Category: Lebanon

[Oops I thought I’d posted this at 10 p.m. last night but it turns out I failed to hit the vital “Publish” button. Still worth looking at though.]
Two thoughtful and interesting op-eds about Iraq today. One by Flynt Leverett in the NYT, and one by David Ignatious in the WaPo.
Both writers make the excellent point that Hizbullah is a serious, sizeable force in Lebanese politics that is not about to be sidelined, and that its differences with the frothy activists (my words) of the much photographed anti-Syrian demonstrators will have a serious effect on developments.
David had this interesting little note:

An encouraging sign is that Hezbollah’s leader, Said Hasan Nasrallah, met quietly Monday night in Beirut with Samir Franjieh, one of the leaders of the pro-democracy opposition. They discussed a possible deal whereby Hezbollah would agree to disarm its militia and join a new government, so long as that government wasn’t openly anti-Syrian and Hezbollah was allowed to keep its “resistance” squads. That’s a steep price, but getting Hezbollah inside the tent of political change might be worth it.

Real politics happening there. Excellent.
Thought-provoking but less above-board was something David mentioned further down:

An interesting idea for squeezing Iran comes from an Iraqi Sunni leader named Mithal Alusi, who’s visiting Washington this week. He suggests inviting dissident Iranian Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri to the holy city of Najaf to explain his view that political rule by mullahs is incompatible with Islam. That would make Tehran think twice about meddling in Iraq.

It might have been more honest for David to tell his readers that this Alusi is a former member of Chalabi’s INC who was canned from the organization after he made a much-publicized visit to Israel. So perhaps Alusi’s credibility back home in Iraq might be just a tiny bit low?

A friend from Beirut who wishes to be identified simply as “Oldtimer” sent me the following:
Just finished your good piece in CSM. It is good to see that you are somewhat optimistic on what appears to be a remarkable change in Lebanese politics, especially the breaking down of the taboo of criticising Syria. I hope it works and more than that, hope it will
continue. I am not so sure.
We are sorely lacking wise and charismatic leadership on the street and the strain is showing. We have Christian youth who have made the issue one of Geagea or Aoun. We have hardnosed Phalangists who want to open the case of slain president-elect Bashir Gemayel. We have Sunnis divided in themselves now totally rudderless. Anything close to a leader we had Walid who has been mobilizing a large segment of the Druze, but with his sectarian restraints, he has now taken refuge in Mouktara, having “seen the light.” Worse, Shiites have not been brought in and some seem to have decided to coopt them by insults. Very wrong and fool-hardy.
Of course there are vast numbers of truly patriotic, angry, well-meaning Lebanese who are about to be fed up with the unorganized nature of the opposition. If these people give up, then we can forget the sea of change in Lebanese politics.
Did you hear that Patriarch Sfeir threatened to leave the opposition if they persisted with their calls of PEACEFUL INTIFADA? We need more of such a realistic and cool-headed approach.
I suppose the term SNAFU was a Lebanese creation.

A dizzying number of different narratives are being unfolded in Lebanon these days. here are the main ones:
Track 1: The facts about the hideous killing of Rafiq Hariri
Track 2: The international “uproar” and rush to judgment
And then, the most fascinating track of all…
Track 3: The birth of an inter-sectarian, nonviolent opposition movement in Lebanon
This is such great news!
I wonder how whoever carried out the grisly deed last Monday is looking at this development? Almost certainly, whoever did it was intending to spark off further, terrible, inter-necine fighting inside Lebanon… Instead of which, we have this great and very mature response from the Lebanese opposition:

Lebanon’s political opposition has called for an “intifada for independence” as it stepped up it attacks on the government.

