As dusk falls in the new downtown Beirut a woman in what appears to be a cross between a horse and a hippopotamus costume is playing pied piper to a throng of children who run after her, pulling on her tail. The warm air is just beginning to cool after the intense heat of the day. Friends and parents watch and clap their hands to the beat of the music pumping from scratchy speakers above their heads. Up and down the block, Lebanon's finest and most urban are buying costume jewelry hawked by street vendors, stopping for a glass of fresh lemonade and a hot dog, or checking out one of the artisans' stores that have suddenly cropped up in the arched doorways of the city that was once known more for flying bullets than trapeze artists.

Nearly a decade after the end of a 15-year civil war that shattered Lebanon, rows of spanking new structures among still bombed-out buildings illustrates the attempt of the Lebanese to start anew. The most glamorous reconstruction is in the town's center, spoking out in several blocks from an already reconstructed clock tower. Roads wide enough for a couple of tanks to travel abreast separate dun-colored buildings that combine the French-colonial old Beirut with the soaring arches of the Middle East. A close inspection reveals pock marks in most of the buildings, not, as one might suspect, designed to look "authentic" or old, but left-over bullet scrapes from a war that the Beirutis are trying to forget.

Beirut Blues...

This new downtown Beirut is an incongruous place for a festival, for girls bending over racks of cheap wire jewelry and "art descending into the streets," as the Ministry of Cultural Affairs' posters hung from street lamps above the bobbing heads proclaim. Blaring music and antique sales notwithstanding, this part of Beirut is just beginning to attract small clusters of tourists and shoppers who wade through the few high-end stores that are scattered along the block. It will take more than street fairs to prove to the world that the gargantuan project of rebuilding Beirut is heading in the right direction.

Solidere is the privately owned company that has undertaken the reconstruction of downtown Beirut. The goal is an aesthetically pleasing modern district spreading over about 430 acres of land, a third of which is being reclaimed from the sea. Company backers hope that by restoring to the old city some of its past grandeur they will attract investment that can re-establish Beirut's previous role as the financial and cultural apex of the Middle East. "Wait till we finish remodeling the souk (old market) area, which used to be the soul of the city and a meeting place for people," said Solidere PR point man, Nabil Rached.

He gives his pitch in a downtown Solidere showroom, a portrait of very modern and very expensive glass table tops, models and mirrors, pointing to a bit-sized model of the new Beirut According to Solidere. "It will be crowded every day." Rached is enthusiastically giving a grand tour of his company's new territories." Fifty percent of the surface of the town's center will be reserved as public and green spaces," he says, pointing down at a patch of green on one of the several model downtowns sprinkled around the room. "Downtown Beirut is going to be as beautiful and lively as it used to be," he said, speaking of the new underground parking lot Solidere is building to accommodate the numerous visitors that are expected to crowd the area once a giant commercial center opens. Grandeur and public relations aside, many Beirutis remain skeptical. "What you have now is extremely nice to look at but very impractical to live in," said 50-year-old businessman Ramzi Zakka. According to Zakka, the Solidere project is not practical for most Lebanese, who are experiencing troubled economic times.

Highly controversial, due to obligatory and-for-shares deals Solidere made with former downtown landowners and complaints that they were steamrollering over ancient roman ruins, the reconstruction has given hope to the Beirutis but has failed thus far to bring a much hoped-for economic prosperity.

"I think it was much easier for people during the war to make money," said Zakka, who is currently reconstructing private buildings for a living. Today, "You tell me how people are living-upon their own initiative," said the businessman, who has combined different sorts of odd jobs to get by. In these turbulent economic times, with rents for one-bedroom apartments as high as two thousand U.S. dollars, many people can hardly afford to live in Beirut, no less in the modern luxury promised by Solidere's project.

