A Perennial Purgatory

Lebanon’s struggle with itself and with Syria


Published in Foreign Policy Association




“They killed Hariri!” These words jolted me awake one February morning. Like most Lebanese, I was in disbelief. A man we fantasized to be greater than Lebanon, stronger than the system, had been so instantly eliminated. Only the night before, I had dismissed as naïve a French newspaper that highlighted the fatal threat five-time Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri faced for his newly-found opposition to Syria’s hegemony over Lebanon.



Then it happened. On February 14, 2005, Hariri was to travel with his security detail in a motorcade of 6 cars from Parliament to his Kuraytem Palace to perish, along with 22 others, less than 10 minutes later in a massive explosion.


In life, Hariri was a polarizing figure, not for his Obama-esque cool, but for what he represented—Saudi-backed Sunni dominion. But it was his death that wrote Lebanon’s history, sending the country into five years of convulsions: a quarter of the population would revolt in the largest gathering the country has known; Syria would withdraw; political assassinations would overshadow an anti-Syrian electoral win; provoked, Israel would launch a massive attack; Hezbollah would stage a 100 day sit-in that transforms Beirut into a ghost city; a pseudo-coup would drive the capital to the verge of a new civil war.


This rollercoaster of events is the focal point of The Ghosts of Martyrs Square in which Michael Young, a Lebanese journalist, seeks to make sense of what he calls “the moment” that shook the country’s fabric, resulting in the rise and fall of an independence movement that came to be known as the Cedar Revolution.


In Young’s narrative of the pre-2005 order, one nauseating image of Syria’s presence in Lebanon stands out, of Lebanese grandees visiting with Syrian head of intelligence Ghazi Kanaan in the Lebanese town of Anjar, “of waiting in his anteroom and laughing at his jokes, while down the road their countrymen were being softened up for their long journey into the twilight zone of Syria’s prisons, never to return.” Syria had long used a complex structure of control in Lebanon: while allowing a certain degree of liberalism, the Assad regime defined the limits for Lebanese oligarchs and exploited the country’s pluralism to pit them against one another. By design, however, this pluralism forced compromise as a restraining mechanism so that no actor, domestic or foreign, was stronger than the system.


Enter Syria’s grave sin. In eliminating a figure so inextricably linked with the system, young President Assad had disregarded the rules of the game his father understood best. Hariri’s riddance clashed with the core of Lebanese society mobilizing “the Sunnis and the Druze [to join] forces with the recalcitrant Christians,” and each community, “for reasons of its own—reasons based principally on their sectarian reading of politics and society”—shared a desire to oust Syria. Driven by their liberal impulse and survivalist instinct, the Lebanese, outraged, took to the streets.


But the rebellion was more sectarian than liberal in nature, reflecting more Lebanon’s “pluralistic cacophony than its unity.” In a moment of converged interests, society’s “sectarian thermostat” kicked in, producing the most unexpected alliances to defend a pluralistic order. The “fathers of the forest”, as Young brilliantly refers to the sectarian leaders in their multitude, “had an implied compact…based on a collective agreement to retain power.” With a shared destiny, their political survival necessitated relinquishing Syria’s patronage, albeit temporarily.


As the dust settled, participants of this uprising were bound to be disappointed as the revolution never existed, not with the narrative dreamt of by the international media. The truth is the Lebanese were hardly united. The Shiites in their loyalty to Hezbollah stood by Syria. And soon enough, in what Young contends was careful Syrian engineering, Christian rebel leader Michel Aoun defected from the anti-Syrian camp. The crack widened in the months to come as the fathers, recalculating their interests in an evolved context, parted ways so that five years after Hariri’s death, Syria (and Iran) came back on top. With a weaning international will and a regained Syrian role in Beirut, Hariri’s son and now Prime Minister paid Damascus a visit, his first, in December 2009.


Syria's Assad welcomes Hariri in Damascus, Dec 09.


Partisan in his account, Young has few kind words for Aoun, who commands the single largest Christian following, criticizing him for being in cahoots with Hezbollah and Syria’s Allawite regime while sparing his opponents, former Syrian sycophants. Young also accuses Hezbollah of engaging in minority paranoia to isolate the Shiites from Lebanese society. His conclusion is clear: “there is Lebanon and there is Hezbollah’s Lebanon; one or the other will prevail.” This may explain why the Christian Maronite leadership, instrumental in building modern Lebanon and its cities, has retreated to the mountains, as Young observes, in what may mirror a psychology of fear and seclusion.


