TRIPOLI — What the heck is going on up here? That seems to be the big ques­tion at the moment. Last night around 9 p.m., fight­ing started up again between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam. This prompted spec­u­la­tion that the push against the jihadi group had come, and I raced back up to Tripoli from my spot of being stuck in a check­point just out­side Beirut. (The cap­i­tal is locked down after three bombs this week, so secu­rity is tight.)
Atop the build­ing where the tele­vi­sion crews have set up, the owner of the build­ing — a tightly wound guy in the best of times — car­ried around a Kalash­nikov and threat­ened to shoot any­one who turned on their tele­vi­sion lights.
In the dark­ness, you couldn’t see who was who, and a rumor — goosed, appar­ently by Lebanese mil­i­tary intel­li­gence — swept through the gang that Fatah al-Islam had sent sui­cide bombers through­out the nearby area and one might be on the roof. A quick evac­u­a­tion ensued.
This morn­ing it’s quiet again. The fight­ing stopped around 6 a.m., and we’re back to wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen.
My feel­ing is that Fuad Siniora’s gov­ern­ment is a bit con­fused, as the Pales­tin­ian issue is a tricky one. The sta­tus of Pales­tini­ans in Lebanon is not a purely inter­nal affair, but one belong­ing to the Arab League thanks to a 1969 agree­ment that keeps Lebanese author­ity out of the 12 camps scat­tered around the coun­try. Fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters, the camp isn’t empty. There has been a more or less steady trickle of refugees get­ting out of the camps, either on foot or in cars, but there are still about 18,000 civil­ians in the camp, accord­ing to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
The human­i­tar­ian sit­u­a­tion is grow­ing worse by the hour inside the camp, accord­ing to the Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee of the Red Cross, and scat­tered demon­stra­tions in other camps have already occurred. More casu­al­ties among civil­ians is going to inflame the Pales­tini­ans in Lebanon — an already seething peo­ple who make up about 10 per­cent of Lebanon’s pop­u­la­tion. Sul­tan Abu Aynan, the head of Lebanon’s branch of Fatah — the main group in the PLO — has warned of a gen­eral upris­ing among the Pales­tini­ans could occur. Other Arab gov­ern­ments have also expressed con­cern over the casu­al­ties (even while they pledge a rush ship­ment of weapons to the Lebanese army.)
So a long siege is unten­able to the Pales­tini­ans and Arab gov­ern­ments around the region. But leav­ing Fatah al-Islam alone is equally unten­able to the Lebanese gov­ern­ment. Going into the camp, no mater how care­fully, will result in hor­rific casu­al­ties among both the Pales­tini­ans and the Lebanese army, per­haps the only state insti­tu­tion almost widely admired by all of Lebanon’s quar­rel­ing con­fes­sional groups. Fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters, mem­bers of the oppo­si­tion, led by the Syr­ian– and Iranian-backed Hezbol­lah, camped out in down­town since Dec. 1, have started mak­ing polit­i­cal hay out of this sit­u­a­tion by accus­ing the U.S.-backed gov­ern­ment of incom­pe­tence and dither­ing — charges which aren’t entirely untrue.
I men­tion the var­i­ous back­ers because solv­ing the prob­lem of Fatah al-Islam has impli­ca­tions far beyond the bor­ders of Lebanon. While mass casu­al­ties on the army’s side would be bad, in Lebanon, the fear of the “other” over­rides all. It’s highly unlikely Siniora’s polit­i­cal allies in the Chris­t­ian and Druze camps would desert him no mat­ter how bad a mil­i­tary assault might be.
(On a side note, Saad Hariri, the son of the slain for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Rafik Hariri, urged his sup­port­ers — of which there are many in this con­ser­v­a­tive Sunni area — to help the army. Allegedly, some have taken that to heart because I’ve heard sto­ries from Pales­tini­ans who say Future Move­ment fol­low­ers are shoot­ing into the camp at any­thing that moves. How do they know the bul­lets are from Future Move­ment sup­port­ers? Who knows, but the truth is almost irrel­e­vant in this case; the sus­pi­cions indi­cate the depth of dis­trust between Pales­tini­ans and local res­i­dents up here.)
So while army casu­al­ties would be bad, large num­bers of dead among the Pales­tini­ans would be worse. Arab gov­ern­ments in the region such as Egypt, Jor­dan, Saudi Ara­bia and the var­i­ous Gulf sheikhdoms would be seen by their own restive pop­u­la­tions as help­ing a gov­ern­ment mas­sacre Pales­tini­ans — and it would be an _Arab_ gov­ern­ment doing it. Talk about betrayal! (Al Jazeera, by far the most pop­u­lar news chan­nel through­out the Mid­dle East, “is allegedly push­ing this narrative”:http://beirutspring.com/blog/2007/05/23/why-many-lebanese-are-shunning-aljazeera/, although I can’t ver­ify this just yet.) So Cairo, Amman and oth­ers are watch­ing this sit­u­a­tion very closely.
This would be bad for Sin­iora because he relies not only on sup­port from the West, but from friendly Arab gov­ern­ments who want to check the Iranian-Syrian axis. Weak­en­ing Sin­iora means strength­en­ing Hezbol­lah in Lebanon’s zero-sum pol­i­tics, which would fur­ther strength­en­ing Syria, right when it’s fac­ing a pos­si­ble United Nations Secu­rity Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion that would set up the Hariri tri­bunal under Chap­ter 7.
The com­mon thread in all of this is Syria. Fatah al-Islam is sus­pected of being a Syr­ian mar­i­onette and Hezbol­lah is a Syr­ian ally. With threats from the north, south and east, the lit­tle prime-minister-that-could is rapidly run­ning out of room to maneuver.