sending me this wretched note year after year until I sent them a lawyer’s letter which told them that they had no legal right to make this demand of a British citizen. At which point, the whole fandango immediately came to an end.

Every few years, the government commences an “anti-corruption drive” in which civil servants immediately refuse to take bribes (for a few weeks) to avoid being fired. But then what happens? Quite a while back, my landlord captured this nonsense rather well. When his phone line was cut in the past, the PTT man came right away. He received a few Lebanese pounds for his work and the line was fixed. “Now when my phone line is cut,” my landlord moaned, “the PTT man won’t fix the line because he’s not allowed to take a gift. How do I get my phone back?”

Corruption, even small scale, oils the wheels. But what is Lebanon to do with Sister Syria next door? It’s calculated that $10bn of Syrian money lies in Lebanese banks, apartment blocks, investments and cash. You can imagine how the Americans – who’ve put around 80 Syrians on their economic blacklist – might roar with outrage at this statement. But it’s true.