Young’s work is colored with imagery. The journalist explains the Maronites’ pragmatism through their rituals and even draws an unlikely comparison between Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and late right-wing Christian arch-nemesis Bashir Gemayel. Yet what intrigues Young the most is Lebanon’s peculiar liberalism. He sees in a weak Lebanese state the possibility of pluralistic freedoms in a region where states use power to confine their citizens. Unequivocal in his preference, Young is kind to the sectarian system for allowing confessional communities to overpower the state. Weak states allow people to be who they are, conceivably not who they want to be, so that Lebanon is not heaven or hell. It is a perennial purgatory.


The epilogue for Lebanon has yet to be written. A special tribunal set up by the United Nations to prosecute perpetrators of the Hariri assassination is expected to issue its indictments between September and the end of 2010. Chaos may quickly find its way back if, as expected, Hezbollah and Syrian officials are charged with the killing. This explains why the Hariri camp, in light of recent Syrian rapprochement epitomized by the Syrian President's first visit to Beirut since 2002, is now downplaying the role of the very tribunal its leaders fought hard to create.


Life goes on for the Lebanese.


For now, with the project of a sovereign state on the back burner, the country is enjoying (relative) stability—perhaps thanks to Syrian acquiescence. The economy is growing comfortably and the summer promises a busy tourist season. It is morbidly ironic that the Lebanese who had criticized the late Hariri for erasing Beirut’s memory of the civil war have themselves fallen victim to amnesia.

Lessons from Lebanon’s Chronic Encounters With Violence

 
Published in Foreign Policy Association and Middle East Book Reviews

FROM THE LAROUSSE
Libanisation (Lebanization): the process of fragmentation of a state, as a result of confrontation between diverse communities.
 
Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict. By Samir Khalaf. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002. 368 pp. ISBN: 0-231-12476-7. US $27.50.


A LOT has been studied about Lebanon’s protracted civil war—identifying perpetrators, determining the “Sarajevo” that ignited the conflict, or ascribing responsibility. Little, however, has been said about the peculiarity of this war—what sets Lebanon apart from other violent contexts. It turns out that the forces that sustained the conflict (for fifteen years!) are different from those that ignited it in the first place, and, in Lebanon’s case, much more important in delineating the country’s tortuous trajectory. Even more obscure is that Lebanon’s modern history has been one of intermittent violence whose patterns have remained largely consistent for two centuries. This discovery serves as both the premise and the conclusion of Samir Khalaf’s Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon.

Khalaf’s examination of Lebanon’s conflicts since the 19th century uncovers three themes that investigations of communal strife overlook:

1. The circumstances that propelled oppressed groups to resort to social or political violence have not been those which sustained the violence or defined its character.

2. When communal discord replaced socioeconomic or political grievances as the face of a conflict, quelling violence became a herculean task. In Khalaf’s words, violence was transformed from a dependent variable to an independent variable inflicting its own vicious cycle of violence.

3. Lebanon’s successive encounters with violence have been futile. As Kaplan suggests, for wars to be productive, they must produce a victor and a vanquished. Much to the interests and efforts of foreign powers, conflicts in Lebanon always ended in suspension.

Lebanon’s major episodes of unrest reveal painstaking similarities in their pattern of violence. Conflicts that started as ordinary socioeconomic or political protest quickly turned into sectarian confrontation. Once conflicts took on a sectarian edge, and they almost always did, they acquired a life of their own and spiraled out of control as self-definition became threatened. Essentially, as Hanf explains, conflicts that were initially over divisible goods became struggles over indivisible principles. Finally, and most painfully, these conflicts have been largely futile, at best restoring status quo.

Today, coexistence is ever so distant. In short, Lebanon’s history with violence is especially vexing as hostilities never revolved around a set of causes nor have they resolved core issues that ignited unrest.

Familiar pattern: a donkey is a donkey

Against this conceptual backdrop, Khalaf revisits three distinct conflicts—the uprisings of the 1800s, the turmoil of 1958, and the 1975-1990 war. In each, he demonstrates how civil circumstances that propelled groups to mobilize were deflected into confessional conflicts, and how geopolitical forces and regional and global rivalries consistently amplified fissures.

