Joumanah El Matrah is CEO of the Australian Muslim Women's Centre for Human Rights, and a PhD student at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research.
There are no official figures for the carnage, horror and human deprivation that was the Lebanese civil war. A commonly cited figure of 250,000 dead includes sniper killings, massacres, exterminations and ethnic cleansing, with approximately 100,000 wounded and around one million displaced, a quarter of the population at that time.
Among the many figures generated, I've chosen those figures because they most reflect the lived experience of the many who escaped the civil war, the many forced to stay behind, and the many of us who were unfortunate enough to witness the war before escaping, leaving family members stranded behind.
Unfortunate, I say, because even when one is able to master one's reaction to war, by the suppression of memories and extinguishment of one's own past, there is always the unforgiving and unrelenting torment of knowing one's family lives day and night under the peril, volatility and the constant threat of death and injury.
What I don't think these figures reflect are the other fundamental truths of war: the undocumented crimes and cruelties that war makes possible - the starvations, looting and sexual violence.
In war, certain crimes are necessary to sustain and win the war, but war also gives rise to opportunistic crime. In the early part of the war, in the chaos of 1975 and 1976, children faced abduction and sexual torture.
The repugnance of war is not only what you witness personally, but it's also what you learn you can live with: dead bodies on the street, the raping of women and the killing of men who've been taken in for "questioning" at militia check points. All these incidents form society as an economy of violence and abuse that propagates new forms of human depravity. Whatever the cause and context of civil wars, at a fundamental level, they are all the same.
The Lebanese civil war is often referred to as many wars in one. There are no broadly accepted explanations and accounts of the Lebanese civil war, most especially among the Lebanese. Many Australian punters have fashioned facile theories of civil war, mostly about the poor character or the lack of patriotism of the Lebanese. No one has taken responsibility and no one has been held responsible. It has all been, as most Lebanese suspected, for nothing. A better society was not born.
Some survivors of war develop a mastery of their past experience and a silence prevails over all the screaming noise of war. Most of the time, that mastery is unconscious, until one is forced to remember, as many of us have been by statements like those of Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, and all the images, noise and even the smell of war returns.
So much has already been said, rightly, about the contribution that refugees make to Australia, about the ridiculously unworkable connection the Minister draws between being Lebanese and participating in terrorism, about the small number of young men that have participated in terrorism from the numerous descendants of those who came out in 1975-76, and finally about the dehumanizing racism that the Lebanese have faced.
Minister Dutton's comments rest on the premise that it is their parents' or grandparents' experience of Lebanon - or, indeed, simply being Lebanese - that caused these young men to radicalize and turn violent. It is not inconsequential that the Minister focuses on their "Lebanese-ness" and not the experience of growing up and, in fact, being Australian.
A great deal can and should be made of this, because this is about returning to biological racism; that it is biology that determines your character, and in this instance, being Lebanese, situates you as an inferior human being, prone to violence.
But what is it to be Lebanese? What does it mean to say you are Lebanese if you are a survivor of its civil war, when civil war destroys all other identities - such as being Lebanese or being Muslim. One thing is clear, you are not like other Lebanese, most especially like other Lebanese born and reared in the Australian context. You're not like any person who has not lived in a time of war. Minister Dutton's comments in this regard, if not racist, are empty of meaning.
If by "Lebanese-ness" the Minister means the experience of the Lebanese civil war that these young men have inherited from their parents or grandparents, the discussion then is about our failure to recognise and treat trauma, most especially intergenerational trauma.
There are no generalisations that can be made about survivors of war. There are none that can be made about the Lebanese who migrated or those who became their descendants.
Whatever happened to the young men who are alleged to have been radicalized, there are no lines to draw back to the horrors of the civil war; there is nothing to tell us why some people fall into violence or others are immune from it. I would want to find that connection if it existed. Whatever happened to these young men, it was not about the race of their parents.
Joumanah El Matrah is CEO of the Australian Muslim Women's Centre for Human Rights, and a PhD student at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research.
