Unimpressed
The public feels the opposition has done too little for Lebanese in Syrian jails
The Lebanese are unimpressed with the opposition’s efforts (or lack thereof) to secure the release of Lebanese detained in Syrian prisons. In a poll conducted shortly after June’s Israeli-Hezbollah prisoner exchange, the Beirut Center for Research and Information (BCRI) asked Lebanese citizens, “have Hezbollah and the opposition done enough to uncover the fate of those missing in Syria?”
A full 67% said no.
“When we talk about the opposition, because the opposition has a very good relationship with the Syrians, those respondents believe they did not do enough,” said Abdo Saad, the director of the BCRI. “They believe they could have done more, but they didn’t.”
Opposition parties are largely silent on the issue of the fate of the disappeared who ended up in Syria. Hezbollah worked for years to secure the release of Lebanese prisoners held in Israel and recently raised the issue of finding the Iranian diplomats and their companions who went missing in Lebanon in 1983, along with calling for investigations into the 1978 disappearance of Imam Moussa al-Sadr, but the party has not publicly put finding the disappeared in Syria on its agenda.
“No one is seeing, even among the Shia… that the detainees are even a priority for Hezbollah to work on… or that they care to begin with,” said Imad Salamey, a Hezbollah researcher and professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University.
The poll results were broken down by sect – Christian, Druze, Sunni and Shia. The findings may surprise many: Nearly 43% of the Shia community said that Hezbollah and the opposition are not doing enough about Lebanese detained and/or missing in Syria.
“This is the first time since 2005, [as far as I remember],” that the Shia community has offered an unfavorable opinion of the party, said Saad, referring to the year he started conducting polls. “They were frank, I believe. They were not motivated by their political affiliation.”
Hezbollah and Amal representatives could not be reached for comment on the subject, and the significance of these results remains to be seen. “You can’t generalize from this particular question [about] the attitudes of Shia toward Hezbollah. Now it is the sectarian clash that is mobilizing the Shia behind Hezbollah, and they have used this to their advantage,” said Salamey, who nonetheless also ventured that there was a possibility that the appeal of foreign-backed militancy may be on the wane. “Now whether dissent is growing or not, it’s too early to tell,” he said, but “definitely, the more the country stabilizes, the more that the sectarian tension cools down… there will be more diversity within the [Shia] community.”
Christian reaction
Another significant finding in the survey was the response of the Christian community. Slightly under 73% voiced their dissatisfaction with the opposition’s handling of this issue, despite the fact that opposition Christian leader General Michel Aoun has long made the disappeared in Syria a cornerstone issue.
“Definitely the Christian margin is significant, to show that 70% are not seeing Aoun, in particular, making any effort to release the detainees, this is something to look for as an indication of resentment on the Christian side,” Salamey said.
Many of the 17,000 who disappeared during the civil war and ended up in Syria are Christian, and in the post-1990 period, Aoun supporters were a particular target for arrest and detention.
Alain Aoun, the general’s nephew and a senior political officer in the Free Patriotic Movement, was not surprised by the community’s reaction. “Of course. We [won’t] consider that anybody did enough until this issue is resolved,” he said. He is not, however, concerned that these feelings in the community will negatively impact the FPM in the upcoming parliamentary elections. “I think people are aware of how genuine our commitment to this cause is,” he said in an apparent contradiction to the findings.
That said, Salamey also doubts this issue will have a significant impact on the FPM in the elections. Both he and Saad argued that the disappeared are not necessarily on the top of everyone’s list of concerns and therefore will not be a major factor in how people vote.
While a majority of the Lebanese population feels more could be done to resolve this long-standing concern, signs that a breakthrough could be approaching are multiplying.
President Michel Sleiman made the disappeared in Syria a priority by mentioning it in his oft-cited inaugural address. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, during his visit to Beirut last month, reversed state policy by, for the first time, actually admitting some Lebanese are in Syria.
And finally, the draft ministerial statement addresses the issue and, in its preamble, calls for putting “an end to this issue, which is so painful for many Lebanese families.”