Both sides of the Lebanese chasm claim they represent the true Lebanon, writes Lara Marlowe
Dahr al-Wahash is a Christian village on the mountainside above Beirut, indistinguishable from the urban sprawl that surrounds the capital. It was here, on October 13th, 1990, that Gen Michel Aoun's Christian soldiers fought their last battle with Syrian troops as they advanced into Beirut. More than 200 Syrians and Lebanese were killed.
Aoun, who will today give a press conference in Paris to mark the 16th anniversary of the start of his "war of liberation" against Syria, demands an international inquiry into the deaths of his soldiers, some of whom were found in underpants with their hands bound and a bullet in the head.
And it was here, in Dahr al-Wahash, that I stopped to talk to Syrian soldiers as they packed to leave last week. "We are the strength of Syria and Lebanon," boasted the faded paint on the wall outside their dilapidated villa. The unit's papers were burning in the overgrown garden. It was the end of an epoch.
Hassan (33), from the Syrian city of Hama, was aged only four when Syrian troops entered Lebanon in 1976. He did not resent the "ingratitude" of the Lebanese, decried in a rambling speech by his president, Bashar al-Assad. As we talked, carloads of Shia Muslims from the Bekaa Valley careered down the mountainside towards the pro-Syrian Hizbullah demonstration in Beirut, waving Lebanese flags. "That proves they like us," Hassan asserted.
The Syrian soldier personified the regime's confidence that, though they may have lost a round in the struggle for Lebanon, Syrian influence will continue. "We will never leave as long as there is dissension among Lebanese people," Hassan said, adding knowingly: "There will always be dissension."
Rudyard Kipling was wrong when he wrote that east and west would never meet. They meet in Lebanon, and the conjunction is not always happy. "This is a clash of cultures, a clash of civilisations," a leading member of the anti-Syrian opposition told me, referring to the massive Hizbullah rally that shook western certainties about Lebanon's "cedar revolution". "Don't quote me," the politician said. "I have enough problems with Hizbullah already. But this is very serious. It could break the country."
Only two city blocks separated Hizbullah's demonstration in Riad Solh Square from the mainly Christian anti-Syrian protesters in Martyrs' Square. They might have been on different planets. The Christians, and a handful of Druze protesters, invariably speak beautiful French and English. I found only one English-speaker in the Shia multitude, a civil engineer. "The Lebanese will come together and find a solution, as they always do," he predicted. Perhaps, I said, but the last time they disagreed, it took 15 years and cost 150,000 lives.
Both sides of the Lebanese chasm claim they represent the true Lebanon. The protesters in Martyrs' Square believe the Shia secretly support them, but are too intimidated by Hizbullah and the Syrian-backed Amal movement to show it.
The Shia see no contradiction between their alliance with Syria and their denunciation of the opposition's desire for foreign intervention. The opposition delight in President Bush's almost daily exhortations to Syria to get out of Lebanon fast, while the French embassy in Beirut holds the hands of opposition leaders. It was significant that when President Émile Lahoud reappointed the failed prime minister, Omar Karami, on March 10th, opposition leaders expressed their rejection from Paris, where they'd gone to consolidate support.
The euphoria propagated by the White House over the so-called "Arab Spring" obscured the fact that a significant percentage of Lebanese see themselves as Arab Muslims, not western democrats. There were two signs that Washington has begun to fathom this reality this last week: the tacit admission that disarming Hizbullah was no longer a priority, and a written warning by secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to her Israeli counterpart to stop crowing about UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which demands a total Syrian withdrawal. It was particularly galling to Arabs to hear Silvan Shalom ordering Damascus to obey 1559, while Israel is in permanent violation of many UN resolutions.
Over a decade ago, the late exiled Syrian poet Nezzar Kabbani wrote an epic poem entitled: When are they going to announce the death of the Arabs? Kabbani was one of the first to understand that all the Arab "isms" had failed. That bitter observation is a motivating factor behind Lebanon's anti-Syrian opposition.
"There is no Arab nation," the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt told me. "Look at the last UN report on the Arab world: 40 per cent illiteracy; only 3 per cent of the world's investment. We are 240 million people adrift. And they still say, 'in the name of Palestine,' 'in the name of the Arab cause'. And they imprison you and kill you."
Rafik Hariri, the self-made billionaire whose assassination on February 14th sparked the present unrest in Lebanon, espoused no ideology other than free market capitalism. Hariri knew that too much politics and religion nearly destroyed his country, and he wanted the Lebanese to concentrate on what they do best: making money.Lebanon may never see the likes of Hariri again. Now that he's dead, all communities mourn him.
At Syrian instigation, the country has reached an institutional impasse with the reappointment of Omar Karami. Hariri once quoted an old proverb to me, that a century of dictatorship was preferable to one day of anarchy. This weekend, the Syrian president committed himself to a complete withdrawal of Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon. Let us hope that anarchy will not follow.