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.