Take for instance the peasant uprisings of the 1800’s where Feudal Mount Lebanon’s Christians & Druze—who had lived harmoniously for a long time—were pitted against each other by their Ottoman & Egyptian masters. Or the 1958 pseudo-war where Syrian and Egyptian efforts in propping up the opposition against the Chamoun government, along with the creation of the United Arab Republic in 1958 and the Maronites’ perennial fears of being engulfed by Arab nationalism and Palestinian presence, quickly transformed the situation into a vengeful conflict defined along confessional lines.

Conflicts that started off civil—revolving around socioeconomic or political disparities— were quickly transformed into battles of identity, and Lebanon became a bloody circus. Time and time again, fear of loss of identity and heritage, one’s very existence, motivated “out-of-control” violence—including banditry, kidnappings, and torture. And again, violence subsided, much as it had started, with foreign intervention—the latest in the form of the Taif Accord, which clinched to the “the ethos of no victor and no vanquished.”

An Ominous future?

Khalaf provides a glimpse of the country’s social psyche that sustained violence and the resulting psychological scars. He explains how ordinary citizens get entrapped in aggression and how traumatized groups come to cope with chronic fear and hostility. He addresses the impact of war on collective memory, group loyalties, and attitudes towards the “other.” Religion and the vilification of the “other” sanctified violence. It simply became routine: groups engaged in such cruelties believed they were morally justified, and observers morally distanced themselves to the extent of desensitization. In essence, citizens became frenzied spectators morbidly fascinated by a Spanish bullfight. 

Most ominously, the picture of post-war Lebanon is bleak. Perhaps the most important impact of the war is what he calls the “retribalization” and “reteritorialization of identities.” The war has reinforced kinship and confessional loyalties. It has destroyed public spaces that provided venues for intercommunity interaction and has caused people to retreat to homogenous spaces. The density of social interaction and intensified intracommunal loyalties are foreboding for the nation. Boundaries between communities, once physical, have become psychological, cultural, and ideological barriers.

Enter “postwar barbarism.” Khalaf persuasively elaborates how, as a consequence of the war, the Lebanese show “no self-control in directing their future options.” Instead they reveal “insatiable desires for acquisitiveness, lawlessness, and unearned privileges,” ranging from the negligence of laws to the destruction of the environment to increased wickedness to the obsession with kitsch and vulgar trends. Khalaf laments the proliferation of kitsch—propagated by the desire to escape the memories of the past—that have vulgarized folk art and architecture in the process of providing cheap distractions to the wounded Lebanese souls.

The reader may take solace in the author’s moderate voice. While providing a sobering account of a violent nation, he reminds us that Lebanon knew periods of calm that rendered the country an avant-garde paradise in the region. Khalaf, a sociologist by training, is at his best in exploring in exquisite detail the social and cultural forces that made Lebanon a cultural paradise in 1959-1975. Few have provided such a comprehensive exposé of Lebanese society during that time.

It is a pity, however, that Khalaf does not more deeply explore the two modern periods of relative calm—1860-1958 and 1959-1975—to understand whether Lebanon could ever again experience such prosperity. With a civil war on the horizon in the latter period, the reader would benefit from a deeper analysis of the economic and political grievances stirring beneath the surface and how society managed to keep them at bay.

Breathe fresh air, pick fresh roses

Perhaps most interesting in this work is the absence of policy recommendations related to political reform. Khalaf must have given up on the role of politicians. Perhaps he knows too well that such alternatives have been proven naïve, imaginary solutions. In fact, Khalaf explicitly encourages focusing on strategies unrelated to conflict resolution and political reforms.

Khalaf emphasizes the role of restoring social spaces in reconnecting “denationalized” Lebanese with each other and with their country. He focuses on the importance of what Paul Rabinow refers to as the “social technologies of pacification” in bringing back meaningful life to society. He calls on urban designers, architects, and intellectuals to play a much needed role in Lebanon—connecting the citizenry through public space. “By mobilizing aesthetic sensibilities… and cultural expressions…, they can prod the Lebanese to…transcend the parochial identities to connect with others.” Productive social networks provide opportunities for intercommunal socialization. Examples include environmental campaigns, pro-local agriculture produce campaigns, and activities promoting women rights.

The alternative he points out is bleak:

“Consider what happens when a country’s most precious heritage either is maligned or becomes beyond the reach of its citizens…their country’s scenic geography, is pluralistic and open institutions, which were once sources of national pride…have either become inaccessible to them, or worse, are being redefined as worthless.”

The point is: group loyalties can be resocialized, but it is not an uncomplicated task.

