Lebanon's
Bloody Summer
By Mohamad Bazzi
26 July, 2007
Electronic
Lebanon
The car bomb that shook Beirut's
waterfront on the evening of June 13 was the sixth explosion in Lebanon
in less than a month. But unlike the other bombings, which were intended
more to instill fear than to cause serious damage, this one had a political
target: Walid Eido, a member of the US-backed parliamentary majority.
With the killing of one more legislator -- the fifth in two years --
Lebanon is hurtling toward yet another crisis.
The bomb, which was planted
in a parked car, ripped through Eido's black Mercedes as his motorcade
left a swimming club where he played cards with friends almost every
afternoon. The explosion resonated throughout Beirut, shattering windows
100 yards away and throwing body parts onto a nearby soccer field. It
killed Eido, his son and eight other people. Within minutes, ambulances
filled the Corniche, a palm-tree-lined boulevard that overlooks the
Mediterranean and is often packed with people out for an evening stroll.
As soon as the bomb went
off, dozens of young men rushed to the scene, and soldiers had to push
them back from the burning cars. They gathered around two fire trucks,
picking through twisted wreckage. Naim Chebbo, a 33-year-old waiter,
ran for a half-mile from his restaurant, following the cloud of black
smoke. Drenched in sweat and hyperventilating, he screamed, "Look
at what the Syrians are doing to us! Don't ask me why this bombing happened.
Ask the Syrians!" He pointed up a hill, toward the headquarters
of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. "I'm going to get the SSNP.
I'm going to fuck them up!" he shrieked. "They're just sitting
up there laughing." His friends restrained him from marching up
the hill.
When Chebbo began insulting
Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah -- leader of Hizballah, the Shiite political
party and militia allied with Syria -- calling him a "terrorist"
and a "criminal," a bystander told Chebbo to keep quiet. The
two began shoving each other, and a dozen soldiers toting M-16s moved
between them, at one point cocking their guns to shoot into the air.
Soldiers finally managed to wrestle Chebbo away, and he walked off,
still cursing.
This is the state of Lebanon
today: deep sectarian anger that could boil over at any moment. In mixed
Beirut neighborhoods, tensions rise between Sunnis and Shiites after
each bombing. Tempers flare, small fights get out of hand, people start
calling their friends and relatives to come in from other areas to help
them and eventually the police have to step in. (A Shiite friend who
lives in a mainly Sunni neighborhood told me that for several days after
Eido's killing, he found a broken egg each morning on his car.) And
there's no shortage of bombings to stoke tensions: On June 24 a car
bomb exploded near a convoy of United Nations peacekeepers in southern
Lebanon, killing six troops under Spanish command. It was the first
attack on the UN force since it was expanded to 13,000 soldiers after
last summer's war between Israel and Hizballah. Some Lebanese politicians
quickly blamed Syria for the bombing, but there is also evidence that
Sunni militants tied to al-Qaeda have been plotting for months to attack
UN peacekeepers in the south.
Throughout Lebanon's fifteen-year
civil war, foreign powers battled for control of the tiny country, either
directly or through proxies. But a great deal of the day-to-day fighting
involved well-armed rival neighborhood gangs. In a city on edge, angry
young men like Chebbo can easily get out of control. Perhaps at the
next bombing, they won't be held back.
"The elements for a
new civil war are here. They are ready. But there are some red lines
that prevent it from happening. We saw an example in January, when sectarian
violence broke out but the national leaders quickly asked everyone to
calm down," says Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese army general who
is now an independent military analyst. "You need an incident or
catalyst that can ignite the situation. It's not yet here. But people's
hearts are full of hatred."
"Everything
Is Blowing Up"
Lebanon's current round of
assassinations began in February 2005, when a powerful truck bomb killed
former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri as his motorcade drove along the
Corniche. Hariri's murder cast a harsh light on Syria's domination over
its smaller neighbor. Faced with international pressure and mass protests,
the Syrian-backed prime minister resigned, and Damascus pulled thousands
of troops out of Lebanon. But the killings continued, mainly targeting
politicians from the anti-Syrian bloc led by Rafiq's son Saad Hariri.
