Helena – Page 134 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Recklessness over Kosovo

Didn’t the “western” nations learn anything from the years of bloody slaughter that followed Germany’s reckless decision to recognize the independence from Federal Yugoslavia that Slovenia and Croatia declared in June 1991? Now, 16 years later, the US and many — but notably not all— the EU countries look set to recognize the unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) that Kosovo made, from Serbia today.
The boundaries between the world’s 200 or so independent states that emerged after the end of World War II were, certainly, highly imperfect in terms of following clear lines of demarcation between one national group and another. (This was particularly the case in Africa, where these boundaries were drawn up much more for the convenience of the various colonial powers than because of any rationality in terms of the social and identity groupings of the various potential citizens involved.) These boundaries were also highly unfair, allotting independent states to several tiny “nations” and none at all to many nations that were much, much bigger.
There were several different kinds of evolution in the nation-state system in the decades that followed 1945– usually, in the context of the withering of the European-based colonial empires. But basically, the post-1945 world order has remained the foundation of the world’s international order until today.
The Western-supported breakup of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that occurred in 1991-92 was a serious, new kind of change in the system. And look what ensued from that. And now, we have the western-supported breakup of the Republic of Serbia itself. No wonder numerous states around the world that have substantial and relatively compact groups of ethnic minorities among their citizenries are concerned about this precedent. These states include western states like Spain as well as Russia and several of its allies.
Back in 1999, I was one of the few voices in the western human rights movement who argued clearly against the US-UK plan to bomb Serbia, supposedly as a way to “prevent” Serbia’s ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. Remember: Prior to the beginning of the March bombing, Belgrade was doing only low levels of ethnic cleansing. But once the western nations had decided to bomb, they pulled out the OSCE monitoring mechanism that had been reducing the level of the Serb (and Kosovar) violence over preceding months. At that point all bets were off. That was when Serbia’s ethnic cleansing campaign got underway on a massive scale.
OSCE’s (unarmed) monitoring mission had been working. The bombing was gratuitous and extremely damaging. The suffering that occurred during the mass uprooting of Kosovars was horrendous. All that violence then then set in train further waves of violence and counter-violence within Kosovo. The Kosovars, who had previously had a very broad nonviolent national movement turned overwhelmingly to violence, with NATO’s support. NATO marched into Kosovo to run it as a western protectorate, but without solving the deep problems of its internal politics, inter-group relations, or governance. NATO did win a veneer of support from the Security Council for its role there– sort of like the ex-post-facto political cover the SC gave the US presence in Iraq in late 2003.
I think the Security Council is discussing Kosovo as I write this. Not surprisingly. The Russians are understandably upset about the abruptness with which the western countries terminated the negotiations and threw their weight behind the Kosovars’ UDI instead.
This Reuters piece gives some essential background about the EU’s new role in Kosovo. But it starts off with this piece of completely unwarranted optimism:

ending a long chapter in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.

Well, maybe one bloody chapter has ended. But the chapters that follow it certainly don’t look set to be peaceful– either in Kosovo/Serbia or in the many other places around the world where over-eager national minorities may now judge that their turn for violent uprising is next. (Kurdistan, anyone?)
It’s important to remember that there are many ways in which the cultural, economic, and political claims of ethnic minorities can be assured within the boundaries of a multi-ethnic state, and that these assurances can be won, and given strong political backing, within the context of serious inter-group negotiations that are backed where necessary by the international community. So many different countries around the world can provide examples of this! Think of India, or South Africa, or many, many others… A mono-ethnic state is a very Germanic ideal.
If Kosovo had emerged as an identifiable political/cultural entity in the same peaceful and successful way that, for example, Catalunya has within democratic Spain, then I’d feel far happier about sharing the joy that so many Kosovars seem to be feeling today. But for that to happen, the west Europeans would have needed to make a commitment to bringing a democratizing Serbia into the EU of the same order as the commitment they made to the still-democratizing Spain in the early 1980s. It is tragic for everyone concerned that this has not happened.