A Lebanese Confession: Why Religious Politics Is Bad for Lebanon

In Lebanon, you are never simply Lebanese. You are Sunni from Beirut, Maronite Catholic from Jounieh, or Shia from the South. Whether seeking to marry or applying for a job, the first question is always what “confession,” or religious sect, you belong to. That is the reality of Lebanese society, a reality reinforced by confessionalism—the political framework that is tearing the country apart.

Rarely cited beyond the Lebanese context, confessionalism is a democratic system that distributes positions in the government, legislature, and civil service proportionally among religious communities. For instance, if a certain confession is said to make up 20 percent of the population, its political leaders are guaranteed 20 percent of legislative seats. That’s the theory, anyway. And though this framework was originally devised to promote peaceful coexistence among disparate communities, it really does just the opposite; it deepens sectarian differences and weakens the state by encouraging allegiance to one’s confessional group over the nation.

Historical Perspective

For a country of only four million people, Lebanon is intensely diverse religiously, culturally, and politically. The country is a mosaic of seventeen confessions of various Christian and Muslim stripes, none of which comprises a majority (see Figure 1). Rivalries—Christian versus Muslim, Christian versus Christian, and Muslim versus Muslim—date back to the first millennium and have long hindered the development of a unified national identity.




Confessionalism is the political embodiment of this fractured reality. An offshoot of consociationalism, it is a form of government involving guaranteed group representation. Other consociational states include Belgium, Switzerland, and Nigeria—all of which are divided along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines, with no group large enough to govern alone. To remain stable, these countries rely on consultations among the political elite of each major group to conduct the messy work of governance. When consociationalism is organized along religious lines, it is called confessionalism.

As early as the thirteenth century, Lebanon adopted various forms of confessionalism to protect the identity of its diverse communities and ensure a balance of power. The system in its modern form was established under the 1926 constitution. When a census in 1932 identified Christians as the majority, the ratio of Christians to Muslims in parliament was set at six to five, with subgroups within each faith receiving their own guaranteed number of seats. Intense wrangling ultimately led to a compromise stating that the Lebanese presidency would always go to Maronite Catholics (the largest among the Christian sects), the prime ministry to Sunnis, and the presidency of parliament to Shiites.

The state functioned, barely, until its collapse in 1975 with the outbreak of a civil war. While the war was precipitated by myriad internal and external forces, a central factor was the inter-communal tension institutionalized by the confessional framework. A growing Muslim population—fueled by lower emigration and higher birth rates—felt neglected and demanded a greater share of the political power. Sectarian rifts exploded. In all, the war claimed more than 200,000 lives.
The war ended in 1989 with the Taif Accord, which diminished Christians’ relative power. Muslims and Christians were now to have equal representation, and the Christian president was stripped of some executive authority. A bright spot for Lebanon at large, however, was that the accord identified the elimination of confessionalism as a national priority. The divisive framework that helped lead thousands to their deaths and many more to emigrate was supposed to be consigned to the dustbin of Lebanese history. But twenty years later, still no progress has been made in this direction.

The Case against Confessionalism

Proponents of confessionalism insist that with no group constituting a majority of the Lebanese population, representation of every confession must be guaranteed to ensure that each group has a political voice. Coexistence, we’re told, is crucial. And indeed it is. The problem is that confessionalism has bred perverse incentives that undermine the very possibility of harmonious coexistence.

Almost by definition, a nation depends on the development of overarching economic, social, and cultural structures of cooperation that transcend intra-national factionalism. Confessionalism, however, promotes the primacy of religious identity. In Lebanon, religious institutions exercise direct control over many facets of daily life, such as marriage and inheritance. Confessionalism has also institutionalized patronage in the political system. Indirect controls and clannish clientelism are plentiful, as jobs, housing, and education are often obtained through appeals to confessional political leaders. These zouama provide favors and protection to their constituents in return for unquestioned electoral loyalty. This encourages close vertical assimilation within confessional communities and obstructs horizontal integration across them, incubating religious-based “states” within the state. As a result, the country suffers from a weak national identity and anemic levels of integration across its communities.

Another source of division is that in a confessional state, the proportional power of each religion must (in theory) be perpetually recalibrated to account for changing demographics over time. But because the matter of religious balance is a sensitive political issue, a national census has not been conducted in Lebanon since 1932 (see Figure 2). A Christian majority in that census gave Christians the highest number of representatives, but as the century progressed and the Sunni and Shiite populations increased, Christians were wielding a disproportionate amount of power. The Taif Accord adjusted the shares of representation, primarily in favor of Sunnis, but today, Christians (who make up the majority of the diaspora) and Shiites feel disenfranchised. This bitterness is further aggravated by the widening Sunni-Shiite divide across the Middle East—a divide that, according to a 2010 Pew Research Center survey, is particularly acute in Lebanon. How long before the eruption of a new calibrating war?