Today Lebanon is bracing
for a showdown over the presidency. It could be a bloody summer, as
the presidential election looms in late September. The president is
appointed by a majority vote in Parliament. After the last parliamentary
election, in June 2005, Hariri's Future Movement and its allies won
seventy-two seats in the 128-member legislature. But with several defections,
Eido's killing and that of another legislator last November whose seat
remains unfilled, the parliamentary majority is down to sixty-eight.
If the majority loses another four members -- either by death or defection
-- it will no longer be able to determine the next president. "Eido
was assassinated to reduce the parliamentary majority in order to bring
the government down," Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces,
a right-wing Christian group that is part of the ruling coalition, said
after the bombing. "It seems that we're the opposition because
we're the ones being targeted by assassinations."
There's another danger: Without
a majority, it's conceivable that Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government
could fall in a parliamentary no-confidence vote. Siniora's twenty-four-member
Cabinet has been in danger of collapsing since November, when six ministers
representing Hizballah and its allies resigned after talks to form a
national unity government failed. (Siniora's ruling coalition of Sunni,
Christian and Druze parties accuses Hizballah of walking out of the
government to block a UN investigation into Hariri's murder, which has
been widely blamed on Syria.)
Hariri was Lebanon's most
prominent Sunni leader, and his killing changed the dynamic within the
Sunni community. During Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war, Sunnis and Shiites
were largely allied under the banner of pan-Arabism and support for
the Palestinian cause. But the current conflict has fractured them,
with most Shiites supporting Hizballah and most Sunnis backing the younger
Hariri. Christians are divided between the two factions. Hizballah is
currently allied with Michel Aoun, a former army commander and prominent
Maronite Christian politician.
Syria is likely the biggest
beneficiary of these political killings. But the coming showdown over
the presidency could prove catastrophic for all sides. And there doesn't
appear to be any way out. All of Lebanon's crises have become intertwined
-- and they're all converging on the battle over the presidency. Ironically,
the latest series of crises began in September 2004, when the Syrian
regime forced the Lebanese Parliament to extend the presidential term
of Emile Lahoud, a former army commander and Syrian ally, for three
years.
Lebanon's problems are rooted
in a sixty-four-year-old power-sharing agreement among the country's
rival religious groups. The system was designed to keep a balance among
eighteen sects, dictating that power must be shared between a Maronite
president, a Sunni prime minister and a Shiite speaker of Parliament.
But this confessional system has barely changed since it was put in
place in the early 1940s, when Lebanon won its independence from French
colonial rule. After decades of intermittent crises precipitated by
the unworkable confessional balancing act, the structure again risks
creating a failed state.
The Lebanese predicament
is also an extension of the ongoing proxy war in Iraq -- pitting Iran
and Syria (which support Hizballah) against the United States, Saudi
Arabia and other Sunni Arab regimes (which support Hariri's alliance).
As soon as Siniora's government took office, the Bush Administration
began pressuring it to disarm Hizballah.
The crises are interconnected
in a Gordian knot: the Hizballah-led Shiite walkout from Siniora's Cabinet,
which throws the government's legitimacy into question because the Lebanese
Constitution dictates that every major sect must be represented in the
Cabinet; the creation of a new government; the pressure on Hizballah
to give up its weapons; and the disarming of various factions in twelve
Palestinian refugee camps scattered across Lebanon. The issue of Palestinian
weapons boiled over in late May, when a group of Sunni militants attacked
the Lebanese Army, which then besieged the Nahr al-Bared camp near the
northern city of Tripoli.
Siniora's government claims
that Syrian intelligence created the militant group Fatah al-Islam and
is using it to destabilize Lebanon. But as with the attempt to hold
Syria responsible for the bombing against UN peacekeepers, the ruling
coalition has provided little evidence to back up its claims about Fatah
al-Islam. Some reports in the Lebanese press tied the group's leaders
to al-Qaeda and to militant networks that are recruiting young Sunni
men from northern Lebanon to fight in Iraq. It's unclear if Fatah al-Islam
played a role in the attack on UN troops in the south, but the group
is part of a growing militant Sunni movement in Lebanon, which is drawing
inspiration -- if not logistical help -- from al-Qaeda. (In several
messages over the past year, al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
urged Muslims to open a new front on Israel's border with Lebanon and
to attack "Crusader forces" in the south -- meaning UN troops.)