Transcript of Jan. 16th interview with Khaled Meshaal

I have now uploaded the full transcript of the one-hour interview I conducted with the head of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, in Damascus last month.
I shan’t add any additional commentary here. I have already provided some commentary and context to the interview in various posts here on JWN, and in this recent CSM column. And now, I’m going to be writing a much more comprehensive essay about Hamas’s still-evolving role for Boston Review, where it will run in the May issue.
I’ll just note– though of course our readers here are all so smart that you’ll have figured this out already– that the interview was conducted exactly one week before the bustout from Gaza.
Meanwhile, there is no word from either Gaza or Egypt on the results of the most recent negotiations in El-Arish over an arrangement for the Gaza-Egypt border.

Military occupations, sewage, and governance

So now, after just under five years of rule by US military occupation, the historic city of Baghdad is drowning in lakes of human excreta. (Hat-tip Juan.) That item from AFP a couple of weeks ago reports that,

One of three sewage treatment plants is out of commission, one is working at stuttering capacity while a pipe blockage in the third means sewage is forming a foul lake so large it can be seen “as a big black spot on Google Earth,” said Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.

Welcome to Gaza.
Gaza has been under Israeli military occupation for just over 40 years, and has been slowly drowning in its own gathering lakes of sewage for several years now.
Maintaining working safe water systems, and therefore also functioning sewage-disposal systems, is a fundamental function of government. It is especially important in areas that, like Gaza or Baghdad, are both heavily populated and flat, and that therefore have no natural run-off system. (And even where areas are mountainous and do have good run-off systems, the people “below” need to be protected from the run-off from the people “above”, as the residents of numerous Palestinian villages in the West Bank that lie beneath Israel’s hill-top settlements can amply testify.)
Different things are going on in Iraq and in Gaza. In Iraq the Bushists are guided– as in all their actions, domestic and overseas– by a profound antagonism toward the role of government as such in providing good governance. Hence all their quite irresponsible outsourcing of so many central functions of government to politically well-connected private contractors operating for profit. Now I’m sure that in Baghdad, the US administration and its local allies/proxies have signed numerous contracts over the past five years, under which contractors were charged with fixing the city’s water and sewage systems. But with the Bushists’ broad and wilfull disregard of governance issues, those contractors’ performance was never adequately monitored, and no-one ever stepped in to say, “Okay, you contractors haven’t performed, so we’ll send in the Army Corps of Engineers to get this vital job done.”
As a corollary, we should note that people who run military occupation regimes have wide leeway to exercise a wilfull disregard for the wellbeing of the residents of the occupied territories since they are in no way politically accountable to them. Hence the need for the provisions of international humanitarian law that specifically codify the responsibility that occupying powers have for the wellbeing of these residents.
In Iraq, the question of “responsibility” for water treatment and other basic functions of governance was certainly considerably muddied by the whole elaborate political play by which a supposed “sovereignty” was handed over to Iraqi political figures, though in many significant regards their ability to exercise true sovereignty remains highly circumscribed.
In Gaza, what has been happening on the sewage issue has been a certain amount of wilfull disregard of the Gazans’ strong interest in this aspect of their basic physical wellbeing by the Israeli occupation authorities. But in addition, Israel’s government has also been intentionally starving Gaza of the electric power and other inputs required even to mitigate the most threatening aspects of the sewage crisis.
Read, for example, this horrendous first-person account, published by Reuters Alertnet, of how the sewage crisis has been affecting the wellbeing of Gazans since at least last summer.
The writer, Manal, says this:

The closure of Gaza borders since June 2007 by the Israeli government has meant that the essential parts needed to build the remaining three could not come through.
Electricity cuts have been affecting the efficiency of the station.

