One day, too many questions
The events of “Black Sunday” have left Lebanon curious and concerned
The events of “Black Sunday” have left Lebanon curious and concerned
“There are Aounists living there!” Beirut residents exclaimed to one another on the night of Sunday, January 27, surprised by what they were seeing on the television, as a mostly Shia mob rioted in a mostly Christian neighborhood. “If General Michel Aoun really represents the majority of the Christians, as he believes, then why did that mob, led by Hezbollah, go into one of the entrances of Christian Ain al-Remmaneh?” an An-Nahar journalist asked shortly thereafter.
There seems to be widespread confusion as to why, given their infamous “Memorandum of Understanding,” Hezbollah officials allowed their supporters to storm a neighborhood with so many crosses and so much orange.
Were the night’s events, which resulted in at least seven dead, outrageous enough to constitute a breach of contract by Hezbollah? One Beirut lawyer who spoke to NOW Lebanon certainly thought so. “Burning tires burned the Memorandum of Understanding before anything else,” opined Elias Zoughbi, who supported the memorandum when it was signed two years ago but now says he is having second thoughts.
Signed into being on February 6, 2006 in Mar Mikhael, where Sunday’s riots actually started, the memorandum was a joint Hezbollah-FPM expression of solidarity and ostensibly a unanimous articulation of their shared vision of Lebanon’s future. At the time of signing, supporters hailed it as radical rapprochement between two sectarian entities that had long been at odds with one another. Calling for “consensual democracy,” the document said that the partnership’s endgame entailed “building a modern state that enjoys the trust of its citizens and is able to meet their needs and aspirations, and provide them with the sense of security and safety as to their present and future.”
Since its signing, however, the memorandum’s implementation has become increasingly one-dimensional. With Aoun and his allies in the Change and Reform parliamentary bloc regularly backing Hezbollah attacks on the ruling majority of the March 14 coalition, even many of the General’s faithful are starting to wonder when their party will once again have a say in the goings-on of the opposition.
“The Memorandum of Understanding was born in Mar Mikhael and it has been buried in Mar Mikhael,” said former MP Fares Soueid to NOW Lebanon. “What it achieved in the Christian community has ended. From the beginning, the understanding was marketed as protection for the Christians, but this idea is rejected because the Christians are not dhimmis [second-class citizens under Islamic law], and they do not need protection because the state should protect all its citizens.”
Moderated by LBC talk show host Marcel Ghanem on Thursday evening, Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah debated March 14-aligned Tourism Minister Joe Sarkis on the significance of the Mar Mikhael events and the role of the army.
Over Sarkis’s objections, Fadlallah reiterated Hezbollah and Amal’s position on the riots. The party did not instigate the riots, he said, but was instead doing all it could to contain them. Indeed, one Amal member was killed doing precisely this. Renewing calls from within the opposition, Fadlallah demanded that results of the army’s investigation be made public as soon as possible.
If there is indeed blood on the army’s hands – as one high-ranking military source told NOW Lebanon the investigation had revealed – Amal and Hezbollah leaders might inform Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa on February 3 of their decision to withdraw support for the presidential candidacy of Army Commander Michel Sleiman, just eight days before scheduled elections, leaving Lebanon with nothing that even resembles a game plan for extricating itself from the current stalemate.
In many ways, the debates over the role of the army and the Memorandum of Understanding both boil down to how best to preserve the peace. The Mar Mikhael riots – which, thanks to An-Nahar, many are now calling “Black Sunday” – have raised pressing concerns about security. In a nutshell, Hezbollah and Amal are hinting that they might not trust the army (or its commander), and March 14 forces are once again reminding their Christian partisans that the memorandum does little to protect their neighborhoods and instead provides cover for Hezbollah’s threatening arms stockpile.
To assuage these fears, Sheikh Naim Qassem and MP Ibrahim Kanaan, speaking for Hezbollah and the Change and Reform bloc respectively, vociferously reaffirmed their support for the memorandum earlier this week, and General Sleiman capitalized on the recently released Winograd Report to remind the resistance that he is still their man. “[The Winograd Report] makes us, as a military institution, stress on the joint victory of the resistance and the Lebanese army during the 2006 July War that led to the defeat of the enemy,” he said to the Lebanese daily As-Safir shortly after the release of the report on Thursday.
All this posturing, however, is somehow less than convincing. With the threat of further “civil” disobedience still looming and the opposition still distancing itself from Sleiman and the Arab initiative, the Lebanese have few assurances that there will be no repeat of last Sunday’s blunder.
Only the election of a president, at this point, can keep the void from widening, but after months of serious negotiations, little progress has been made on this front. Few among even the most optimistic in the country see the elections scheduled for February 11 bearing fruit. “The opposition’s plan is to erode constitutional and state institutions to create chaos and extend the vacuum in order to bring Syrian influence back to Lebanon,” said Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea on Friday. He just might be right.
Picure: Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah sits alongside Free Patriotic Movement head General Michel Aoun in Mar Mikhael on February 6, 2006 after both put their signatures to the “Memorandum of Understanding.”