Category Archives: Lebanon

l’Affaire Sayyed?

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BEIRUT — In the “boy, that’s chutz­pah” cat­e­gory, for­mer direc­tor of the Lebanese Surete Gen­erale (Gen­eral Secu­rity), Jamil Sayyed, has made a new appeal for his release by call­ing for a “Lebanese Emile Zola” to stand up for him. If you’re not famil­iar with that ref­er­ence, Zola was the writer who defended the falsely accused Alfred Drey­fuss in the ugly “l’Affaire Drey­fuss” in France in the late 19th cen­tury, which saw the Jew­ish French Army cap­tain wrongly impris­oned for treason.

It occurred in a time of vir­u­lent anti-Jewish sen­ti­ment in France at the time — as was com­mon in most of Europe, frankly — and while it wasn’t the whole rea­son for Drey­fuss’ prob­lems, his being from a wealthy and old Jew­ish fam­ily didn’t help matters.

Zola’s role in this was to pub­lish his famous open let­ter — the J’Accuse! let­ter — in the hopes of spark­ing a libel trial and get­ting the facts out on Drey­fuss. It worked, and Drey­fuss was even­tu­ally acquit­ted, released and went on to become a knight in the Legion d’Honneur and fight for France in World War I.

Sayyed, on the other hand, was a much-feared indi­vid­ual before the end of the Syr­ian occu­pa­tion in 2005, and ran one of the more pow­er­ful and fear­some secu­rity ser­vices in the coun­try. Many, many Lebanese dis­si­dents were thrown in jail and tor­tured under his watch. A lot of them died.

That he is now com­par­ing him­self to Drey­fuss must be one of the more ironic devel­op­ments in Lebanon, a coun­try largely lack­ing in abil­ity to per­ceive irony. If there’s any hope of jus­tice in the world, l’Affaire Sayyed will have a markedly dif­fer­ent end­ing from the one 109 years ago — and one worth remem­ber­ing, too.

Jumblatt shoots his mouth off

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BEIRUT — Well, this is just great. Druze leader Walid Jum­blatt said that rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with Hezbol­lah was “impos­si­ble” because the Shi’ite mil­i­tant group wants to replace the cur­rent plu­ral­ist state and soci­ety of Lebanon.
This is bunk. I have my crit­i­cisms of Hezbol­lah, but they don’t want to take over the whole coun­try. For one, they don’t want the respon­si­bil­ity. They want to be a resis­tance move­ment fight­ing the Israelis; they don’t want to be in charge of fill­ing pot­holes in Tariq el-Jdeide. They want enough power within the cur­rent sys­tem to guar­an­tee the south remains theirs, so they can move freely in and out of it and keep their weapons, which is the real base of their power. Does any­one think Iran and Syria would con­tinue to finance them if they weren’t such an effec­tive tool against Israel? If Hezbol­lah had no weapons, then they have no money. If they have no money, they have no abil­ity to sup­port their social ser­vices, which are a strong draw to Lebanon’s poorer Shi’ite pop­u­la­tion. With­out that loy­alty, they’re noth­ing — and Hezbol­lah knows it. As Hezbol­lah sees it, they _have_ to pro­tect their weapons if they want to remain polit­i­cally viable.
But back to Jum­blatt (or “Jumbo” as he’s affec­tion­ately know to local jour­nal­ists). He’s long had a rep­u­ta­tion as a dial-a-quote politician/warlord, but he rep­re­sents one of the small­est com­mu­ni­ties in Lebanon. (Druze make up maybe 5 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion.)
What’s dan­ger­ous about his com­ments, how­ever, is that he’s lis­tened to by the rank and file of March 14, and his com­ments can harden atti­tudes to any kind of com­pro­mise — which is sorely needed these days. Hezbol­lah ain’t going away, and it has to be inte­grated into the Lebanese polit­i­cal sys­tem some­how — fully and non­vi­o­lently. Jumblatt’s com­ments make that more dif­fi­cult.
At any rate, his com­ments came in the wake of the dis­turb­ing dis­cov­ery of two caches of explo­sives and det­o­na­tion fuses scat­tered around Beirut and the rest of the coun­try. Per­haps some­one was just try­ing to dump them, but it’s set the place on edge. Care­less com­ments from polit­i­cal lead­ers are not the best way to calm the situation.

