Category Archives: Lebanon

“The blood of the Shi’ites is boiling”

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Here’s the lat­est I filed from Lebanon. “A much shorter version”:http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-10/116556152129650.xml&coll=1 appeared in the _Newark Star-Ledger_, but here’s the full account:

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s cap­i­tal is once again a tin­der­box, ready to blow because of polit­i­cal rival­ries exac­er­bated by sec­tar­ian ten­sions. Increas­ingly, the polit­i­cal dis­putes — which are osten­si­bly over inter­na­tional tri­bunals, pres­i­den­tial terms and the legit­i­macy of a gov­ern­ment — have grown into reli­gious dis­putes, mir­ror­ing the sec­tar­ian ten­sions between Sun­nis and Shi’ites across the region.
Which leader one sup­port­ers is often deter­mined by one’s faith. Shi’ites sup­port the Syrian-backed Hezbol­lah and its leader, Has­san Nas­ral­lah, who has called for the over­throw of the cur­rent gov­ern­ment as being too close to the United States and cut­ting Shi’ites out of power for too long. Sun­nis, how­ever, sup­port the cur­rent gov­ern­ment because it is lead by Prime Min­is­ter Fuad Sin­iora, who is a mem­ber of the Future Move­ment, a polit­i­cal party headed Saad Hariri, the son of the mur­dered ex-premier Rafik, who was killed in 2005.
“The polit­i­cal issues are sec­tar­ian,” explained Tariq Tar­qawi, 20, who is, in order, a Pales­tin­ian, a Sunni and a car elec­tri­cian. He lives in Ard Jal­loul, a mainly Sunni neigh­bor­hood that abuts the mainly Shi’ite sub­urbs of Beirut. “They love Nas­ral­lah, we love Hariri.“
It’s a polit­i­cal cri­sis that has come to a head in the past week, with hun­dreds of thou­sands of pro-Syrian sup­port­ers fill­ing down­town Beirut and street clashes between Sunni and Shi’ite youths from rival neigh­bor­hoods. Nas­ral­lah says his peo­ple will con­tinue to demon­strate and par­a­lyze cen­tral Beirut until the gov­ern­ment resigns. Sin­iora says he’s stay­ing. Where this ends up is anyone’s guess, but it’s already turned deadly.
Ali Ahmad Mah­moud, a 20-year-old Shi’ite from the neigh­bor­hood, was killed Sun­day night in fight­ing between Shi’ites and Sun­nis in Ard Jal­loul. Details are murky, but res­i­dents say Shi’ite pro­test­ers appar­ently entered the neigh­bor­hood spoil­ing for a fight.
“If we hadn’t fought them, they would have come in here and bro­ken every­thing,” said Khalid Hashem, 20, a Sunni from the neigh­bor­hood. He was, he added, a friend of Mah­moud. “The Shi’ites are known for this.“
Accord­ing to oth­ers, the intrud­ers chanted slo­gans and insulted Sunni reli­gious fig­ures.
“We could not bear it any­more,” said one woman in a phar­macy whose hus­band would not allow her name to be used. “I did not like Hariri and I had noth­ing against the Shi’ites, but now things are chang­ing. This is not a polit­i­cal demon­stra­tion any­more.“
Both Shi’ite and Sunni par­ti­sans blame the other side for the shoot­ing, but the ques­tion remains: Who killed Ali Ahmad Mah­moud?
The sit­u­a­tion is so knife-edge bal­anced that the head of Lebanese army warned that his forces were being strained to the break­ing point as they tried to cope with the secu­rity down­town and main­tain calm through the tenser neigh­bor­hoods of the city. If the protests con­tin­ued, or worse, turned more vio­lent, the army would be unable to cope, he said.
On Mon­day, Mahmoud’s body was taken down to the demon­stra­tion sur­round­ing the Grand Serail, the old Ottoman fortress that serves as the prime minister’s office and now, the sleep­ing quar­ters for a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of Siniora’s cab­i­net.
The sight of Mahmoud’s cof­fin brought a fresh surge of fury at the gov­ern­ment and pro­tes­tors crowded around the ambu­lance car­ry­ing it. Many car­ried signs pro­claim­ing Mah­moud a mar­tyr. “Mar­tyred at the hands of the government’s mili­tias,” read one.
Almost gone were the ini­tial polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions that had brought the hun­dreds of thou­sands into down­town Beirut: the inter­na­tional tri­bunal, pres­i­den­tial terms and Shi’ite rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Mon­day was a day of mourn­ing and pas­sion.
“The blood of the Shi’ites is boil­ing,” chanted the pro­tes­tors. “Death to Sin­iora.“
Down­town Beirut is a tent city, with the can­vas con­struc­tions lined up below the Grand Serail, like many a besieg­ing army has done over the cen­turies in this part of the world. At any hour, chant­ing pro­tes­tors crowd up against coils of con­certina wire while Lebanese Army and Hezbol­lah dis­ci­pline men keep them rel­a­tively at bay.
For Iman Fakhiya, 29, from the Shi’ite town of Taibe in the south, this protest is sim­ply a mat­ter of fair­ness for the Shi’ites, who have tra­di­tion­ally been the under­dogs in Lebanon.
Hezbol­lah gained sup­port in the south because the gov­ern­ment in Beirut rarely pro­vided ser­vices to the rural and impov­er­ished South and Bekaa Val­ley, the home­lands for the country’s Shi’ites. And over 23 years, since its for­ma­tion in 1982, it has soft­ened its Islamic rhetoric, and now pro­vides for Shi’ites when the gov­ern­ment doesn’t, such as schools and hos­pi­tals, and defends them when the elite of Lebanon won’t. Even today, on online forums revolv­ing around events in Beirut, sup­port­ers of the gov­ern­ment often talk of the Shi’ites down­town as “scum” and dirty out­siders.
“I think my par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion accepted this but we won’t,” she said. “They want to keep us down. We just want our rights. Why is the pres­i­dency for the Chris­tians and the prime min­is­ter­ship for the Sun­nis?“
For her, it is only a mat­ter of time, lit­er­ally. She would stay for as long as it takes, she said, no mat­ter how uncom­fort­able she was.
“It doesn’t mat­ter,” she said as she pulled the blan­ket tighter. “We’ve been hurt­ing for a long time. We are used to it.”