What is exciting is that the people at the head of this movement are by no means patsies or stalking horses for US or Israeli interests. They are people of real political substance with long histories in left-nationalist organizing inside Lebanon… They are also old, old friends of mine.
Like Walid Jumblatt, the MP and former minister whose father Kamal Bey Jumblatt was killed by the Syrians in 1977 at the time that the Syrians were doing Washington’s bidding by “saving” the Falangists (Maronitist extremists) from being over-run by the Lebanese leftist and Palestinian forces.
Like Samir Frangieh, a wry, longtime Marxist intellectual who has for decades now been one of the notable voices of conscience inside the Maronite community.
Lebanese politics is notably complicated for people who don’t know much about the country’s extremely complex society. The twists, turns, wrinkles, and turnrounds can be confusing enough for anyone!
So Walid Bey Jumblatt is the hereditary “community head” of the Druze community inside Lebanon. As such, he has many quasi-feudal powers within Lebanon’s Druze community– — and also, much influence among Druzes in Syria (including the Israeli-occupied Golan) and among those in Israel itself.
The Druze– in case by chance you didn’t know this?– are a small, fairly secretive religious group that broke off from Shiite Islam in the days of Egypt’s very weird Fatimid ruler Al-Hakem bi-Omrillah [sorry, make that Al-Hakem bi-Amrillah] in the 11th century. The Druze “closed” the call to convert to their sect in 1085, and have had very few converts since. The Jumblatts, interestingly enough, were some of those converts, having come over to Lebanon from somewhere in Kurdistan a few centuries after 1085.
(Read all about this in my 1985 book on Lebanon. If you can get hold of a copy. I’m actually trying to regain my rights to it, to reissue it, right now.)
So Walid Bey has this position of quasi-feudal leadership… And he is also head of Lebanon’s most stable socialist party, the PSP, whose red flags you might have seen waving at Hariri’s funeral.
Oh, and by the way, in a tradition not followed by many socialist parties anywhere else in the world, he also inherited his role as head of the party from his father.
His mother, May Arslan Jumblatt, is a fabulous woman– a pioneering, chainsmoking, volubly French-speaking feminist from the “rival” Yazbecki trend in Druze feudal politics who was divorced from Kamal Bey when Walid was still small. We spent a great evening with her, Walid, and Walid’s wife Nura up in the family’s ancestral seat in the mountains, back in October.
Okay, and then there’s Samir Frangieh, a Maronite Christian who is the second cousin of Suleiman Frangieh, the present Minister of the Interior. Suleiman F., btw, is the grandson of the generally pro-Syrian man of the same name who was President back in the 1970s. Suleiman’s father Tony was killed along with, his wife, a baby daughter, and 31 supporters in an attack set by Maronitist rivals in 1978.
For details of a long list of nasty assassinations inside Lebanon since 1975, go here.
All of which history makes the emergence of a determinedly nonviolent opposition movement in the country even more notable.
(There have been some small attempts to do this before– led mostly by women. But they never got anywhere. The men just couldn’t, in those days, resist grabbing for their guns when the going got tough.)
So according to that same Daily Star report cited above, Jumblatt, Samir Frangieh, and the others declared that they intend to place all the country’s parliamentary business on hold,

until Hariri’s murderers are identified.
Speaking from Chouf MP Walid Jumblatt’s residence in Clemenceau Qornet Shehwan Gathering member Samir Franjieh said: “In response to the criminal and terrorist policy of the Lebanese and Syrian authorities, the opposition declares a democratic and peaceful intifada [uprising] for independence.”

