Gulf Arabs Are Back, But Not Just To Play

By Marilyn Raschka

They used to buy land and build villas. They used to hand over fistfuls of money to a broker and say, "Buy me something nice in the mountains." They used to spend in a couple of weeks in the summer what the average Lebanese made in a year.

These "theys' are Gulf Arabs, especially Kuwaitis, who once flowed with robes, wives, children and diners into Lebanon to trade the summer heat of their desert shores for the coolness of the Lebanese mountains. They stayed in plush hotels, or rented plusher villas. Many built or bought summer homes in the Lebanese resorts of Sofar, Bhamdoun and Aley.

Their money was sorely missed during the war years. A Ministry of Tourism official, when asked when he thought tourism would get back on its prewar feet, answered, "Not until the Arabs come back to spend their money."

Well, the Gulf Arabs are back. But things aren't the same. In the inner offices of an investment bank in Beirut, the Lebanese woman officer shakes hands with a smiling, youngish man. He's in Western dress. Only his Gulf-accented Arabic reveals that he is Kuwaiti. He beams as he reports his good luck. He's bought some land in Sofar.

"Did you buy land for a villa?" the banker asks her Kuwaiti client. His polite smile doesn't waver, but his answer reveals that the banker is way behind the times.

"No, I bought land for a medina zghiiri (small city)."

Today's Kuwaiti is not the Kuwaiti of the '60s and early '70s—the years before the Lebanese war. That Kuwaiti's children were educated in English-language schools in Kuwait and sent to the U.S. for higher education. Many returned with MBAs and degrees in engineering and banking. They set up export-import businesses and established construction firms.

Now, when they come to Beirut, no longer do they simply hand over a bundle of money and say, "Buy me something nice." A Beirut lawyer said, "The Gulf Arabs now realize that the Lebanese had been cheating them."

Those days are over. But the wheeling and dealing continues, on a much more sophisticated level. A Lebanese law dating to 1950 limits land sales to foreigners to 5,000 square meters per family. But many of the development projects planned by Gulf entrepreneurs need a lot more turf than that.

So, the law is easily circumvented. Lebanese agents—playing proxy—buy large tracts of land for the Gulf Arabs, who ensure control through power of attorney.

But even without cheating, a lot of land is up for grabs. Another law states that up to five percent of Lebanese land can be owned by non-Lebanese. In spite of what already looks like a land rush in the countryside, the amount presently owned by foreigners is only 1.6 percent.

All over the mountains, "small cities" such as the one envisioned by the young Kuwaiti investor are annexing themselves to traditional villages. Tops of mountains have been sold, sliced off and converted into the sites of American-style developments. Already there are regrets.

Early Regrets

"My father sold that land," a young Lebanese villager tells visitors who stop to stare at an incongruous addition to the landscape. "Now he's sorry. He didn't know they were going to build those kinds of things."

This particular mountainside—above the village of Shemlan—is scarred with roads scratched out by bulldozers, and the foundations for the repetitive cubicles that now occupy the land so uncomfortably.

For Shemlan and many other villages, it's too late for regrets—the land and the village already are being dismembered.

But in the village of Hammana— Lebanon's cherry capital—the battle against dismemberment is being fought. Dr. Najib Abu-Haydar, chairman of the municipal council, has set down some laws to fight what he labels as greed to buy and greed to sell.

The town has no desire to keep out Kuwaitis or anyone else. Some of the Gulf families who summer in Hammana have done so since the 1950s. But, in Hammana, there won't be any medina zghiiri, just pleasant villas that by the village's zoning laws can occupy only 20 percent of the lot area, must be constructed with dressed stone instead of cement blocks, and must have red-tiled roofs and follow other architectural guidelines to keep the Hammana village "skyline" intact.

Some agents assumed they could build complexes without respecting the coding. They even went so far as to sell the apartments or condos before the ground-breaking, using drawings and brochures of the finished product.

They've got a lot to explain to their clients—but Hammana is not backing down.

In the town center stands an old building which, long years ago, served as a kerkhanni, the Turkish word for silk depot. In those old days this is where the villagers, who raised the silk worms, brought the cocoons for processing into silk threads and fabric.

Across Lebanon these kerkhaunis are disappearing, but not in Hammana. Yesterday's silk factory—facade left intact—has been remodeled into today's village school.

In Hammana a mix of controlled progress and concern for the past means that once again Gulf Arabs or anyone else can buy land and build a villa. But there won't be any auction of Lebanon's biggest selling points—its natural beauty and architectural traditions.