Ordinary Lebanese want the Syrians to go - yet they want to stay on good terms with them, writes Lara Marlowe in Beirut
Abdel-Hamid Ghalayini's body lay for 17 days beside the bomb crater, under 10cm of dust, while his family fought for the right to look for him. This week, for the Lebanese public, the Ghalayini family's ordeal came to symbolise the sloppiness, indifference and criminal negligence of the Syrian-backed Lebanese authorities.
Ghalayini was jogging on the Beirut seafront when a massive bomb killed the former prime minister Rafik Hariri and 18 other people on February 14th. Lebanese security forces removed the most important evidence from the site - the charred vehicles of Hariri's convoy - then cordoned it off, saying it had to be preserved for the investigation.
After the blast, the wife of Zahi Abu Rjeily was prevented from going to her husband's office in the Saint Georges Hotel to look for him. The Lebanese state pathologist later concluded that Abu Rjeily had survived for 12 hours; he might have been saved had his wife been allowed to look for him.
Mahmoud Muhammad's body was found under a car two weeks after the atrocity, only because hordes of cats were attracted by his decomposing flesh.
When the Ghalayinis accosted the investigating magistrate, Michel Abu Arraji, to ask for permission to search for Abdel-Hamid, the judge jumped into his car and drove away. The second time, he asked them to stop complaining to the media and told them they were fortunate the state had allowed them to order DNA tests on three unidentified bodies.
On Tuesday evening, the Ghalayinis staged a sit-in beside the police line. They purchased fluorescent rescue workers' jackets, helmets, gloves, masks and trowels, and on Wednesday they forced their way through the barrier.
An army officer pulled Ghalayini's brother-in-law Bassam Houhou aside, to try to persuade the family to leave.
"As I was talking with the officer, I smelled something bad," Houhou said. "I saw a swarm of bluebottles around a crack in the ground, and we got civil defence workers to help us." Ghalayini's body was unburned, his clothing untorn.
"It appears my father was in a coma, and the government did nothing to find him," said Lama Ghalayini. She swore to sue president Émile Lahoud and the government that resigned this week because of mass protests. "The cats that roam this area were more efficient at finding bodies . . . Animals have more compassion than our government."
On Thursday, opposition MP Walid Eido joined the angry march from Ghalayini's funeral at the Ein el Mreisse mosque to Martyrs' Square, the site of permanent protests demanding the departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon. "I ask them yet again to leave before the deluge," Eido said of the Syrians and their Lebanese allies. "They must leave, because Lebanon no longer needs them, and because we want freedom and democracy." Leaders of the protests on Martyrs' Square yesterday considered dedicating their next big demonstration on Monday to the memory of Ghalayini and the other abandoned victims of the February 14th bombing.
Elias Atallah, the secretary general of the Democratic Left, says it is impossible to maintain a constant presence downtown, as Ukrainian protesters did in Kiev. He fears the situation will drag on for weeks or months, and so he organises a nightly programme of speeches and music on the stage in Martyrs' Square.
A former communist, Atallah was a student activist when Beirut imitated the May 1968 Paris riots. He joined the communist resistance to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. "The Syrians murdered 18 of my friends, to bring us under their control," he recalls. Atallah left in disgust and spent the intervening years as a farmer. Atallah claims the biggest demonstrations have drawn more than 150,000 Lebanese, though some estimates are far lower. The US State Department has called this a "cedar revolution", a successor to the peaceful movements that overthrew Milosevic in Serbia in 2000, Shevardnadze in Georgia in 2003 and Yanukovych in Ukraine last December.
The Syrian president Bashar al Assad said yesterday Syria was ready for a "partial withdrawal" from Lebanon, where it maintains 14,000 troops and an estimated 10,000 secret police. Since Hariri's assassination, Assad has been under intense pressure from US, European and Arab leaders to withdraw from Lebanon completely, as required by UN Security Council Resolution 1559. He may divulge his plans in a speech to the Syrian parliament today.
Elias Atallah knows the Syrians always play for time. "We're afraid people will lose their motivation," he says. "So we tell them to go to school or work in the day and come to Martyrs' Square in the evening." If attendance falls off, Atallah has arranged with secondary schools to bus in students.
Rudeina Al-Arab is one of the thousands of Beirutis who come to Martyrs' Square at nightfall. During the day, she sits in her apartment overlooking Hariri's palace at Koreitem, dressed in black, wearing a pin with Hariri's smiling portrait and a blue ribbon. Rudeina's husband Abed is a bodyguard for the Hariri family.