Reporter Nada Raad wrote,

Monday’s upcoming parliamentary session looks set for chaos as the opposition insisted it will not discuss the draft electoral law until a full debate is held on Hariri’s murder and the attempt on the life, last year of Chouf MP Marwan Hamade and Syrian troops are withdrawn from Lebanon.
The refusal to discuss the electoral law could delay this May’s parliamentary elections.
Interior Minister Suleiman Franjieh was dismissive of the opposition but still took time to warn them against inciting tensions in the wake of this week’s tragic events.
He said: “Should security be tampered with, the government will not stand unmoved, and the army will be given the order to act.”
But despite the warning he added: “It is not worth announcing a state of emergency.”
The opposition statement followed a meeting of opposition groups at Le Bristol Hotel in Beirut. Sources close to opposition leader Jumblatt said he did not attend the meeting for “security measures” after receiving what they described as “direct threats.”
In his latest direct attack on President Emile Lahoud, Jumblatt said: “He should be removed from Lebanon in a Syrian truck.”
He added: “They cannot assassinate the one or even two million people who support us.”
Jumblatt again accused Lebanese and Syrian security services of being behind Hariri’s murder. He said: “We ask for an international investigation not involving the Lebanese regime.”

She noted that the meeting in the Bristol Hotel had been attended by,

around 44 MPs, including some members of Hariri’s parliamentary bloc and a dozen of political parties, including exiled former army commander General Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement.
The attendants wore red and white ribbons in support of Lebanon’s independence.
Opposition members also asked Lebanese expatriates to organize sit-ins and demonstrations in front of Lebanese embassies.
Samir Franjieh said: “We ask Lebanese expatriates’ political and financial support for our cause. We demand the United Nations’ support to protect the Lebanese people.”
Hariri’s grave in downtown Beirut has become a shrine since his burial last Wednesday and Samir Franjieh urged the Lebanese people to continue their presence and prayers there.
On Friday, hundreds of Lebanese marched from Phoenicia Inter-Continental Hotel, where Hariri was assassinated, to Gemmayzeh chanting slogans against Syria and calling for “freedom, sovereignty and independence.”
Some students threatened to march “everyday at 7 p.m. until the government resigns.”
Opposition members called for the formation of an “interim government as a supreme national necessity to protect the Lebanese people and ensure the immediate and complete withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.”

Expected responses from the Syrians and the remaining pro-Syrian forces inside Lebanon?
Not clear yet. But there is that news about Bashar having dismissed his military mukhabarat chief somewhat precipitately… Plus, there’s this interesting report from AP’s Zeina Karam in Damascus, who says “some Syrians” are now saying it’s time to withdraw the 15,000 troops their country has in Lebanon.
She gives no further quantification for the degree of support she found for that view, and notes that,

This is not yet the opinion of the Syrian government, which has spent the week denying responsibility for Monday’s assassination and reaffirming its close ties to Lebanon.

One of the Syrians she does quote by name as urging an immeidate withdrawal of Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon is the left-leaning writer Michel Kilo, whom she describes (rightly) as “prominent”.
Karam also quotes two businessmen as saying that’s not a wise course… But let’s see.
Regarding the pro-Syrian forces inside Lebanon, they seem generally to be acting pretty wisely, and not in an escalatory way right now. But who knows how they will be moving forward? Hard for anyone to guess.

Former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri and at least nine other people were killed in a massive car bomb attack on the Beirut seafront today.
A Sunni Muslim billionaire from Sidon, who made his fortune as a contractor in Saudi Arabia, Hariri was Lebanon’s PM from 1992 thru 1998, and again from 2000 till last October.
Initial speculation– in the case of this bomb as of the one that severely wounded MP Marwan Hamadeh last October– turned to the possibility of a Syrian hand in the attack. Both Hamadeh and Hariri had been in the movement that opposed the Syrian-backed extension in office of Maronite Christian President Emil Lahoud.
However, in both cases there is also the possibility that the attacks were part of an orchestrated destabilization campaign in Lebanon aimed at turning the Lebanese people even more strongly against Syria. Who might be behind such a campaign? On the principle of cui bono one would have to say certain hardline forces inside Israel.
The possibility of some kind of a Mossad hand seems to me even more likely this time around than in October. Since October, the Syrians have definitely been trying to handle their relations with Lebanon in a more intelligent, less heavy-handed manner.
Al-Jazeera is reporting that its office in Beirut,

received a phone call from a person claiming he was speaking on behalf of a group calling itself “al-Nasir [victory] and Jihad [Holy War] Group in al-Sham countries [Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine]”. [This would seem like the name of a Sunni fundamentalist group. ~HC]
The caller said this group has “announced carrying out the fair penalty against the infidel agent Rafiq al-Hariri”, adding that it was a “martyrdom operation” whose details would be later announced.
“We have never heard about this group before,” Aljazeera’s correspondent said. “The person is not a native-Arabic speaker. He was speaking Arabic with a foreign accent.”