The crippling cost of living in Beirut has made it the 22nd most expensive city in the world (New York is 14th) according to a recent UN survey. "Solidere reflects the housing glut," said Paul Salem, executive director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies. "There was a big bubble when Solidere took off around '94-'95 and it didn't burst but it stopped and it stagnated because there was no peace and no real flood move back to Beirut." Real estate prices in the building market increased because people expected a heavy demand, but when that demand didn't come, prices never went down again.

Despite Solidere's desire to demonstrate through a fantastic face-lift that the country is back on track, Lebanon is in the midst of a painful financial slowdown that belies the new construction. Since 1997, the country has been hit by an economic crisis that has done nothing to boost the confidence of potential foreign investors, and has driven Solidere's shares from a high of 170 dollars to a rock-bottom of six dollars on the Beirut Stock Exchange. There are 6,000-7,000 unemployed engineers today (according to Daily Star article, 12.7.99), and employment in most other sectors is down. Five hundred million dollars in Solidere construction has been held up by delayed construction permits, keeping many construction workers out of work. --While the secretary of labor mentioned a nine percent unemployment rate, some economists argue that it could be as high as 25 to 30 per cent Foreign investment, vital to Lebanon's economy, has been put off by internal bank corruption, shaky markets, and bureaucracy that makes it easier to deal elsewhere.

Additionally, Lebanon is fighting tremendous debt. According to Bank Audi, one of the largest Lebanese banks, in 1998, the country had to face a budget deficit of 15% of GDP and a public debt standing at 115% of GDP. Tax evasion has always been a national sport, and loans for agriculture and private industry are very low --agriculture accounts for two percent of bank loans although it makes up 12 percent of the GDP, according to the Economist country survey.

Overall, it's a fairly bleak picture. Although the streets of Beirut showcase a gross display of wealth in the form of ubiquitous Mercedes and cell phones, more than a quarter of Lebanon's population, around one million people, currently live below the poverty line, according to 1998 UN statistics.

Proponents of Solidere say it shouldn't be criticized too harshly, given that it has already done hundreds of millions of dollars of reconstruction that neither the government nor the private landowners could have carried out on their own. Some speculate that Solidere's homogenous rebuilding prevented what could have been a mishmash of single buildings going up one at a time. "I really like Solidere-what they did was like magic-before, it looked like a field of war, like Vietnam," said artist Gharda Saghieh, 40, who lived in a suburb of Beirut with her two children during the war. Saghieh was hired by Solidere to paint some murals to cover the work-in-progress. "I wanted to be present in this reconstruction site because to me it was a miracle, a superhuman effort in this country that still has an unfinished highway from the 80's." Even Paul Salem thinks that the Solidere project will ultimately be a viable one. "It may take 20-30 years to fill (the buildings created by) Solidere but it is a stunningly beautiful project," he said. Solidere has recently (Daily Star article 12.7.99) been forced to drop retail rental prices from $600-800 to around $200 a square meter. Which is still overpriced for the current market, but, "When business is moving, people will pay," said Salem. He added that the final success of Solidere would be predicated on a lasting peace in the region with the Israelis.

Still exchanging fire with Israel, Lebanon suffered a bombed power station in June and a minor bombardment near the Syrian border in July, in addition to several skirmishes this fall. "If there is real peace, Beirut and the downtown district will be a large beneficiary," said Salem. But the company itself has no cash to spare. Solidere's 1998 revenues were only one third of the company's target of 180 million, and Merrill Lynch estimated that year-end profits for 1999 will be down as low as $32 million (Daily Star 12.7.99). "I thought that Solidere was going to prosper," said Renee Ghattas, a fifty-something professor of accounting and finance at the Lebanese American University of Beirut. When the war ended in 1992, Ghattas was one of many downtown owners who faced a painful dilemma: either give up the devastated building she and her sisters owned or rebuild it themselves. Ghattas believed that Solidere was going to provide her with a financially secure future in exchange for her family home. "Since we did not have money to rebuild it ourselves, I thought that Solidere was the best deal. I had faith," she said. "It was a beautiful small building on a corner, done in traditional Arabic style."