The number of children who have been taken ill has increased considerably. Cases of diarrhea are mounting by the day.

even though there is sewage water in the neighborhood schools

Read, too, the comments that the UN’s new Under-SG for Humanitarian Affairs, John Holmes, made yesterday after he completed his first visit to Gaza:

“I have been shocked by the grim and miserable things that I have seen and heard today, which are the result of current restrictions and the limitations on the number of goods that are being allowed into Gaza,’ said Mr. Holmes during a day-long visit to the Gaza Strip. ‘Around 80 percent of the population is dependant on food aid from international organizations. Poverty and unemployment are increasing and the private sector has more or less collapsed. Only ten percent of the amount of goods that entered Gaza a year ago are being permitted to enter now,” he said.

The complete chokehold that Israel has exercised over every physical interaction between Gaza and the outside world needs to be ended– NOW.
And in Iraq, the six million residents of Baghdad also need to be saved from the stinking, health-threatening effects of military occupation. Governance in Iraq needs to be handed back to a genuinely sovereign Iraqi government that is accountable to its own people, not to any outside power.
Military occupation rule: it is always, potentially, a threat to the wellbeing and even survival of people and the communities they live in. It was never envisaged in international law as being a longlasting means of governance, but only a short-term stop-gap arrangement pending conclusion of a final peace agreement. These two occupations need to end.

Video of Froman and Amayreh discussing Accord

Haaretz today carries a short video showing Rabbi Menachem Froman and close-to-Hamas Palestinian journalist Khaled Amayreh meeting in the garden of the Cave of the Patriarchs /Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron to sign the ceasefire-plus Accord that, as I had noted here, they recently finished negotiating.
It is a delightful short clip and shows the two men dealing in friendly and cooperative fashion with each other. It was shot, according to the voiceover “last Tuesday”. On the clip, they sit at a picnic table near the Mosque/Cave with the Koran and the Torah on the table in front of them, and sign their Accord.
Amayreh says he spoke with the Hamas caretaker government in Gaza Monday night “and they gave me their total agreement for this document.” He says that Hamas head Khaled Meshaal himself “accepts the document completely.” He adds that the obstacle is the Israeli government, and in particular Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “I am ready to meet with Barak to discuss this with him,” says Amayreh.
Froman says that the documents promises the end to all Palestinian violence including rockets and kidnappings. Amayreh says he cares about the people of Sderot, and he feels the pain of the Israeli boy there who lost his leg to a Palestinian rocket attack earlier this week. “All kids are kids, whether Israeli or Palestinian,” he says.
Watch the video. Spread the word about this important initiative. This is some great news out of the Holy Land; and the ceasefire-plus Accord negotiated by these two very serious men deserves the world’s strongest support.

Discussing Hamas on Capitol Hill

At yesterday’s Capitol Hill panel discussion on “Re-calculating Annapolis” I tried to present the best arguments I could for the US to end its profoundly anti-democratic current practice of working with Israel and others to exclude and crush the organization that won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, Hamas.
The US, I concluded, should do whatever it can to promote these short- and medium-term goals:

Attentive readers of JWN will be familiar with most of the arguments I made along the way, which I have made here on the blog and in this November 2007 article in The Nation. I also noted that the dedication with which the Bushists have pursued their anti-Hamas agenda since the 2006 elections has very seriously undermined the claims the administration has made that it is somehow (counter to the evidence on the ground) committed to spreading the ideals and practice of democracy around the world, and has made the administration look very hypocritical and opportunistic indeed.
I may or may not have noted in my presentation that the campaign to exclude and crush Hamas– which has included giving full support to all of Israel’s policies of besieging Gaza and undertaking large numbers of extra-judicial executions there and in the West Bank– has actually had the opposite of the desired effect. Hamas has thus far emerged stronger politically than it was back in January 2006. (And meanwhile, the cost that these policies have imposed on the Palestinian people, and also to the Israelis who reside in the south of their country, has been high. In the case of the 1.4 million Gazans, quite horrendous.)
I should have quoted Uri Avnery’s great recent quote that the Olmert government’s actions against Gaza have been “worse than a war crime, they have been a blunder.” But I didn’t have time to. At the very last minute my position on the event’s roster was changed from #5 to #2, so I had to do some very rapid last-minute editing/revising of my comments.
We spoke in this order:

Two of the other panelists, Malley and Levy, presented broadly the same arguments I was making. Whitley is precluded by the nature of his job as a UN employee from expressing political judgments; but the picture he painted of a besieged Gaza facing “a social explosion and an economic implosion”, and being poised “on the verge of a health pandemic”, was grim indeed.
As for our fifth fellow-panelist, Ghaith al-Omari, he was advocating a path very different from that urged by the rest of us. He spoke right after me, and almost his first words were that, “Elections are highly over-rated.” He argued that trying to deal with Hamas, “is neither doable nor desirable.” He acknowledged that Hamas, “represents a real force in Palestinian society and needs to be taken into account.” But, he said, the question was “On what terms should Mahmoud Abbas be expected to reconcile with it?” His answer was that Hamas needed to be further weakened before Abbas could deal with it.
That seemed to me like a clear invitation to the forces currently seeking to punish and crush Hamas to step up their efforts. And this from someone who, though he is not a Palestinian, works for an organization that claims to speak in some way for the Palestinians…
In Rob Malley’s presentation, which came next, he directly challenged the assumption underlying that last argument of Omari’s. “Hamas is getting stronger and Abbas is getting weaker,” Malley warned. “We should not assume that time is our friend.” He also warned that the very difficult situation in Gaza could well be “the crucible of the next Arab-Israeli war.”
He noted that the attempt to isolate Hamas had been aimed at pushing forward the “peace process.” But he noted that had not happened. (A little later, Levy argued that the Annapolis formula “was the best that Condi Rice could win support for from the White House; but it wasn’t actually a recipe for success.”)
The major point at which Malley seemed to diverge from my views is he said he thought Mahmoud Abbas should mediate both the ceasefire asnd the prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. Personally I think that’s a recipe for disaster because (a) Abbas is not even on speaking terms with Hamas at this point; (b) There is anyway an existing mediator between Israel and Hamas on these two issues, and that is Egypt; so neither side “needs” Abbas to mediate for them (they could also communicate directly with each other if they wanted; this has happened in some limited ways in the past); (c) from a national-interest point of view, it actually seems very inappropriate for Abbas to “mediate” between Israel and Hamas; and finally (d), the biggest point of all: Abbas is actually increasingly weak and irrelevant.
Levy made a couple of excellent observations. Firstly, that “We now have no fewer than three U.S. generals in the region working on this issue– and none of them is doing anything that would count as de-escalation of the tensions.” Secondly, that what he had been learning from his Israeli compatriots was that Hamas had discernibly been trying to target military installations with its rockets, while it was Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees who had been sending rockets simply into the (populated) general vicinity of the city of Sderot. “Though Hamas,” he added, “has not intervened to stop them from doing that.”
I was encouraged to hear that Levy’s Israeli sources saw clear evidence of an attempt by the Hamas rocketeers to restrict their targeting to military installations. But that guidance certainly needs to be extended to their people undertaking other kinds of violent operations, too. (Hamas credibly claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing that on February 3 killed an elderly woman in Dimona; the two operatives involved reached Israel from the Hebron area, not from Gaza or Egypt.)
It was significant that though the title of our discussion was “Re-calculating Annapolis”, no-one spent much time looking at the actual (and very sad) record of what has been going on in the post-Annapolic negotiations. I made a point, in my presentation, of noting the political impact of the fact that the Syrians— after having taken the bold step of attending Annapolis– had received nothing but a very cold shoulder from the Bushites in return.
But really, none of us spent any time discussing the minutiae of the current formal “peace process.” Partly because so very, very little has been, in fact, going on. And partly because the whole confrontation over– and the recent bustout from– Gaza has completely eclipsed in importance whatever teeny baby steps forward (or backward) the “peace process” negotiations might have taken.
Talking of which, I found it intriguing to note that Salam Fayyad, the man whom Abbas picked as his Prime Minister after the Israelis had conveniently imprisoned a large number of the Hamas parliamentarians, has not been completely acting the role of compliant US/Israeli puppet. Fayyad’s been here in the US, partly doing family things. But he also gave a couple of policy addresses here in Washington, DC. And in one of them he complained openly that the checkpoints that the IOF maintains inside the West Bank– which were supposed to have decreased in number after Annapolis– “have increased, not decreased.”
Oh, and in further related news, on Tuesday Israel’s housing minister, Zeev Boim, announced plans to build more than 1,100 more new apartments in occupied East Jerusalem.
Under these circumstances, is it really any surprise that Abbas is so rapidly becoming weaker?