The AP account linked to at the top, like all other media accounts, reports that,

Syrian President Bashar Assad said he “condemned this horrible criminal action,” according to SANA, Syria’s official news agency. Assad urged the Lebanese people to reject those who plant “schism among the people” during this “critical situation.”

Before all my ardent pro-Israeli commenters get on my case here, let me just point out two things: (1) The use of car-bombs and other forms of roadside explosive devices has been an established Israeli SOP in Lebanon for many, many years (and has even recently been used inside Syria); and (2) Israel has maintained robust special-ops capabilities in central Lebanon throughout the whole period of Syria’s general domination of the area.

Continue reading “Rafiq Hariri, RIP”

I’m crashing on the deadline to write my increasingly lengthy Hizbullah piece for Boston Review. (Celebrated ‘New Years Eve’ at c. 11 p.m. last night. Go figure.)
So today, I was writing about Hizbullah’s impressive work in the provision of basic public services. Since the party was actually born in mid-1980s in the turmoil of a blisteringly destructive war situation, I immediately thought: Hey, why didn’t the Bush administration turn to these experienced pros to do the reconstruction/rebuilding job in Najaf, Sadr City, etc, instead of the US Army and Halliburton??
Okay, silly question, I know. But still, the contrast between H’s record in Lebanon and that of the US reconstruction effort in Iraq is certainly informative.
Here’s a fragment from what I’ve been writing:

AUB professor Judith Palmer Harik has studied the party [Hizbullah] for many years now. She notes that in the chaotic, civil-war-ridden circumstances in which Hizbullah was born, its ability to provide basic social services in an effective manner– and to provide them to all the residents in its areas of operation, not just to its followers– won it considerable loyalty and respect. She writes that after Hizbullah took over effective control of the south-Beirut Dahiyeh [suburbs] in 1988, it almost immediately started providing a reliable trash-removal service there, and that it was a further five years before the corruption-plagued central government sent any garbage trucks into the Dahiyah at all. Moreover, writing in 2003, she noted that though the government’s trash-removal efforts there still continued on a notably spotty basis, “Hezbollah still trucks out some 300 tons of garbage a day from the dahiyeh and treats it with insecticides to supplement the government’s service.”

Continue reading “Basic services in Iraq: a proposal”

I’m busy writing about (Lebanese) Hizbullah this week. It’s really interesting because,