A response to the Jerusalem Post

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BEIRUT — A response is in order to the Jeru­asalem Post’s story today, in which Michael Tot­ten is inter­viewed and my name comes up in the arti­cle.
The _Post_ says, “Chris Allbrit­ton, who some­times works for Time Mag­a­zine, briefly men­tioned on his blog dur­ing the war that sev­eral jour­nal­ists he knows were threat­ened by Hizbul­lah because of what they were writ­ing.“
Let’s look at what I “actu­ally wrote”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2006/07/tales_from_the_south_sort_of.php:

To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbol­lah is launch­ing Katyushas, but I’m loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s pass­port, and they’ve already has­sled a num­ber of us and threat­ened one.

In a “follow-up post”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2006/08/silence.php, I expanded on this, as this one com­ment was taken com­pletely the wrong way by many, many right-wing blogs and pub­li­ca­tions (Such as Totten’s and the JPost.)
The begin­ning of my response was this:

Let’s set aside that the Lebanese Inter­nal Secu­rity also has pho­to­copies of our pass­ports. The rea­son for the has­sling and the threat was that a reporter had filmed or described either a launch­ing site or Hezbol­lah posi­tions. (I’m not sure which.) To the best of my knowl­edge, that’s been the extent of the has­sling. I’m going to get in trou­ble for this, but I think it’s a rea­son­able restric­tion. This is the exact same restric­tions placed on jour­nal­ists by the Israeli army and by the Amer­i­cans in Iraq. I don’t think threat­en­ing jour­nal­ists is cool at all, and it cer­tainly doesn’t endear me to them, but that has been the extent of Hezbollah’s inter­fer­ence in our coverage.

You can read the rest of it, and I hope you do, “here”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2006/08/silence.php.