"All the problems that
were suppressed for thirty years are popping up, and they're all popping
up at the same time," says a Lebanese NGO worker who could not
be quoted by name. "The Hizballah weapons, the Palestinian weapons,
the presidency; I mean everything, everything is now blowing up. It's
thirty years of bullshit. The Pandora's box has opened up."
"The Blood of
Sunnis Is Boiling"
When Hizballah and its allies
began an open-ended protest in downtown Beirut on December 1, setting
up hundreds of tents outside the main government palace, relations between
Sunnis and Shiites deteriorated quickly. On January 23 the opposition
organized a nationwide strike as part of its campaign to topple Siniora's
government. Two days later, rioting erupted around a university, killing
four people, injuring dozens and forcing the army to impose a curfew
in Beirut for the first time in ten years. Lebanon teetered on the edge
of another civil war.
In the following months,
sectarian tensions eased slightly -- until Eido's assassination, which
further inflamed the hatred between Sunnis and Shiites. The funeral
procession on June 14 for Eido and his son passed through the Sunni
neighborhood of Tarik al-Jadideh, the scene of January's bloody street
battles. Overnight, billboards throughout Beirut were plastered with
pictures of the two men, calling them "the martyrs of justice."
Hundreds of supporters carried the blue flags of the Future Movement
and white flags with a stencil of a roaring tiger -- the logo of the
Ras Beirut Tigers, the movement's pseudo-militia, which has become more
active in Sunni neighborhoods in recent months. At this point, the Tigers
lack an organized military structure and weapons; instead, they're focused
on showing their strength at rallies and on the streets of Muslim-dominated
West Beirut.
"The blood of Sunnis
is boiling!" a crowd of young men shouted as they marched behind
the coffins. "Terrorist, terrorist, Hizballah is a terrorist group!"
Koranic verses warbled from the minarets of every mosque along the route,
mixing with the loudspeakers mounted atop minibuses that blared out,
"Today is the funeral for a new martyr killed at the hands of Bashar
Assad" -- the Syrian president. Other mourners insulted Hizballah's
revered leader, chanting, "Nasrallah is the enemy of God!"
After Saad Hariri spoke at
the funeral, his supporters pumped their fists in the air and bellowed,
"Labayk ya Saad-Eddine!" (We obey you, oh Saad-Eddine). It's
the same rhythmic chant -- freighted with religious overtones -- that
Nasrallah's followers intone whenever he speaks in public.
At Eido's funeral, the next
Lebanese political crisis began to emerge. Within hours of his assassination,
members of the Future Movement started calling for a special election
to replace Eido, and another to fill the seat of Pierre Gemayel, a Maronite
member of Parliament and minister allied with the Hariri bloc who was
assassinated last November. Two days after Eido was buried, Siniora's
Cabinet approved a plan to hold elections on August 5. But special elections
also need the president's consent, and Lahoud has vowed not to sign
any directive issued by Siniora's government because he "and half
of the Lebanese people" consider it unconstitutional.
Even if the elections are
held, it's unclear if the two new legislators would be allowed to take
their seats in Parliament. Speaker Nabih Berri, leader of the Shiite
Amal Party and a Hizballah ally, has refused to convene Parliament ever
since the Shiite ministers resigned in November. For months, Berri blocked
the legislature from approving a UN Security Council plan to establish
an international tribunal that will try Hariri's killers. In late May
the council created the tribunal anyway -- without Lebanese approval.
(With the vote for president looming, the Future Movement and its allies
have threatened to convene a parliamentary session without Berri; opposition
legislators would likely boycott such a meeting.)
