Militia man
Michel Aoun used to condemn militias but now his Hezbollah alliance harms Lebanon
In the last phase of the Lebanese civil war, General Michel Aoun famously took on the Lebanese Forces, which he called a “militia” that undermined the authority of the state and its military, challenging the party and wresting control of ports operated by it. Thirty-four years after the war broke out, and 20 since Aoun launched his doomed “war of liberation” against Syria, one militia remains. And though it has brought the country to the brink of civil war, turned its weapons on its own countrymen, and undermined the foundations of both the state and Lebanon’s one truly national institution, the army, the militia in question is Aoun’s principle political ally.
The contradictions that bedevil the Lebanese state, and that have come to define Michel Aoun, were thrown into sharp relief on Monday. On the anniversary of the start of the civil war, drug dealers in the Bekaa Valley brazenly ambushed an LAF vehicle, killing four soldiers and injuring another, apparently in retaliation for the death last March of notorious drug lord Ali Jaafar. While Aoun condemned the attack, he denied that there was any link between the death of the soldiers and larger political forces. And yet it is difficult to image such incidents occurring were it not for the flourishing illicit economies and culture of impunity Hezbollah has fostered in the areas it controls.
At his press conference on Monday, Aoun declared himself “responsible for the opposition’s leadership to achieve real partnership.” Aoun used that partnership to portray himself, on a day marking the beginning of the 15-year conflict, as a peacemaker whose alliance with a militia had managed to save the country from a second civil war. “The importance of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Free Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah was that our Lebanese partners prevented the return of war during the Mar Michael events.” Those events – which occurred in the same area as the fateful clashes 34 years earlier that sparked the onset of full-scale war – took place in early 2008 and involved the deaths of seven Amal and Hezbollah supporters, whom the latter claimed were killed by the army.
At the time, Aoun’s partner angrily denounced the military’s actions, rejecting the notion that that the soldiers had fulfilled their duty and insisting on accountability and a serious investigation that would “preserve the high esteem of and respect for the army."
Four months later, the former general’s favorite militia plunged the country into the worst violence since Aoun himself fled Lebanon in 1991. Hezbollah preserved the high esteem of the army by rendering it powerless, a national military forced to stand back and watch as a sectarian militia invaded the capital, and, after years of insisting its weapons would never be turned inward, it proceeded to kill scores of Lebanese.
It was not the last time the military would suffer at the hands of the militia: Last summer, three months after the events in May, a Hezbollah fighter opened fire on an LAF helicopter flying near one of Hezbollah’s “security zones,” where Party of God forbids the military from entering, killing an army officer.
The strength and independence of the Lebanese state and its military, the only national institution that transcends sectarian lines, are inextricably linked; when one is undermined, so is the other. More than three decades since the start of the war, the twin threats to Lebanon’s sovereignty – foreign interference and armed forces beyond the control of the state – that fueled the conflict continue to imperil the country and its military. And the former military leader who presented himself as the man most determined to counter those threats unabashedly embraces both.