"We were so proud to say we worked for Hariri," Rudeina says. "When we spent money, we were proud because it was clean money, not stained with blood like the militias.'" Abed al-Arab's uncle Abu Tarek had worked for Hariri for 23 years and he was killed with him. He raised his three nephews, including Abed, after their father was killed in the 1975-1990 civil war. Protecting the billionaire prime minister became a family's vocation.
"My husband put the pieces of Hariri's body into the ambulance," Rudeina says. "He doesn't sleep any more. He hasn't mourned his uncle, because he's mourning his boss. I try not to cry in front of Abed and the children. In the daytime, I go and see the widows (of six of the seven bodyguards who were killed and buried with Hariri). Abed asked me to look after them. It feels like we're mourning our future." Future - mustakbal - was Hariri's favourite word, the name of his political movement, television station and newspaper.
Negotiations between the Syrian loyalist and opposition camps dragged on through the week. The opposition demands the complete withdrawal of all Syrian troops and secret police, that Hariri's killers be brought to justice, and the resignation of seven leading Lebanese justice and intelligence officials. The loyalists rejected the last demand, and said the opposition will be held responsible if the country descends into chaos. The central bank has spent more than $2 billion (€1.5 billion) propping up the Lebanese pound since Hariri's assassination, and officials fear the economy may collapse.
The Maronite Catholic patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, has been a driving force behind the opposition, and he struggles to smooth over disputes within the movement. Sfeir is to meet with President George W. Bush in Washington on March 16th.
For 30 years, Damascus has succeeded in dividing and ruling the Lebanese, and Bashar al-Assad may be counting on the cracks in the opposition - between the hardline Aounists and Phalangists, more moderate Christians, Druze, and Sunni Muslims. The latter are leaderless since Hariri's death. A handful of secular leftist Shia Muslims have also joined.
Samir Frangieh, a writer and leading figure in the opposition, calls this fragmentation "the terrifying diversity" of Lebanon. It gives the small Mediterranean country unique charm, but can make it ungovernable, and is a magnet for foreigners seeking to exploit divisions among the Lebanese.
"Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Morocco are true nation-states," says Jihad Zein, an editorial writer at An-Nahar newspaper. "With all my love for my country, we have no deep political roots here. Politics in Lebanon always boils down to an identity crisis. There is a consensus against Syrian hegemony, but is that enough to shape a nation? We need US or European tutelage; I have no qualms saying that." Dr Bassem Yamut, a US-trained neurologist who once cared for Rafik Hariri's parents, is an MP now considered a traitor by the Hariri clan because he sided with the pro-Syrian majority in parliament. Yamut implies Hariri's assassination was the result of a US plot. The Syrian and Lebanese governments made big mistakes, he admits, but he constantly steers the conversation away from Syria, towards the Bush administration.
Yamut gives me a copy of the "Clean Break" study drawn up by pro-Israeli neo-conservatives in the US in 1996, for the then newly elected Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Most of its objectives - forging Israeli alliances with Turkey and Jordan, abandoning "land for peace" as the basis of negotiations with Palestinians and removing Saddam Hussein from power - have been achieved. The current turmoil in Lebanon, Yamut says, is the result of Likud's and the American neo-cons' determination to, as the study advocates, "engage Hizballah, Syria and Iran." Seen through the eyes of Syrian loyalists, the US-led push to drive Syria out of Lebanon is intended to destroy all resistance to Israeli domination of the region.
In dozens of interviews, ordinary Lebanese told me they wanted the Syrians to go. Yet almost as an afterthought, they said they wanted good relations with Syria. Hundreds of thousands of Syrian "guest workers" fled Lebanon after Hariri's assassination, and cross-border traffic, usually heavy, has virtually stopped. "The opposition is creating animosity between our two peoples, and that is a recipe for disaster," warns Bassem Yamut.
The late president Hafez al-Assad used to say that Lebanon and Syria were "one people in two countries". Many Lebanese, especially the Sunnis most bereaved by Hariri's assassination, have relatives in Syria. Yet Syria's presence has come to resemble that of an abusive spouse. The Lebanese want a separation.
"Who doesn't know who killed Hariri?" asks Rudeina al-Abed, the bodyguard's wife. "Everybody knows . . . Maybe we can have good relations with Syria after a while, when the grief lessens. But in the immediate future, no way."