On June 17 Lahoud met with
the octogenarian Maronite Patriarch Butros Nasrallah Sfeir, the most
powerful Christian leader in Lebanon. Lahoud told the cleric that he's
not being obstinate for his own sake but rather is trying to protect
the powers of the presidency. Lahoud's argument is meant to appeal to
the Patriarch and to Lebanese Maronites in general, who are worried
about the waning power of the presidency -- the last vestige of Christian
influence. "Siniora and his government are trying to usurp the
authority of the president, and that is a dangerous precedent that I
cannot allow," Lahoud told Sfeir, according to the Lebanese daily
Al-Akhbar. "These powers do not belong to me personally. They belong
to the presidency."
Impasse
In the short term, Siniora's
government began losing Shiite support after Washington backed Israel
during its war last summer against Hizballah. Fresh off its perceived
military victory against a far superior Israeli army, Hizballah accused
Siniora's government of being a US puppet and demanded more power. After
months of on-and-off negotiations, Hizballah and the Siniora-Hariri
bloc now stand at an impasse.
But even if the two sides
reach a compromise, another political crisis is sure to emerge, unless
they address the root causes of Lebanon's instability -- like the fact
that the country's largest sect, Shiites, do not have power equal to
their proportion of the population. Eventually, the Lebanese will have
to tackle the question of what kind of country they want.
That question has dominated
Lebanon since it gained independence in 1943. When the French left,
they created the confessional system and handed the lion's share of
political power to the Francophone Maronite elite. The system was enshrined
under the National Pact, an unwritten agreement among Lebanese leaders.
Seats in Parliament were divided on a 6-to-5 ratio of Christians to
Muslims, with parliamentary seats and executive offices divided among
the major sects, and that partitioning was extended to most government
jobs.
The division was based on
a 1932 census, which showed Maronites as the majority in Lebanon. Since
then, the government has refused to hold a new census. By the 1960s,
when Muslims began to outnumber Christians, Muslims began to clamor
for a change in the balance of power. A recent State Department report
estimated that Lebanon's population of 4 million is more than two-thirds
Sunni and Shiite. Some Lebanese researchers estimate that Shiites make
up 40 percent of the population, although others put the number slightly
lower.
When civil war broke out
in 1975, the political imbalance was one of the driving forces that
prompted each sect to form its own militia. Because of the confessional
system, Lebanese political institutions never got a chance to develop;
the country remained dependent on the powerful clans and feudal landlords
that held sway in much of Lebanon. The zaeem, or confessional leader
who usually inherited rule from his father, became paramount during
the war. With most people loyal to their sectarian leaders, few Lebanese
were invested in developing the constitutional institutions of the state.
As the war waned in 1989,
Lebanon's political class convened in the Saudi city of Taif to salvage
the sectarian system. Brokered by Saudi Arabia and Syria, the resulting
Taif Accord restructured the National Pact by taking some power away
from the Maronites. Parliament was expanded to 128 members, divided
equally between Christians and Muslims. Taif also called for all militias
to disarm -- except for Hizballah, whose military branch was labeled
a "national resistance" against the Israeli occupation of
southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. All factions in Lebanon constantly
affirm that they will abide by Taif, elevating the document to the status
of a Magna Carta. Yet few acknowledge that the agreement also called
for eventually abolishing the sectarian system, although it gave no
time frame for doing so.
Confessionalism leads to
a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful
patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the
United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most
of the current players are too invested in this system to really change
it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce
their influence.
"Whenever you talk about
a new Taif, people freak out. ... Lebanese are always afraid of changing
any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese
Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because
the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in
times of violence."
What if the battle over the
presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed?
There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split
into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing
President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister
because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a
largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister
refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended
in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace,
driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese
are talking openly today about the possibility of another government
breakup; some are even resigned to it.
Splitting the country into
two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional
system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're
trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and
that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can
agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they
will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.
Mohamad Bazzi
is a Lebanense-born journalist and Newsday's Middle East Bureau chief.
This article originally appeared in The Nation and is reprinted with
the author's permission.
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