Two buses blown up in Christian area

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BEIRUT — Bombs destroyed two com­muter buses today in the small Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity of Ain Alaq, in the moun­tains north of Beirut.
Reports of fatal­i­ties var­ied, but ranged from three (Red Cross, secu­rity forces) to 12 (LBC and other media sources.) Ten to 20 were wounded. The first bomb was appar­ently attached to the under­car­riage of the first bus while the sec­ond was in a back seat on the sec­ond, accord­ing to my fixer, who is try­ing to find more info. I’ll update if this changes.
The wounded were civil­ians pos­si­bly trav­el­ing to work, mark­ing a change in the “two-year cam­paign of bomb­ings and assassinations”:http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L13582123.htm that has wracked Lebanon since the killing of Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14, 2005. Before, the attacks were either tar­geted assas­si­na­tions of well-known anti-Syrian politi­cians and jour­nal­ists or small bombs exploded in build­ings late at night so as to min­i­mize casu­al­ties. This seems aimed at Iraq– or Israel-style ter­ror. Ran­dom, any­where, piti­less.
Details are still emerg­ing, but spec­u­la­tion is ram­pant. Was this Syria? Hezbol­lah? CIA? (A Hezbol­lah spokesman said it was the lat­ter.) Was it a warn­ing to the March 14 coali­tion not to attend the big rally planned for down­town tomor­row to mark the two-year anniver­sary of Hariri’s death?
One intrigu­ing con­nec­tion is to Elias Murr, Lebanon’s defense min­is­ter. The buses orig­i­nated in Bteghrin, the home of the Murr fam­ily — they’re the major clan there — and some have won­dered if this could be a response to Murr’s “refusal last week to return a truck full of Hezbol­lah weapons”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6345761.stm inter­cepted by the Lebanese Army?
Elias Murr was the tar­get of a failed assas­si­na­tion in July 2005.
I’m not con­vinced of that, as it would be a com­plete turn-around for Hezbol­lah, who have not (yet) turned their weapons on their fel­low Lebanese — a point of pride for the group.
Also, the attack hap­pened near Bik­faya, the ances­tral home of the Gemayel clan. Sev­eral of the dead were Gemayels. Lebanon’s indus­try min­is­ter, Pierre Gemayel “was assassinated”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2006/11/pierre_gemayel_has_been_assass.php in Novem­ber.
Michel Murr, the defense minister’s father, was at the site of the bomb­ing and said it was a mes­sage for all Lebanese to come together and tran­scend pol­i­tics. That’s a nice sen­ti­ment, but it’s almost assuredly _not_ the mes­sage the bombers were try­ing to send.
More likely, it was a warn­ing to March 14.
“They are try­ing to sab­o­tage tomorrow’s meet­ing,” said Ahmad Fat­fat, the for­mer inte­rior min­is­ter. “They are try­ing to divide the Chris­tians. … The peo­ple who are doing this don’t want the peo­ple to come together and it’s another link in the chain” of assas­si­na­tions.
“I can­not believe any Lebanese is capa­ble of doing such a ter­ri­ble thing,” he added.
Fat­fat also said the bombs were placed on the buses yes­ter­day, although he declined to say how he knew that.
Obvi­ously, Fat­fat is not-so-subtlely point­ing the fin­ger at Syria. A Hezbol­lah spokesman said the same thing, but blamed the CIA instead of Syria.
I wit­nessed this in Iraq, too, by the way, early in the insur­gency. In 2004, when the vio­lence was much more spo­radic and rare than it is now, Iraqis would often tell me, “These bombs could not come from Iraqis. No Iraqi would hurt another Iraqi. This must be the Israelis or CIA.“
There’s always a nat­ural ten­dency to believe that out­siders are the ones doing the killing. Wit­ness the imme­di­ate reac­tion to the Mur­rah Build­ing in 1995. Every­one imme­di­ately sus­pected Arab ter­ror­ism, not home-grown white suprema­cists.
But right now, espe­cially on the eve of the anniver­sary of the killing of Hariri, every­one in Lebanon — Hezbol­lah, March 14, etc. — is bank­ing on national unity for their own pur­poses. “Hariri was for all of us,” as many say. Other par­ties — Syria, espe­cially, but pos­si­bly Israel — would love to see Lebanese at each oth­ers’ throats. Syria could use any vio­lence as an “I told you so” excuse to inter­vene again, and Israel prob­a­bly wouldn’t mind see­ing Hezbol­lah on the defen­sive in its own coun­try.
(Mind you, I’m not accus­ing Israel of today’s bomb­ing; I’m just ana­lyz­ing who might stand to gain from Lebanese dis­cord.)
*UNRELATED (?) NEWS:* The Grand Mufti of Lebanon, Sheikh Moham­mad Rashid Qab­bani, the high­est rank­ing Sunni cleric in coun­try, claims in a press release to LBC that he was heck­led and threat­ened by the pro-Syrian, Hezbollah-led March 8 pro­test­ers as he led prayers at Hariri’s grave in Martyr’s Square down­town today. He says he was told to leave or they would burn his car.
(March 8 is a coali­tion of mostly Shi’ite par­ties and some Chris­tians, and includes Hezbol­lah, Amal, the Syr­ian Social Nation­al­ist Party and the Chris­t­ian par­ties of Michel Aoun and Suleiman Fran­jieh. With the excep­tion of Aoun, they are all solidly pro-Syrian. Aoun just wants to be pres­i­dent and will hitch his horse to whichever wagon he thinks will win.)
Also, in this morning’s _San Fran­cisco Chronicle_, I have a story about the “rearm­ing of the Lebanese factions.”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/13/MNG62O3F5U1.DTL&hw=allbritton&sn=001&sc=1000 It might become very rel­e­vant after today.

Beirut in flames

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hard_days_work.jpg
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.