(1) Seeing the amazing political smarts inside this Shi-ite political organization in Lebanon, where Shi-ites are maybe 45% of the population, gives some clue as to possible directions the Shi-ites might take in Iraq (where they’re 60-65%).
In Lebanon, Hizbullah has always had a mass-organizing aspect to it, that few people in the west have ever focused much on at all. In addition, since 1989 they’ve been part of the Lebanese body politic. Since 1992 they’ve had around 12 of the 128 seats in the national parliament. In addition, since 1996 they’ve won municipal elections in increasing numbers of municipalities and now control 141 of them–from tiny ones to very large ones. All these are systems in which they’ve been RE-elected, so the voters must like something about them.
In addition, Hizbullah’s done really well at reaching out to non-Shi-ites, including Christians…
(2) In 2000, Hizbullah’s well-coordinated combination of mass organizing and tightly focused military resistance actions against Israel (overwhelmingly against Israeli military targets, not civilians), succeeded in bringing about a near-total and quite unilateral Israeli withdrawal from land the IDF had occupied in South Lebanon since 1982 (and some they’d occupied since 1978). Now, Sharon has been proposing a unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops– and settlers– from Gaza. So, can the events in south Lebanon since 2000 tell us anything useful about how things may turn out in Gaza post a unilateral Israeli withdrawal there?
(3) It’s a really interesting story in itself, too. When I quit living in Lebanon in 1981, Hizbullah didn’t even exist! Since then, it has really established itself as, not just a major political force inside Lebanon, but also as the only well organized political party in the whole country. It’s people are nearly universally seen as non-corrupt, serious, well trained, and impressively task oriented. As opposed to both the clan chieftains and the woolly “ideological” forces of various stripes who dominated Lebanese politics when I was there in the late 1970s. So how have these Islamist modernizers achieved this?
Another reason I think it’s an intriguing story: all the Hizbullah officials I talked to in Beirut recently had an impressive command of, and a seemingly sincere copmmitment to, the discourse of democratic modernity: good citizenship, good governance, equality of rights, accountability of governments, etc etc. Only occasionally would they– like John Locke in his day, for example– slip in some scriptural reference to add authority to what was basically an appeal to non-theological democratic ideals…

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of writing to do, and need to keep reminding myself: Helena, this is just a short project; don’t let it drag on too long!
Oh, and about their relationship with Israel…

Continue reading “Lebanon’s Hizbullah”

There was a well-conceived piece by Nick Blanford in yesterday’s Daily Star, looking at the security situation along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. He was examining in particular the fears some people have that Palestinians in S. Lebanon, upset or enraged or whatever after Arafat’s death, may launch attacks across the border, against Israel.
He noted that,

Ironically, Hizbullah and Israel have a joint interest in maintaining the status quo along the United Nations-delineated Blue Line.
Hizbullah is careful to protect its tactical control of the Blue Line, aware that the finely-tuned rules that govern border clashes can easily be upset by unauthorized attacks. Hizbullah’s militants are deployed along the length of the 110-kilometer border, some at small observation posts, others armed and in military uniforms staking out the remoter stretches of the frontier. The fighters have been known to stop armed Palestinians on their way to the frontier and hand them over to the Lebanese authorities. Israel is aware of the occasionally useful role its arch foe plays in helping maintain calm along the border, hence the willingness to play down last week’s Katyusha attack.

But things are different with regard to Palestinian militants operating here in Lebanon:

Continue reading “Hizbollah and Israel’s border”

What better way to respond to news that George W Bush has been elected President of the USA for the next four years than to go and visit contacts in Hizbullah, and in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, here in Beirut?
Hizbullah… Which has been listed by the US State Department as a “foreign terrorist organization”… Which has also been targeted in a US-inspired Security Council resolution that requires Lebanon to disband all “militias”..
…But which also happens to have been elected to no fewer than 12 seats in Lebanon’s 128-member parliament… and to have won control through popular elections of more than 140 municipalities throughout the country.
Hizbullah is quite a poster-boy for democratic control of local and national institutions! Just the folks to talk to about George W Bush’s extensive plans for democratizing the Middle East, don’t you think?
And then, there’s Shatila camp… Location of one of Ariel Sharon’s more notable earlier attempts to “solve” the Palestinian people through terror and extermination. I’ll write more about that, in a later post.
But meanwhile, back to Hizbullah… Back in the mid-1990s, the Lebanese people were chafing under a corruption-riddled system in which municipal leaderships had not been elected since 1963. Hizbullah was at the forefront of a movement to ensure accountable, democratic control of the municipalities, and managed to win government acquiescence in the idea of popular elections for municipal councils…
That first round of new local-level elections took place in 1998, and Hizbullah did fairly well in them. They did even better in the second round of municipal elections earlier this year, which indicates that their people performed pretty well during their maiden terms on the councils. (The local elections here Lebanon reflect the “popular will” of the electorate much more directly than the national-level elections. These latter consist of numerous small, multi-member contests conducted according to arcane rules specifying the religious affiliation of each of the candidates.)
So, being all in favor of finding out more about Hizbullah’s experiment in popular democracy, I set out this afternoon for their headquarters in the –Hizbullah-controlled– southern flanks of the city…. Also known here, more simply, as the “Dohhiya” (the suburb)…

