Lebanon, Thirty Years On
News: Three decades after the start of the civil war, Lebanon's politics may still be fractious--but at leat the guns aren't out.
April 16, 2005
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Lebanon hardly needs reminders of its civil war. The husk of the bombed-out Holiday Inn remains one of the city's most prominent landmarks and many buildings still bear the scars of bullets and shellfire from a conflict that touched virtually every family.
But on Wednesday Lebanon marked the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the war, which lasted 15 years and left more than 100,000 dead. What was once Beirut's Green Line is now home to a tent camp of holding hundreds of anti-Syrian demonstrators, many of whom have missed work or school to more or less live at the camp since it was erected a few days after the Feb. 14 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Lebanon's parliament building stands less than a kilometer away, but there's nobody home. The pro-Syrian government, which disbanded under pressure from demonstrators after the assassination, failed to re-form on Monday, likely postponing elections planned for May for at least another few months, but the mood in the tent camp remains largely optimistic.
"We will remain here until there is a government that is not pro-Syrian," says Natalie Francis, a 17-year-old who mentions with a hint of pride that her teacher sanctioned her absence from school today, becomes my unofficial guide to the camp for an hour or so.
"My dad fought in the war—he doesn't talk about it," she says. "Bad memories."
When I meet Natalie, whose father was a member of the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia, she is she sitting in a tent that has been set up by members of Walid Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party, in the arms of a burly young man whose parents quite possibly faced hers across a front line sometime in the not-too-distant past.
But while Francis and her friends abhor the notion that Lebanon could ever return to civil conflict (and at the moment, that does not seem at all likely, though an economic crisis appears to be looming), some of their rhetoric is less than reassuring.
Nearly two months after opposition demonstrations began, most of the camp feels less like a celebration of Lebanon's unity than a party waiting to celebrate the return of Maronite Christian leaders leaders Samir Geagea and Gen. Michel Aoun. (Geagea is in prison, Aoun in exile in France.) "There are none here," says a man who sits a wheelchair, the result of an injury from the civil war, when I ask about Sunnis and Shia. "We are united. Why are you talking about Sunni and Shia?" "The Shia do what they are told," one of Francis's friends offers, derisively referring to the leadership of Hizbollah, which has led counterdemonstrations because of the opposition's calls for the militia to disarm and the support it receives from Syria.
"But now we have the Sunnis [Hariri was Sunni] on our side, and there are more of us than there are of them."
"Christians are not Arabs," says 22-year-old John Bechara, whose father was a member of the (banned) Lebanese Forces militia and spent eight years in a Syrian prison after the war ended in 1990.
"Our ancestors are Phoenician." Bechara and Francis both agree that Lebanon's confessional system, which stipulates a Maronite president, Sunni prime minister and Shiite speaker of parliament, should remain in place.
The leaders of the camp downplay divisions within the opposition, as does Michael Totten, a 34-year-old journalist sent to Beirut by Spirit of America, a non-partisan American NGO that is helping fund the camp.
"I see that there's a lot of people who are willing to confront since the war ended," Totten said. "Very tentatively, they're willing to try and bridge a huge gulf of hate and mistrust of the other. And they're doing it when there are these bombs going off — those bombs remind people of what it was like when the war started."
"At the same time, Lebanon is not united — there's a lot of people that are trying to untite the country, but they're not there yet," Totten said. "The Hizbollah part of Beirut, they didn't come out. Not everybody is as interested in the national reconciliation."
Some Christian members of the opposition have left, complaining that Jumblatt has softened on the opposition demand that UN Resolution 1559, which calls for Syrian withdrawal as well the disarmament of Hizbollah, be fulfilled entirely. Jumblatt, who has been in contact with Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, has recently said he supports the fulfillment of the Taif Accord, the 1990 agreement that ended the civil war but leaves Hizbollah's disarmament to be settled within the Lebanese political structure. And on the ground, Hizbollah remains a sort of 900-pound gorilla.
"I don't hear anybody making real overtures," to Hizbollah Totten said. "I do hear people saying they're going to have to figure out how to do that, but they don't know how to do it yet. They're going to have to do it at some point. I hear a lot of talk about not wanting to do something to upset them."
To mark Wednesday's anniversary, a concert was held downtown featuring a singer famous for her patriotic anthems and generally regarded as well-loved by all factions. The concert was also the culmination of five days of events to promote national unity as well as shopping, was attended course be attended by a wide swath of the population (save for Palestinians), but last week the streets were as quiet as they have been the few weeks. The recent bombings have left many Lebanese afraid to go out.
On the other side of the country, Syrain troops are in the final stages of their pullout after nearly 30 years in the country. But some are less sure that all of the Syrian mukhabarrat (secret police) will go with them. "When the demonstrations began, they used to come every day and just smile at us. A couple of days I saw two of them sitting over there," Francis says of the mukhabarrat, pointing to a nearby park.
Meanwhile, those downtown have installed a countdown board for the Syrian pullout and Jumblatt has called for Lebanese citizens to take over parliament if elections are not held on time — 30 years on, Lebanese politics may still be fractious, but at least the guns aren't out.
David Enders is a freelance writer currently working from Beirut. Until recently, he reported from Iraq for Mother Jones online. His first book, Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation, was recently published by the University of Michigan Press.