Also, I’ll be trav­el­ing for the next few weeks, so post­ings will be infre­quent. I hope things don’t get out of con­trol here.
IMPORTANT CHANGE: Com­ments have been changed to allow authen­ti­cated com­menters only. This means you will have to sign up for a “TypeKey”:https://www.typekey.com/t/typekey/register?lang=en-us account to com­ment. This will cut down on spam and drive-by com­menters. Sorry for the incon­ve­nience, but it’s a nec­es­sary evil these days.

Massive protest swamps Beirut

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A sea of pro­test­ers wave Lebanese flags in Riadh el Solh square in Beirut on Fri­day in a bid to top­ple the gov­ern­ment. ©2006 Christo­pher Allbrit­ton
BEIRUT — In a mas­sive show of force, Lebanon’s pro­tes­tors loyal to Hezbol­lah and its polit­i­cal allies poured into the streets of down­town Beirut by the hun­dreds of thou­sands, dwarf­ing last weeks show of sup­port for the gov­ern­ment and deliv­er­ing a sweep­ing rebuke to Lebanon’s polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment.
The streets, squares and bridges of sev­eral neigh­bor­hoods were a sea of red and white Lebanese flags as sup­port­ers of the Shi’ite groups Hezbol­lah and Amal, as well as the Chris­t­ian groups Marida and the Free Patri­otic Move­ment, took to the streets in an attempt to top­ple the U.S.-backed gov­ern­ment.
“The real prob­lem with this gov­ern­ment is that they did not stand with us dur­ing the war,” said Muham­mad Obaid, 40, a Hezbol­lah sup­porter, echo­ing a com­mon com­plaint of the oppo­si­tion, which is also called the March 8 coali­tion.
Hezbol­lah, which is sup­ported and armed by both Syria and Iran, cap­tured two Israeli sol­diers on July 12, prompt­ing a mas­sive retal­i­a­tion by the Jew­ish state that turned into a 34-day war. More than 1,000 Lebanese died — mostly civil­ians — and the country’s infra­struc­ture and indus­tries were dev­as­tated. Hezbol­lah feels that the gov­ern­ment in Beirut, which is led by Sunni politi­cian Fuad Sin­iora, didn’t sup­port it enough and even qui­etly hoped for it to lose the war so that the Shi’ite group would no longer be a viable polit­i­cal oppo­nent.
Hezbol­lah emerged stronger than ever, how­ever, and demanded more power in the gov­ern­ment for itself and its allies in the March 8 coali­tion. After six cab­i­net min­is­ters from their polit­i­cal bloc resigned, and Chris­t­ian indus­try min­is­ter Pierre Gemayel was mur­dered, the March 8 forces hope to force the res­ig­na­tion of the Sin­iora gov­ern­ment so that new elec­tions can be held — which they feel they will win.
“The gov­ern­ment will fall today,” Obaid said con­fi­dently.
Obaid comes from a small town in the Bekaa Val­ley east of Beirut, a strong­hold for Hezbol­lah. He said that the group had paid him to drive his bus to ferry pro­tes­tors to Beirut. From his vil­lage alone, he said there were four large buses and 15 minibuses.
By any count, the crowd was mas­sive, eas­ily top­ping 1 mil­lion peo­ple. It was unclear how many peo­ple were in the streets because of the sheer num­bers, but today’s protest may have sur­passed the orig­i­nal 2005 protest that gave Siniora’s bloc its name — the March 14 move­ment. That protest, com­ing exactly a month after the assas­si­na­tion of for­mer pre­mier Rafik Hariri, led to the end of Syria’s 29-year occu­pa­tion of Lebanon, a defeat the regime in Dam­as­cus would like to undo with its allies in Lebanon, such as Hezbol­lah.
