31 may 2006
Samir Kassir, one troubling year
later
A year before his murder, Samir Kassir published an essay titled "Considerations On the Arab Misfortune." It was arguably his least satisfying book, because it showed Kassir overcome by that impetuous optimism that was always his greatest weakness. His purpose was to delve into Arab history and obtain the broad outlines of a regional reawakening, to remind his readers that "40 years ago, we could draw a general picture of the Arab world that was largely optimistic; the Arabs looked like a world in movement, an integral part, sometimes a leading one, of the Third World revolution." But Kassir was killed on orders from a foul emanation of that time of ferment, reiterating how, far from renewal, the Arab world most often draws its life-force from death.
On Friday, the one-year anniversary of Kassir's assassination will be commemorated with the uncovering of a statue of him in a park bearing his name near the Al-Nahar building in Beirut. Like the gatherings in front of his home last year, people will be milling around, allowing the inveterate conversationalist to listen in on all the gossip since his departure. But if the talk turns serious, many will agree that much has been worrisome since Kassir was eliminated by the agents of a vulgar and violent regime.
Kassir's death was poorly comprehended by a majority of Lebanese. There was more to the crime than the silencing of free expression; it was the first criminal challenge to the post-Syrian political system, a warning from the men in Damascus and their comrades in Beirut that there was no impunity in newfound liberty and sovereignty. When he was killed, Kassir was preparing his column for that week, an open letter to the Aounists in which he sought to warn them against dividing the anti-Syrian opposition. That he never completed the piece was regrettably apt: Far from uniting the Lebanese, his assassination served as a backdrop to the growing divisions surrounding parliamentary elections, and particularly to Michel Aoun's ludicrous assurances that the Syrians had truly withdrawn.
From murder to bombing to murder, the Lebanese soon forgot Kassir, as they fell back on that stubborn, stupid partisanship that invariably pervades the society at the most inopportune of times.
The Aounists have elevated their general to infallible pope, who takes pride in jerking and yanking his flock through multiple, unnatural political convolutions, each more incongruous than the last; Hizbullah has manipulated the Shiites into believing that its disarmament would marginalize the community as a whole, and now pursues an alliance with Iran and Syria that will only bring Lebanon grief; the Future Movement, after the early promise, has shown itself to be an amalgam of mostly pedestrian parliamentarians, led by an inexperienced, uninspired man paralyzed by the numerous swords hanging over his head; the Lebanese Forces, were it not for a leader who, for all his past crimes, seems to have opted for openness toward his former enemies, would surely revert to a narrow, obtuse, vehement sectarianism; and Walid Jumblatt, the Svengali of the so-called March 14 movement, maneuvers to stay alive, arranges uncanny alliances, and expands his hegemonic control over a Druze community and its endowments, in a daily orgy of paradox.
This is the cacophony that ushers in one year without Samir Kassir. But there is something more specific that would have alarmed Kassir, he who always saw the inability of the Syrian regime to democratize as the major threat to a Lebanese liberal order. It is the confident resurgence of Syria's allies - such as former parliamentarian Nasser Qandil - as they sense a change of wind in the region, hoping to return Lebanon to its days under the Syrian thumb.
It was Kassir who described the previous Syrian control over Lebanon as a "protectorate," and it was the Palestinian in him who detested the persistent Syrian efforts to hijack Palestinian decision-making. That Syria's Palestinian peons and Hizbullah should have joined forces last weekend to escalate a conflict against Israel destined to destabilize the Lebanese government, that the episode was used by Hizbullah to show the Israelis the party has longer-range rockets than hitherto deployed, would not have pleased Kassir, who could smell Syria's ways from afar.
However, Kassir would have been pleased with the Syrian regime's growing anxiety about its domestic opposition, even while regretting the latter's vulnerabilities. He would have publicly sneered at the arrests of Michel Kilo, Anwar Bunni, Ali Abdullah and his sons, Aref Dalila, Fateh Jammous, and the others recently hauled in by the security apparatus. It would have made for an acerbic column. But Kassir would have also seen all this as further evidence that the Damascus Baathists have no future that transcends repression. And amid insistent rumors that the investigation of Rafik Hariri's assassination will soon move to qualitatively new levels of accusation against Syria, that hopefulness would have been on display, albeit accompanied by fears of retribution.
A passage from "Considerations" illustrates how Kassir's buoyancy never hid a realistic sense of where he and those like him stood in the region. After enjoining the Arabs to abandon their "negative Arabo-centrism" and renounce whatever cultural obstacles prevented them from appreciating that democratic values belonged to all of humanity, he wrote: "Such an overhaul is not impossible, but its difficulty lies in the fact that the elites capable of bringing it about are caught between non-democratic powers, most often supported by the West, regardless of the 'democratic crusade' in the Greater Middle East, and radical Islamic currents."
Kassir died crushed in that vise, while the remnants of the popular movement he helped mobilize continues to be buffeted by a despot in league with radical Islamists. What the Lebanese have disregarded, to their detriment, is that Kassir's death was the first violation of a potential liberal revival by a confederacy that will stop at nothing to suffocate it.
Michael
Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=24879#