Bush trying to entangle NATO allies in Lebanese strife?

I was trying to think through why the Bush White House and its Lebanese allies have been acting in such a provocative, escalatory way in Lebanon in recent weeks. There is no way the pro-US forces in Lebanon could ever hope to “win” a civil war if the country should indeed be tipped over the brink into one.
Actually, the history of the past 33 years in the country should prove that no-one wins if there is a civil war there.
So why do the US and its Lebanese allies currently seem so risk-happy?
Then it struck me. There are 15,000 UN troops, most of them from NATO countries, currently deployed in the south of the country; and most of them aren’t doing very much there. (The peace is kept between Israel and Hizbullah much more by the deterrent power that they exert towards each other than by UNIFIL’s lightly armed peacekeepers, as I wrote here, a long time ago.) But if a civil war should suddenly threaten to engulf the whole of Lebanon, maybe the Bushists would seek to get UNIFIL’s mandate suddenly enlarged, so that its troops could intervene at short notice, and in support of the Lebanese side that the Bushists judge to be “legitimate”?
Obviously, I have no way of knowing if this is their plan. If it is, it would be a plan fraught with large numbers of dangers and uncertainties. For one thing, it’s by no means certain the UN Security Council– or indeed, most of the troop-contributing countries– would ever agree to such an enlargement of the UNIFIL mandate. But if entangling UNIFIL in a Lebanese civil war is not part of the Bushists’ plan, then what are they doing acting in such an escalatory and self-defeating way there?

Who is seeking to destabilize Lebanon?

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the truck-bomb killing of former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri. Quite understandably, many of those most horrified by that killing are planning large-scale marches to commemorate it. This, amidst the the political crisis caused by the failure of the country’s political leaders to agree on a formula for forming the country’s next government. (That bottleneck has also led to the failure of the country’s MPs to form a quorum large enough to elect the new president; the country has been without a president since November 23.)
Obviously, many Lebanese and their friends are concerned at the possibility that the spate of acts of violence that has occurred in recent weeks might, at this very sensitive time, tip over that hard-to-discern brink into a large-scale, outright, very damaging, and possibly lengthy civil war.
Last Saturday, February 10, I wrote a post here in which I said that the real story in Lebanon is actually that there is not, already, a civil war there. I also noted the efforts that many Lebanese political leaders, including those from Hizbullah, had been pursuing in an effort to prevent the outbreak of a civil war.
But on that very same day, MP Saad Hariri, the son of the late Rafiq H. and a leader of the anti-Syrian “March 14” bloc in the parliament, made a belligerent speech in which he said that if the country’s “destiny” is confrontation, then he and his allies were “ready” for that.
The following day, Hariri’s ally, the ever-mercurial Walid Jumblatt, went much further, issuing this very public threat:

“You want disorder? It will be welcomed. You want war? It will be welcomed. We have no problem with weapons, no problem with missiles. We will take them from you.”