Packed and par­ty­ing crowds of mostly young peo­ple stretched from the Chris­t­ian neigh­bor­hood of Gemayze to the east, to the gov­ern­ment build­ings ringed by con­certina wire on the other side of down­town toward the west, and from the site of Hariri’s grave near the port up to Sodeco Square in the Chris­t­ian enclave of Achrafiye. They filled alley­ways and over­passes, and all seemed to carry a flag of some sort.
Most car­ried the Lebanese flag, its red and white stripes fram­ing a green cedar, but becom­ing a dra­matic sweep when thou­sands upon thou­sands of the ban­ners waved. But the Lebanese could not resist putting their own party’s stamp on their out­fits, with Hezbol­lah mem­bers drap­ing the milita’s flag about their shoul­ders and Michel Aoun’s Free Patriot Move­ment sup­port­ers wear­ing orange sweat­shirts or base­ball caps.
The crowd for the most part was friendly and respect­ful of the call by Hezbol­lah leader Has­san Nas­ral­lah not to dam­age prop­erty or resort to vio­lence, but a group of young toughs did cel­e­brate the mur­der of Pierre Gemayel, by say­ing, “Con­grat­u­la­tions to Pierre, when is Geagea next?” Samir Geagea is the leader of another Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal party called the Lebanese Forces and is par­tic­u­larly hated by the Shi’ites of Lebanon. “We want your wife, Hakim,” they chanted refer­ring to Geagea’s nick­name and his wife, con­sid­ered one of the more beau­ti­ful women in Lebanon. Their jibe was an ugly, sex­ist chant.
They called the inte­rior min­is­ter a Jew while Hezbol­lah secu­rity stood by, watch­ing impas­sively. It was only after I asked the youths why they were chant­ing such things — and their vio­lent reac­tion when I said “I’m a reporter” in my badly accented Ara­bic — that the Hezbol­lah secu­rity guard inter­vened.
“They are not polite,” the guard said as he pushed me away roughly. “I don’t want you talk­ing to peo­ple who aren’t polite.“
The March 8 move­ment has vowed to stay in the streets, stag­ing sit-ins until the gov­ern­ment resigns. As night fell, trucks car­ry­ing portable toi­lets and water tanks arrived while tents were being set up in Mar­tyrs’ Square.
“If they don’t step down, we will stay here,” said Hayan Ismael, 22, a physics stu­dent from the Bekaa vil­lage of Bed­nayel and a sup­porter of another Chris­t­ian group. He said protest orga­niz­ers had timed the protests for Fri­day after­noon before the week­end to min­i­mize the eco­nomic impact of shut­ting down the heart of Beirut, indi­cat­ing that March 8 may be expect­ing a res­o­lu­tion by Mon­day morn­ing. Down­town mer­chants have been com­plain­ing for months since the war about all the dis­rup­tions to busi­ness.
“Every day the gov­ern­ment stays and doesn’t step down, it makes the econ­omy suf­fer,” said Ismael.
Sin­iora, how­ever, vowed last night not to step down.
“We will not allow a demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment to be top­pled or its insti­tu­tions,” Sin­iora said in a tele­vised address. “Nor will we allow a state within a state. We are the legit­i­mate gov­ern­ment and respon­si­ble for all Lebanese.”

