Beirut Stories

Robert Fisk on a one-man attempt to bring rugby league to Lebanon and, years after the civil war, the blossoming of the capital's Corniche

Is rugby another form of war? Danny Kazandjian, special agent for the Rugby League International Federation, suspects that is what some Lebanese think.

"This is a place where parents are overprotective – they mollycoddle their kids," he says. "But the children have the preconceived idea that rugby is a very brutal pretext for a fight. It's not true. Once you prove that size genuinely doesn't matter, the players understand.

"Rugby is a technical thing, especially in defence – the basic techniques of passing the ball, tackling and running – and some of our best players are small men. Size doesn't matter."

Nor, it seems, does religion. By hunting for rugby league players in the universities and in the army – among the few Lebanese institutions which do not choose their students and soldiers on a sectarian basis – Danny, whose mother is English and whose father is half Lebanese and half Armenian, has avoided the fate of the football clubs here, which draw their players and their supporters from Shia Muslims or Sunni Muslims or Christians.

Back home in Barnet, Danny writes an online sports column, but he has settled in the suburb of Jel el-Din, a Christian area, and has given himself two years to turn Beirut into a rugby league city. We met downtown, at a coffee shop overlooking the ruins of the Via Maxima in Roman "Berytus".

In just six months, Danny believes, Lebanon has seized on rugby league for the first time in its history. His first victory was to secure a France-Lebanon match to top off the Francophonie conference here later this month. Beirut's bureaucracy demanded a "permit" to allow the game to be played, but he managed to switch it to a 23,000-seat, £13m stadium in the northern city of Tripoli, which has been used only four times in the two years since it was built.

Then it was a matter of getting the Lebanese national team to Lebanon: they all live in Australia, and travel on Australian passports. As "The Cedars", the Lebanese-descended players represented Lebanon at the World Cup in 1999, and hope to qualify again in 2005, but this will be the first time they have actually played in the country. Many were born in Sydney, and have never been to Lebanon before.

A bigger problem, though, was the six members of the team who were actually born here. Before agreeing to come, they all insisted on protection from the one great fear of all Lebanese: being drafted into the Lebanese army.

After all that, it is only a minor difficulty that few of the players are able to speak French, and that Danny himself admits to only a cursory understanding of the language. However, it has not prevented him from persuading the French embassy to foot the bill for the posters advertising the match.

It's an ill wind, etc. Last year 11 September put paid to the Francophonie conference in Beirut, so we've waited 12 months for Jacques Chirac to arrive with his familiar declarations of French "amour" for the "patrimoine" of "Liban".

We've waited a lot longer – 12 years, in fact, since the end of the civil war – to see the Mediterranean Corniche tidied up and replanted with flowers, as it used to be more than a quarter of a century ago. There was some digging in the shell-blasted central reservation last year – until 11 September. But now the road outside my apartment is a mass of trees and fresh earth and pink flowers, and workers who start drilling the old kerbstones out at six in the morning.

No more will the wealthy mums be able to park on the central reservation while picking up their rich kids from the American Community School. No more will their exhaust fumes drift over my balcony, at least until the summit is over, when – 55 French-speaking presidents having departed Beirut – I rather fear the mums will be back, destroying the palms and the roses with their wretched four-wheel-drives.