Giving Compass' Take:

• News Deeply reports on the efforts in Beirut to preserve a museum to honor the past and reflect on Lebanon's civil war, but public sector disputes have hampered efforts.

• What can we do to make sure that history does not get lost because of municipal failures, whether here or in other regions where museums are vital to civil discourse? Funding and willpower go hand in hand.

• Here's how one cafe in Lebanon brings together warring rivals to build a better future.

Mona Hallak, 26, landed on the tarmac of the Beirut International Airport in 1994, four years after the end of Lebanon’s 15-year long civil war, and headed straight to the center of the capital.

Downtown Beirut was once a glitzy hot spot for the city’s cosmopolitan elite, but the central area had fallen victim to the conflict that had erupted between Lebanon’s Muslim, Christian and Druze communities. But upon her return, the young Lebanese architect found that the country’s national post-war reconstruction process had already begun and was threatening to raze the downtown’s history to the ground. Many of the buildings she knew before the war had already been buried beneath rubble or had been flattened by bulldozers.

Shocked, Hallak continued to search for something familiar. Nearly two miles (3km) southeast along the former front line known as the “green line,” she came upon a striking but abandoned Ottoman-era building riddled with war wounds.

Several families had lived in the aging, yellow Barakat building before the war. However, warring militias overtook it when fighting began due to its strategic location and height (it stands at 80ft, or 24 meters). When the conflict ended in 1990, the building was abandoned.

For Hallak, the building was the beginning of an ongoing effort to create the first museum dedicated to to commemorating Beirut’s history, especially the years it endured a civil war. More than 20 years later, the project has now become emblematic of the post-war reconciliation process in a country that remains divided over how to remember its past.

 

Read the full article about the fading memories of Lebanon's civil war by Victoria Yan at News Deeply.