Friday at 3 p.m. is the “Zero Hour”

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BEIRUT — Hezbol­lah secretary-general Has­san Nas­ral­lah has announced that Fri­day at 3 p.m. (con­ve­niently after Fri­day prayers) would be the “zero hour” that his sup­port­ers and polit­i­cal allies would take to the streets to force the res­ig­na­tion of the cur­rent Lebanese gov­ern­ment.
The so-called March 8 move­ment, which takes its name from the mas­sive March 8, 2005 demon­stra­tion that was to “thank” Syria for its 29-year occu­pa­tion of Lebanon, is dom­i­nated by Hezbol­lah, the Shi’ite mil­i­tant group that fought Israel to a stand­still the sum­mer. Because of its “divine vic­tory,” as Hezbol­lah called it, and what Nas­ral­lah says was insuf­fi­cient fealty to the group’s war on the part of Fuad Sin­iora and the Lebanese gov­ern­ment, Hezbol­lah, Amal and the largely Chris­t­ian Free Patri­otic Move­ment were demand­ing veto power in the cab­i­net. (It’s widely assumed that the March 8 move­ment, which is sup­port­ive of Syria, is try­ing to derail the U.N. tri­bunal set up to try sus­pects in the case of the mur­der of ex-premier Rafik Hariri, in which Syria is sus­pected. Veto power in the cab­i­net would grant them this power.)
They didn’t get the expanded num­ber of seats in the cab­i­net, as there’s already been an elec­tion and there won’t be another one for par­lia­ment until 2009, so now they’re tak­ing to the streets to top­ple the gov­ern­ment, which they say is exer­cis­ing their “demo­c­ra­tic rights.“
It seems March 8 has a funny idea of democracy.

Con­tinue read­ing →

Ready to Blow

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BEIRUT — After today’s “funeral for Pierre Gemayel”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/2006/11/mourning_in_beirut.php, Lebanon is ready to blow.
Tonight, about 1,000 Shi’ite youths gath­ered along air­port road and began protest­ing what they said were the insults made against Hezbol­lah secretary-general Has­san Nas­ral­lah at the funeral this after­noon. (Saad Hariri more or less said the major­ity claimed by Hezbol­lah and oth­ers in the March 8 move­ment was a mirage.)
Soon, a crowd of Sunni youths gath­ered nearby, prompt­ing a large response from the Lebanese secu­rity forces. Local Hezbol­lah offi­cials told the Shi’ite crowd to go home, but they were ignored, prompt­ing Nas­ral­lah to call Manar TV, the group’s tele­vi­sion chan­nel, and issue a call for the crowd to dis­perse. That, too, ini­tially seemed to be ignored, and it is only after sev­eral hours that the pro­tes­tors drifted home.
In another wor­ri­some devel­op­ment, in a Pales­tin­ian camp in the north of the coun­try (I haven’t pinned down the name yet), camp res­i­dents clashed with Sunni extrem­ists loyal to Jund al-Sham, a group with ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the slain leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
And finally, for­mer Inte­rior Min­is­ter Has­san Sabaa has with­drawn his res­ig­na­tion, mean­ing Ahmad Fat­fat is no longer _acting_ inte­rior min­is­ter. This is impor­tant because it increases the numbr of peo­ple in the Sin­iora cab­i­net who are full-fledged min­is­ters. The cab­i­net is nor­mally made up of 24 min­is­ters, with 16 needed for a quo­rum. Last week­end, five Shi’ite min­is­ters and a pro-Syrian Chris­t­ian min­is­ter resigned, threat­en­ing the sta­bil­ity of the gov­ern­ment. Then Pierre Gemayel was killed, bring­ing the num­ber of absent min­is­ters to seven. If two more min­is­te­r­ial seats became vacant, Siniora’s gov­ern­ment would be auto­mat­i­cally dis­solved.
Since Fat­fat was only an act­ing min­is­ter, there might be some legal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to dis­solve the gov­ern­ment if only one more min­is­ter was removed. So by bring­ing Sabaa back, the March 14 forces are solid­fy­ing their posi­tion and hun­ker­ing down for a long fight.

