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NEWS & LETTERS, March-April 2005Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
Lebanon opening?
The assassination of liberal politician Rafik Hariri has
sparked a vast democratic movement that includes members of all this fractured
country’s major religious groups--Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Druse--except
for Shi’ite Muslims. At a huge public funeral--attended by women as well as
men at the invitation of Hariri’s Sunni family, in defiance of Muslim
tradition--participants laid the blame at Syria’s door. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has continued his
father’s policy of dominating Lebanon through the presence of 15,000 Syrian
troops and control of the Lebanese police and intelligence apparatus. Syria has
not hesitated to use intimidation, including assassination. Last September, it
humiliated nationalist sentiment by pressuring the Lebanese parliament to change
the constitution to permit President Emile Lahoud to serve another term,
something Hariri opposed. In today’s Lebanon, "the scent of Kiev wafts in
the air," as LE MONDE aptly put it. A few days after the funeral, 100,000
took to the streets to accuse Syria, this in a country of only 3.7 million
people. Since then, young men and women with Lebanese flags painted on their
faces have camped outside parliament. The government retreated a bit, as the
pro-Syrian prime minister and his cabinet resigned, but Lahoud stayed on. With U.S. troops on its doorstep and serious
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations underway, Assad junior seems either to have
miscalculated, or to have lost control of his father’s military-intelligence
apparatus. In any case, Syria has misjudged the political climate, unlike the
Lebanese opposition. It was shocking to hear longtime anti-imperialist Walid
Jumblatt, the Druse leader who now heads the opposition, tell the WASHINGTON
POST: "This process of change started because of the American invasion of
Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three
weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." That may be true. But what do the Lebanese democrats think about the country’s 415,000 Palestinian refugees, confined to camps and denied citizenship or even the right to work? Or about the Shi’ite community, the country’s most impoverished, where the pro-Syrian fundamentalists of Hezbollah hold sway? |
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