An oppo­si­tion mem­ber cra­dles the head of an exhausted com­rade as they take a break from block­ing roads in Beirut on Tues­day © 2007 Christo­pher Allbrit­ton
BEIRUT — If there was any ques­tion whether Hezbol­lah was in con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion here fol­low­ing the vio­lence of Tues­day, the fight­ing today should con­vince those that it is not, and the sit­u­a­tion is about to be seri­ously out of con­trol.
To back up a lit­tle, Tuesday’s vio­lence seemed to shock even the lead­ers of Hezbol­lah, both because its Aounists and Amal allies behaved like hooli­gans, but also because the fol­low­ers of Saad Hariri and Samir Geagea refused to back down and matched slo­gan with slo­gan, stick with stick, stone with stone.
At one neigh­bor­hood in Beirut, where the fight­ing was fiercest, the largely Sunni sup­port­ers of al-Mustaqbal chanted their sup­port for Amer­ica (in response to the chants of “Iran! Iran!” and “Bashar! Syria!” by Amal sup­port­ers across the street.) They also, bizarrely, hoisted a poster of Sad­dam Hus­sein, indi­cat­ing that the Sunni-Shi’a con­flict from Iraq has poi­soned the atmos­phere in Lebanon now, too.
This is about to be a full-on sec­tar­ian clash between Sun­nis and Shi’a and within the Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity.
That’s why Hezbol­lah and its allies called off their strike after a day, despite many promises by the men on the street I saw who said they would con­tinue the strike “for days,” if nec­es­sary.
“Do you not think Hezbol­lah loves Lebanon?” asked Bilal, a Hezbol­lah sup­porter I spoke with as his com­pa­tri­ots burned a car to block the road lead­ing the air­port. “Of course we do, which is why we are pre­pared to stay out here for days, weeks.“
More omi­nously, today’s vio­lence shows that Hezbol­lah no longer con­trols the oppo­si­tion move­ment it cre­ated. Months of ani­mos­ity over the war, the par­lia­men­tary paral­y­sis and calls for chang­ing the gov­ern­ment has hard­ened posi­tions among the Sunni, who increas­ingly see the Shi’a as respon­si­ble for last summer’s war and more loyal to Iran than to Lebanon. In short, the Shi’ite mil­i­tant group has pushed its polit­i­cal oppo­nents too far.
Already this has spread beyond the cap­i­tal. The Lebanese Army has been deployed to Chtoura and Baal­bak in the Bekaa and there are as yet uncon­firmed reports that the road to old road to Sidon has been closed. By whom, we don’t know.
Four peo­ple are dead and at least 25 injured and while this flare-up might be con­tained, the next one appears inevitable. And next time it won’t be fought with sticks and stones.