Quality control
It is said that anyone who respects laws or sausages should not be present when they are created; we suppose the same could be said for governments. But sausages, laws and governments should all meet at least basic quality standards such that, however stomach-turning their construction, they don’t actually end up rotten. Suffice it to say that the inclusion of Ali Kanso in a Lebanese national-unity government does not meet that basic quality standard.
Kanso is a former head of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. Whatever the intellectual solemnity of the party’s origins, they have long disappeared and been replaced by street thug ideology, bargain basement leadership and an air of menace. The party recently issued an open letter to Future Movement leader Saad Hariri and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora which carried a veiled threat to assassinate them in revenge for the violent deaths of SSNP members in Halba during the May unrest. The letter concluded, they “can ask Riad as-Solh and Bachir Gemayel, against whom the people’s verdict was executed by ordinary nationalists.”
Kanso is also the man who excused his party’s possession of explosives, detonators and timers, discovered in raids on his and other SSNP members’ houses after the assassination of former Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel in late 2006, as just one of “different methods of resisting;” this, despite the fact that the SSNP has not “resisted” anyone but their fellow Lebanese since the mid-1980s.
But surely the biggest reason for rejecting Kanso’s nomination must be because, between 2000 and 2004, Kanso served as labor minister in Prime Minister Rafic Hariri’s fourth cabinet in a Lebanon that was smeared by the Syrian thumb. The lucrative Labor portfolio – the Lebanese labor market was flooded with Syrian workers, providing Syria with a cash cow in the form of remittances worth between $2 billion to $4 billion annually – was a wholly Syrian-run entity, making Kanso the supreme example of the Syrian retainer. True, there are few politicians who have not been in some way and at some time in their careers tarred by the Damascene brush, but pragmatism has its limits.
Kanso’s presence in any cabinet that seeks to represent the new Lebanon would be a backward step. He is neither a technocrat nor a serious voice on the Lebanese political stage. It is people like Kanso and the culture he represented that moved nearly 1 million people to take to the streets in 2005 to demand Syria leave Lebanon. Whatever compromises must be made in the wake of Doha, however, the era of Syrian meddling by its sad troupe of hirelings must be put to the sword once and for all.
Even in the sausage factory of Lebanese politics, certain standards must be maintained, certain red lines, if you will, uncrossed. Kanso is a compromise too far.