On Feb. 11th, too, at least two people were wounded Sunday in a gunfight between Jumblatt supporters and opponents in Aley, east of Beirut, and shots were reportedly fired Sunday in an altercation between Hariri supporters and members of Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri’s security services.
(When I got to the bottom of my incoming mail pile on Sunday, I found a charming, Christmas card from Walid– featuring a photo he had taken of the snow-covered steps of his family’s feudal home in Moukhtara. Maybe I should have a conversation with him about Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence sometime?)
Back in November, Walid notoriously threatened to unleash car-bombs against the Syrian capital, Damascus. Yesterday, just such a bomb did explode there. It killed Imad Mughniyeh, long wanted by the US government as being the accused architect of the very lethal attacks against US military and diplomatic facilities in Lebanon in 1983-84, and by Israel for his alleged role in organizing very lethal attacks against Israeli and Jewish facilities in Buenos Aires. Hizbullah’s Manar website today described him as “a great resistance leader who joined the procession of Islamic Resistance martyrs.”
No indication, yet, of whether Walid’s threat of last November was related in any way to Mughniyeh’s killing. But did the belligerent words Walid pronounced last Sunday about “We have no problem with weapons, no problem with missiles” have anything to do with yesterday’s visit by US Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman to Beirut?
This AP report tells us that,

This move of accusing Syria and Iran of unacceptable intervention in Lebanese politics is an increasingly common one– from a US administration that is also, (a) majorly intervening in Lebanon’s domestic politics, and (b) quite evidently a non-Lebanese actor. It would be a laughable move to make if the reality that blies behind it– of US arms supplies to the Lebanese army and hostile, escalatory rhetoric– were not so serious.
All power to the de-escalators and the bridge-builders. May their efforts succeed.

Live-blogging Obama’s “Potomac” breakthrough

We did it! In Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, we voted Barack Obama overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary.
I’m watching Obama giving the victory speech. He’s doing it in Madison, Wisconsin, since Wisconsin is one of the upcoming primary states.
But Obama’s stupendous. He’s talked quite a bit about the need for clarity on the war. He said some good things about John McCain’s past heroism– a nice touch. But then he said that McCain lost his way. That McCain, who had once stood against the tax cuts Bush gave to the rich but now he supports them. A number of times Obama made the link directly between the cost of the war in Iraq and the lack of investment at home.
He’s been talking in a very personal vein– about the fact that his mother was a teenager in Hawaii, and then his father left the family when Barack was only two years old…
Most interesting of all, though, has been to see him suddenly looking like someone who is ready to be president. He’s been saying a number of times “When I am president…” and suddenly it looks as if he is growing into a self-realization of the possibility, growing into the role.
Half an hour ago, I saw a very mechanical speech from Hillary Clinton.
Oh, and now CNN has shifted over from Obama to McCain. The difference in age and energy level is evident.
Also, Obama was speaking in a huge, two-tiered stadium with tens of thousands of people there. (He has shown this amazing ability to mobilize large numbers of voters, especially young voters.) The camera there kept moving into a wide shot and then panning over the massive crowd. With McCain, now, all you can see is five other– all white– people in the frame behind him as he speaks in Alexandria, Virginia. One of them is, I think, the ageing and about-to-retie Republican Virginia senator, John Warner, who is 80-plus years old.
But McCain is also promising a respectful, decent campaign. Including– I just heard him using Obama’s signature chant of “I’m fired up and ready to go!” That, with a large smile.

Congratulations, Egypt and Abu Treika!

