One of the notable things one might come across when leafing through the newspapers of the past is that on April 16, 1975, the headline of An-Nahar newspaper, which graced its front page, read: "And it was relieved!" Above this headline, however, was a tally: "37 dead, a few explosives, and an unlimited number of rockets." We do not know if the editor made a mistake, confusing the order of the letters, just three days after the Ain al-Rummaneh bus incident, where the civil war had, in essence, exploded "INFIJAR" but in structure was relieved "INFIRAJ".

Relief follows sadness, while an explosion brings sorrow. There is, of course, no claim that the war had placed itself on the calendar of events just three days after its official starting date. In fact, we don’t even know precisely when people began marking April 13 as the day it broke out, setting a dividing line between two eras. Before the war acquired many names, and before the days of the week, neighborhoods, and things became colored by the shades of conflict—like Black Saturday, hotels, camps, brothers, a flag, a mountain, the Hundred Days, liberation, cancellation, Nabaa, Damour, Tel al-Zaatar, Sabra, Shatila, and so on—everything, from words to events, was documented by UMAM in the daily diary of its memory, the "Guide for Lebanese on War and Peace."

The paradox between "relief" and "explosion" suggests that the war may have been ongoing without officially announcing itself. People could have lived it with daily smiles but without a headline, in the form of theft, fraud, kidnappings, executions, and the discovery of bodies here and there. It might have also taken the shape of bombs and explosions, with daily fears of the return of April 13.

Even though the Lebanese later marked a date as the end of the war, announcing afterward "reconstruction" and the formal disbanding of militias—well, some of them—the war keeps coming back to us in various colors and forms, and we continue to live it as if it's a "relief!"

On the surface, it seems that Lebanon, having marked the 49th anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war, has been living in a state of "peace" since the early 1990s. However, a closer look at what war truly means, and at the events that followed—such as May 7, Khalde, Ain al-Rummaneh, the axes of Tripoli and Abra, camp wars from Ain al-Hilweh to Nahr al-Bared, and skirmishes here and there, alongside wars both within and beyond the borders, kidnappings, murders, assassinations, and more—culminating in the assassination of the very person who documented the war and curated its diary—reveals the truth: Lebanon is still living through a "golden era" of small wars, if not even more...