18
January 2007
The speaker outcast - or just
disarmed?
Spare a sardonic thought
for Parliament Speaker Nabih
Berri. Only last summer he was being
feted by March 14 for having
helped the Cabinet majority railroad Hizbullah into approving a Lebanese Army deployment to South Lebanon and
endorsing Security Council Resolution 1701; now they're depicting him as the scoundrel
of the moment, increasingly
marginalized for failing to
hold a parliamentary
session to approve the
mixed tribunal in the Hariri assassination.
Oh when that trapdoor opens.
Berri
has done himself few favors in recent months. He alienated
Hizbullah and its secretary general,
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, during the summer
war, but also when he seemed
to be trying to open an independent line to Iran last November.
As you might recall, he had
just wrapped up a series of national dialogue sessions and
flew to Tehran for a conference. While he was there
the Shiite ministers resigned. Berri initially declared that the
government remained constitutional, but then abruptly backtracked - under Iranian pressure, some speculated. This angered the majority,
and in a matter of days the speaker was sitting atop
the detritus of a failed dialogue that he had sponsored,
with Hizbullah and March 14 united on a single thing: that it
did no good to trust Nabih Berri.
For
a time, after the
opposition descended on Downtown
Beirut in protest, it looked like
Berri might devise a new role
for himself. Who else could play
middleman to help break the
deadlock? That was too optimistic
a reading of the speaker's capacities. By then, Hizbullah was unwilling to grant him any
of the leeway it had during
the July-August conflict. The majority,
meanwhile, was still only interested
in seeing whether Berri would summon Parliament
to vote in favor of the
Hariri tribunal. Caught in a vise, the speaker discerned a faint ray of hope in the Arab League
proposal peddled by Secretary General Amr Moussa. And what did
the normally cunning Berri do? He tied a rope around
his neck and leapt.
Moussa
sought to promote a package
deal that, among other things, would
have formed a new government
with 19 ministers from the majority,
10 from the opposition, and one independent. The idea was
to prevent the majority from imposing
its writ by a two-thirds vote, while denying the opposition veto power.
The majority also agreed to the creation of a committee of judges to discuss amendments to the draft tribunal proposal. Berri, not wanting to oversee a vote in Parliament on the tribunal, set a condition for his
acceptance: that the amended draft
be returned to the new government for approval. This effectively denied the majority
a means to pass a proposal with which
the opposition disagreed. Suddenly, Berri became enemy number-one for March 14,
but also angered Moussa and his patrons in Cairo and Riyadh.
That wasn't all. In the period between Christmas and New Year, Berri came up with a plan of his own to resolve the crisis, one that proved to be dead on arrival.
Walid Jumblatt dismissed it as "the latest merchandise," and Moussa saw the scheme as an underhanded effort to supplant his own ideas.
The Arab League secretary general reacted by indefinitely delaying his return to Beirut. It was no coincidence
that last Monday the Kuwaiti newspaper As-Siyassa, citing an adviser to Siniora, spoke of the possibility
of Saudi Arabia's hosting a
reconciliation conference
on Lebanon, at which Berri would not be invited. The
likelihood of that
happening is negligible; after all, Berri represents Parliament. Still, the leak was
designed to warn that the speaker may become irrelevant.
Berri
is a target because the majority views
him as the weakest link in Syria's effort to
derail parliamentary approval of the Hariri tribunal. March
14 politicians will admit he has been threatened - but everyone has, they promptly add. That
Berri remains Syria's man is
hardly
surprising for anyone who has followed his decades-long political gymnastics. But more disturbing for the speaker, Saudi Arabia and
Egypt apparently regard this as a problem when dealing with
him. The Saudis are said to oppose bringing Syria into any discussion of Lebanon. If that's true, then Berri did himself few favors by telling As-Safir on Saturday, after
meeting with Saudi Ambassador Abdel-Aziz Khoja, that "any efforts exerted to bring about a breakthrough in Saudi-Syrian relations will speed
up the opportunities for a resolution in Lebanon, before it is
too late."
This
kind of talk, particularly
Berri's recent statement that Lebanon is
"a time-bomb preparing
to explode," is open
to various interpretations.
Some see the comments as a threat; others, more benignly, assume the speaker is playing up a sense of impending doom to pave the way for his return as mediator. The visit
by Amal representatives to the Phalange headquarters on
Tuesday lends credence to the latter view. But Berri, like Nasrallah, is paying a heavy
price for his alliance with Syria, and
more specifically for Syria's refusal
to grant its Lebanese comrades any latitude to negotiate what, for the Assad
regime, could be a less dangerous
tribunal framework.
Difficult times lie ahead for
Berri. The parliamentary majority has already signed a petition asking President Emile Lahoud to open an extraordinary
session of Parliament. The decision is binding
on Lahoud, but Berri has yet
to transmit the request to Baabda. If the speaker gets over this
hurdle, in late March he must convene the first regular
session of Parliament for 2007. If a parliamentarian formally asks that the
tribunal law be dealt with as "fast-track" legislation,
Berri, at least according to
a member of the Hariri
bloc, must put it to a vote. In addition, Article 44
of the Constitution allows the majority to hold a vote of confidence in the
speaker two years after legislative elections, in the first regular annual
session. If he loses by a two-thirds margin, Berri can be replaced.
These maneuvers are unlikely
to change Berri's behavior, get
the tribunal approved, or bounce the speaker. However, they are politically embarrassing. One thing must be dawning
on Berri: It was the March 14 leadership that was instrumental in returning him to power last year. Having lost the
majority's backing and little trusted
by Hizbullah, the speaker
must be wondering if he's
gone beyond his expiry date. More pertinently,
Berri must sense that he may be
the latest target in a broader effort to dismantle what remains of the Syrian order in Lebanon.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY
STAR.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=78696#