It was the northern summer of 1998 - just as France celebrated its 3-0 trouncing of the much favored Brazil in the FIFA World Cup Final - that I undertook the first of many sojourns to the former French-mandated Lebanon. Few countries are so riddled with contradictions, so bathed in paradox - that a morning's dip in the emerald tinged Mediterranean can easily be followed by lunch riding a ski-lift at the Cedars Snow Resort. However, this idyllic picture masks a generational tragedy, the great pathos of Lebanon's contingent of the Palestinian Diaspora of 1948 - and an inhospitable host nation with endemic societal problems.

As one of the most challenging moral imperatives faced by the international community, Lebanon's "Palestinian issue" has exercised histories best minds, bedeviling presidents, Popes' and peacemakers alike. So intractable an issue that its very guardians would relinquish the core tenet of UN General Assembly Resolution 194: "[H]e has changed the charter of the PLO, and has given up the right of return of about three million Palestinian refugees and it was all done in secret, cried Chafiq al-Hout, PLO ambassador to Lebanon", (Fisk 490) writes Robert Fisk in "The Great War for Civilization", Resigning in protest, al-Hout accused PLO chairman Yasser Arafat of infamy most grand.

As old-Beirut morphed into new-Beirut - rising like a phoenix from the rubble of a 15-year civil war - showing all the signs and vitality of 1950s-1970s coined "Golden Period", surreptitiously hiding the squalor and dispiriting predicament of Palestinian refugees secreted in the Burj el-Barajneh camp situated near Beirut International Airport. And as tri-storey mansions peppered the hills of Jounieh - many still in skeletal form - promising the possibility of an economic resurgence on the back of bricks and mortar, compared with the stench and dilapidation of the Dbayeh camp 12 km East of Jounieh, of abject poverty and Third World.

Lebanon remains a house divided; a national psyche caught between East & West, multi-confessional with seventeen officially recognized sects - comprising Muslim, Christian and Druze. Each holding deep-seated mistrust for the other with grudges ancient in the making. Even today as the country languishes without a head of state, a polarized "Le Parlement" enters its sixth month of squabbling about the legitimacy of the presidency.

In the absence of a Palestinian Mandela, Lebanese De Klerk or statesman in the mold of Fuad

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