A perpetually delicate confessional balance makes the state extremely sensitive to internal and external stressors. Minor changes in the political environment can trigger instability, and there have been several attempts at artificially bloating population numbers of specific communities to gain greater political clout. In the 1950s, for instance, Lebanese President Camille Chamoun naturalized Christian Palestinians in an effort to boost the number of Lebanese Christians. Similarly, in 1994, the naturalization of Syrian workers and Sunni Palestinians aimed to bolster the Sunni population. Although no census took place to recalibrate power based on these demographic changes, inflating the number of a confession’s members provides more votes for that demographic and strengthens its leaders’ political power in negotiations.

Externally, foreign actors have further contributed to Lebanon’s instability by applying pressure to the confessional structure. Israel collaborated with the Christians in 1982, seeking to empower them as it invaded the country. Western countries have long favored the Christians, the Arab world has backed the Sunnis, and today Iran supports the Shiites. Amidst this playfield of foreign interference, the loser is the Lebanese state.

The Path Forward

Many contend that a secular solution can be found only once the Lebanese are “mature” enough to more fully separate religion from the state. In a December 2009 article in the Lebanese Daily Star, the patriarch of Lebanon’s Maronite Church asked, “What is the advantage of abolishing political confessionalism in [national] texts before doing so in [people’s] minds?” But the maturity argument is self-fulfilling. The more entrenched the Lebanese are in a confessional society, the more solidified their prejudices become and the harder it is to cultivate national unity that transcends religious lines. A sustainable nation depends on the development of common interests across communities. Confessionalism should therefore be abandoned.

Still, the secularization process needs to be gradual and inclusive. As required by the Taif Accord, parliament should put forth a transition plan. Under parliament’s oversight, a task force of leading political, intellectual, and religious figures would present proposals for a secular framework. A bicameral transition government would be formed—one chamber based on the current confessional framework and the other elected without confessional quotas. The chambers would work jointly on a strategy for national reconciliation to reaffirm the Lebanese identity through substantial reforms in governance, electoral law, and civic education.

Of course, this proposal assumes widespread political will, which thus far has been lacking. Public opinion is (predictably) divided along confessional lines. With changing demographics, former critics of confessionalism have become its strongest enthusiasts, while its former advocates are now its opponents. Shiite Muslims, with their plurality of the population, lament their current level of power compared to what they would exercise under a majority rule. Previously secularized Christians, on the other hand, are now fearful of the rising power of Muslims and are more willing to accept the confessionalized status quo.

In fact, a recent survey by the Lebanese Opinion Advisory Committee found that more than 50 percent of Lebanese agree that political confessionalism is rooted in Lebanese culture and cannot be removed. This political landscape is reflected in Lebanon’s parliamentary maneuvering. When the debate about abrogating confessionalism surfaced in January 2010, as it often does, the Shia speaker of parliament called for the formation of a national committee to oversee the process of ending this framework. Threatened by what they perceive would be the Islamization of the country, Christian leaders were quick to veto such a move.

Change will require a revitalized political and civic culture. If the champions of reform remain confessional leaders demanding a bigger piece of the pie, the result will be more knee-jerk defensiveness that exacerbates inter-communal hostilities. Perhaps, as Nawaf Salam, a Lebanese academic and diplomat, has written in “Deconfessionalizing the Call for Deconfessionalization” for the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, “Deconfessionalization is too serious an issue in Lebanon to be left to traditional politicians. Instead, it is a challenge for civil society and new social forces.” According to Salam, deconfessionalization will depend on the emergence of strong nongovernmental organizations that cut across sectarian barriers, collectively acting both as pressure groups and as a successful model for what a nonconfessional state would look like.

This path to a secular and sustainable Lebanon would be long and tortuous but, one hopes, possible. After all, when confessionalism was embedded in the country’s constitution, it was regarded as an interim political arrangement whose architects emphasized the need for its swift riddance. That was eight decades ago.

Michel Chiha, a Lebanese thinker, once wrote in Politique Intérieure, “A nation is a guarantee for confessions, but confessions are not a guarantee to the nation.” Indeed, without reform, they just might be the nation’s undoing.