Continue reading “Meeting Hizbullah”

Okay, we’ve been here in Beirut for 16 days and finally, tonight, Bill and I made a foray into the rebuilt “downtown” area.
We’ve driven through it a few times; at some speed, remarking on the number of new buildings that have gone up there in the five years since we were last here. Tonight, we exited the AUB campus onto the Corniche and walked east about a mile (through the old hotel district) till we came to the still-being-rebuilt areas of the old downtown.
For a period soon after I came to live here in 1974, I would transit downtown three or four times a day. I was living in Fakhani, a strongly Palestinian area quite a ways out of the central district to the southwest. I was studying Arabic at St. Joseph, the Jesuit university not far from downtown, and I also had a part-time job in an ad agency up on Hamra Street. So in the mornings I’d get a service (share-taxi) from Fakhani to downtown, walk briskly the few blocks to St. Joseph– where Bashir Gemayyel was studying law at the time. After a couple of hours there I’d walk back to downtown, perhaps pick up a knafeh bi-kaakeh to eat along the way, and get a service up to Hamra to go to my job for 2-3 hours. Then, a service back to downtown and to St. Joseph for the afternoon classes. Later, go back to the ad agency.
Gosh, I got to know certain routes and parts of the downtown really well… Where to go and look for a gypsy service if the main thoroughfares were blocked. Which corners were, on a dark evening, places where some stupid guy might make a grab at you. Where there would often be Egyptian migrant workers fighting on the street. Which were the fun little souks to come to late at night with friends for a sahlab treat. Where the cheap restaurants were that you could sit at late at night and watch the porters sweating as they hauled huge loads of fresh vegetables in to the market stalls at 3 a.m. Where the tricksters and shell-game artists would congregate to take advantage of people coming fresh into the city from the countryside. All of that.
Later, I’d come and hand in my copy at the Daily Star offices downtown.
A little after that, downtown became a battlefield…

Continue reading “Beirut downtown”

I’ve been continuing to work on re-encountering Beirut with some wariness.
Lots of reasons for that. Some personal, some political.

If you want to skip the following few “personal” observations
and get straight to what I write about the political situation here and in
the region, click here.

This afternoon, I walked up to Smith’s supermarket on Sadat Street. Boy,
the proliferation of big, modern supermarkets in Lebanon these days is really
something! Yesterday, I went to a large Monoprix near my old apartment
up on Verdun. Incredible: vast; extremely clean expanses of floor and shelving;
with great, mainly Lebanese goods hygienically packaged, beautifully presented,
and not terribly expensive… I’ll definitely go back there.

Smith’s Supermarket, however–an old institution in Ras Beirut–does not
quite compete with that one, on quite a number of grounds. Including
price. But it does have wine, and I wanted to lay in a couple of bottles.
Also, it’s within walking distance of our AUB faculty apartment here.
So I wandered around it a bit, picked up a few things, paid for them, and
was just picking my way over the nasty bit where they’re remaking the sidewalk
outside when I heard a gravelly male voice say, “Um Tarek, keefik?“

I don’t know how high I jumped off the ground. It’s been ages since
anyone called me Um Tarek–Tarek’s mom– the usual Arabic monicker for a
woman whose eldest son is called Tarek. Actually, on later consideration,
not that long: many of the Palestinian friends with whom I caught up in Ramallah
and Jerusalem last February are people who call me Um Tarek. But still,
I definitely wasn’t expecting it there, on the sidewalk outside Smith’s…

Continue reading “Beirut, part 4”