Egypt’s national football (soccer) team won the African Nations Cup final in Ghana last night. Huge congratulations to them and to their scorer! Muhammad Abu Treika (no. 22).
Abu Treika is probably today the best-known 29-year-old in Africa and perhaps the whole of the Muslim world. If you want to see one amazing recent goal he scored, look at the second goal on this Youtube clip. Abu Treika had already won attention by raising his No.22 shirt at the end of a game in an earlier round of the cup, revealing a tee-shirt underneath that said “Sympathize with Gaza.” (See his explanation of this, to English Al-Jazeera, here.) But the guy is also just an amazing player: intuitive and disciplined at the same time.
For those US or other readers who don’t know much about football the way the whole of the non-US world plays it, or who don’t know much about Abu Treika, Time’s Scott MacLeod has a nice post on Abu Treika, and on the wildly enthusiastic reaction that last night’s win saw in downtown Cairo. (Hat-tip Bram.)
MacLeod writes:

MacLeod was writing from a downtown coffee shop. (It goes by the significant name of the “Fallujah” coffee shop.) He wrote:

The story: Lebanon NOT consumed by civil war…

… so what’s going on?
This is a really interesting story, though most of the western (“If it bleeds, it leads”) MSM haven’t even started to notice it.
But what’s been happening in Lebanon since even before the Feb. 14, 2005 killing of ex-PM Rafiq Hariri is that– okay, in addition to the ghastly Israeli assault of summer 2006, and the brutal fighting at Nahr al-Bared refugee camp last summer– there have been numerous other sporadic acts of lethal violence. And each time, many people around the world would perk up their ears and say, “Oh my! Is Lebanon about to plunge back into civil war?” But it doesn’t happen.
Why not?
I think this is due, in large part, to the sense of realism and political wisdom that so many Lebanese political leaders actually have. Starting with the country’s biggest party, Hizbullah, but extending far beyond them. Nearly all the acts of violence that have occurred since late 2004 have been unclaimed, and unexplained. Under those circumstances, normally, people would have every reason to be fearful. Where might it happen next, and to whom? People would be on-edge and ready to “counter-attack first”. Back in December 2006, there was a small eruption of fighting between Sunni and Shiite militias in South Beirut. But it was rapidly contained and defused. Last Sunday, there was another such cliffhanging incident. Again, it got contained. There is evidently some very serious and intentional conflict-defusing work going on there, for which the people of Lebanon and the region should all be glad.
I’m just thinking back to the few days I spent in the generally cosmopolitan hub of Ras Beirut last month. Ras Beirut seemed a lot more relaxed and pleasant to be in then, than it did when we were there for two months in later 2004 (i.e., before the Hariri killing.) Maybe that had to do with the removal of the Syrian military presence from the country, which happened– as a response to Hariri killing– in summer of 2005.
Last month, the main gripe of many people in Ras Beirut was against the selfishness and arrogance that so many local parliamentarians seem to display in various facets of their personal and political lives. The parliamentarians have periodically been enacting their big drama of “Can they convene enough MPs together and reach agreement on the formula for forming the next government?” Yesterday, they just postponed that constitutionally vital session for the 14th time. As a result, the country still doesn’t have a president. The sitting ministers– that is, all the non-Shiite ones, since the Shiite ones all resigned a year or so back– continue to get their hefty salaries and to do not very much of anything except renew the contracts they all gave to their friends a while back. The MPs also take their salaries, and throw out huge barricades around their lavish residences, which inconvenience everyone else no end. No legislating, and precious little real governing, gets done at all. The country generally keeps running along, even if in an extremely unorthodox way.
Lebanon, remember, is a country whose founding ethos was one of aversion to, or flight from, anything resembling central government authority. That’s what being a mountain-dominated society full of theologically heterodox communities is all about. Iraq, which is a plains country, is actually far, far worse affected when the central government doesn’t function, since back to the days of the Sumerians the river/plains systems there have always totally relied on having a central authority to regulate both waters and the livelihoods and communities so heavily dependent on them.
So in Lebanon, it is indeed quite possible that the country won’t get a new president or a new president before the scheduled holding of parliamentary elections next year. In which case, the main job for the sitting MPs will be to draw up the rules for that election. (A bizarre system, eh?) It will be interesting to see whether an international community in which George W. Bush is no longer a leading actor will be one that supports Lebanon at last having a strong, fair, and non-sectarian election system… Let’s hope so.