Mourning in Beirut

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Pro­tes­tors and mourn­ers burn and spit on posters of Syr­ian pres­i­dent Bashir Assad and Lebanese pres­i­dent Emile Lahoud, Assad’s ally in Lebanon. ©2006 Christo­pher Allbrit­ton
BEIRUT — They came by the thou­sands, by the hun­dreds of thou­sands, to cen­tral Beirut, just as they had done 20 months ago, to mark the killing of another politi­cian opposed to Syria’s yoke on Lebanon.
Today it was for Pierre Gemayel, the young Chris­t­ian min­is­ter of indus­try in Lebanon’s besieged anti-Syrian gov­ern­ment. On Tues­day, three gun­men ambushed him and sprayed his car with bul­lets mid-afternoon in a Chris­t­ian neigh­bor­hood, killing him and fur­ther plung­ing the coun­try into polit­i­cal cri­sis.
But in Martyr’s Square in down­town Beirut, today was a day of defi­ance for the mostly young, mostly Chris­t­ian masses who came down to stand up to Syria, they say.
“We come for the sake of Lebanon,” said Khaidon Issa, 55, from the Chris­t­ian neigh­bor­hood of Achri­fiye in east Beirut. “Mar­tyr after mar­tyr, where is this going to end?“
Gemayel is the fifth assas­si­na­tion of an anti-Syrian fig­ure in Lebanon since for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Rafik Hariri was killed Feb. 14, 2005 in a mas­sive car bomb near down­town Beirut that also killed 22 oth­ers. The protests that fol­lowed on March 14 were mas­sive — by some accounts, one-fourth of Lebanon came to Beirut that day — and prompted the with­drawal of Syr­ian troops from Lebanon after a 29-year occu­pa­tion. Since then, there have been 15 car bombs and other vio­lence, most of which has been blamed on Dam­as­cus in its attempt to desta­bi­lize Lebanon and regain con­trol over its smaller neigh­bor.
“I think March 14 was a his­toric day for the world,” said Naim Boushahine, 21, a hair­dresser from Ham­mana and a sup­porter of the Druze party, the Pro­gres­sive Social­ist Party. “Because of that day, God will­ing, Lebanon will achieve its full inde­pen­dence.“
While hun­dreds of sol­diers and riot police sur­rounded the square, peo­ple pounded drums, waved thou­sands of Lebanese flags — along­side those of their respec­tive polit­i­cal par­ties — and giant loud­speak­ers played for­mer speeches of Gemayel, who once said he was pre­pared to die for Lebanon’s free­dom.
His voice boomed forth: “There are peo­ple who are plan­ning every moment to over­throw the gov­ern­ment.” It was a poignant state­ment; many believe Gemayel was killed to reduce the anti-Syrian cab­i­net to fewer than 16 mem­bers. If that hap­pens, and there are only two min­is­ters stand­ing against that fate, the gov­ern­ment will fall.
But among the crowd, rather than let­ting Syria and its Lebanese allies — Hezbol­lah, Michel Aoun and Pres­i­dent Emile Lahoud — top­ple the elected gov­ern­ment of Prime Min­is­ter Fuad Sin­iora, some were plan­ning their own rev­o­lu­tion.
“Tomor­row, God will­ing, we’re going to Baabda,” said Boushahine, refer­ring to the pres­i­den­tial palace and home to the staunchly pro-Syrian Lahoud. “We’re going to lib­er­ate the palace from the cock­roach that lives there.“
Oth­ers were less direct, but in agree­ment.
“We hope that Lahoud resigns today,” said Tariq Naj­jar, 22, from a town called Abadieh. “We hope that today that Lahoud hears our voices and (Hezbol­lah, Iran and Syria) know that we are the major­ity of Lebanese peo­ple.“
As the square began to fill up, the red and white Lebanese flags con­trasted sharply with the deep, azure blue of the sky. Young men and women held up signs of Bashar Assad, the pres­i­dent of Syria, embla­zoned with the words, “Shove Your Civil War,” a rejec­tion of the assumed plot by Dam­as­cus to foment civil war in Lebanon in order to take con­trol of it again. Some burned posters of Lahoud and Assad.
At 1 p.m., Gemayel’s body was brought to the Maronite St. George Cathe­dral in down­town Beirut, while thou­sands of Lebanese stood out­side. Osman Hamze, 20, a stu­dent of com­puter sci­ence in the heav­ily Sunni town of Tripoli, said he had come down to stand for “the truth” about all the killings done in Lebanon since that fiery Feb­ru­ary day, 20 months ago.
And after that?
“Tomor­row is a nor­mal day,” he said. “But we won’t for­get our killers.”