Greater
than the sum of its deaths
Daily Star
staff
Tuesday, February
14, 2006
Do the Lebanese deserve their dead? The
question merits being asked on the first
anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Bassel Fuleihan, and the other
innocents killed so Lebanon could remain
firmly Syrian. But also as the memories
of those killed since June still
hover over a divided society - Samir Kassir,
George Hawi, Gebran Tueni, and the
untargeted victims, Lebanese and non-Lebanese,
of a dozen bomb attacks intended to restore the country to its previous custodians.
In the aftermath of the March 14 rally last year, the Lebanese were
entitled to believe something had changed
in their society; that half a century of fragmentation would be swallowed
up and spat out by a
society for once on the same
wavelength. However, this was a faulty
reading of the million-person protest, which was directed
against the easy target of a suffocating external antagonist, the Syrian regime; but also against fellow
Lebanese, particularly Hizbullah, which had organized a pro-Syria rally a week earlier.
Now, 11 months later, the
political system is gridlocked, the religious communities are thinking more than ever in insular terms, and just
over a week ago, as Islamists rampaged through Achrafieh, many thought they heard
the echo of violence from bygone days.
However, the system didn't buckle, even as a blanket of gloom settles over
the country. Could it be that
the Lebanese still have no real understanding
of their own history?
There is a phrase of the late journalist, George Naccache, which is often cited
to illustrate how unlikely
a country Lebanon is.
"Two negations do not make a nation," Naccache wrote in a March 1949 article, which
remains as relevant today
as it was then in its denunciation
of ambient political mediocrity and stalemate. What he meant was
that Lebanon's National Pact
of 1943, based on a formula of "neither with the
West, nor for Arabization,"
was inadequate as the basis for creating a national
identity. Naccache was right, but the reality is that
generations of Lebanese
have also lived according to a social contract almost entirely built on defining what they are not, rather than what
they are. Lebanon floats on a sea of "no's."
It is worth recalling
how 1943, the year of Independence, was similar to 2005, in that the system was radically overturned in a short period of time. France, which then had a League
of Nations mandate over Lebanon,
reacted like Syria would later
do against acts of emancipation from the Lebanese leadership (namely, the deletion
of clauses related to the
mandate from the
Constitution). It resorted
to violence and arrested the president, prime minister, and others.
Rather than intimidate opposition groups, however,
this only unified them, leading
to escalating anti-French demonstrations.
France also tried to play the Lebanese
off against one other - as the Syrians did
on March 8 - by appointing Emile Edde
president in lieu of the sitting president, Bishara al-Khuri. Their efforts collapsed thanks to outside intervention - in
this case from Great Britain. Sensing the end
was near, the French government subsequently tried to condition its military withdrawal
on Lebanese acceptance of a
treaty advantageous to
France. One can almost hear Bashar Assad's speech in
March last year, when he told the
Syrian Parliament: "A Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon will
not mean a disappearance of
Syria's role in Lebanon."
France's endeavor again failed.
The
consensus around independence
was neither as clear-cut nor as amicable as many people now imagine. Edde, for all the criticism he
aroused by agreeing to become president, had earned more support in parliamentary elections that year than
Khuri. Naccache's railing against the corruption of the political system came just three years
after the last French soldier left Lebanon.
In other words, the recurrent Lebanese
desire for harmony - the very same
that followed the March 14 demonstration - has
more often than not been frustrated in our recent history, leading to widespread disillusionment based on an unwillingness of Lebanese to grasp that their
system rests on the
insistent articulation of differences.
Two things can be
said about this: a system
of negations can be far more resilient and steady than
people imagine, so that the absence of unity that followed the
parliamentary elections
last year was regrettable,
but par for the course with
respect to national stability. The
sectarian system, precisely
because of its acknowledged
shortcomings and the anxiety it
produces among Lebanese, is one also one where, in moments of crisis, sectarian representatives fall into line and play
their allotted roles in re-establishing an equilibrium. That's what happened after the recent rioting
in Christian areas, and it's what
happened after every random bomb
blast last year, all of which
occurred in predominantly
Christian areas, so that the political costs
to the perpetrators soon surpassed the advantages.
A second aspect of the
general disappointment with national disunity is that it
shows there is a platform on which to build unity - if only politicians displayed audacity. Sectarianism won't dissipate in a
night, or a decade, but more can
be done to weaken its worst
aspects. If March 14 showed anything,
it was that
that the death of someone like Rafik Hariri could alter age-old sectarian reflexes. Other developments, short of death, might too.
Everything from introducing civil marriage to creating a civil category where citizens are identified not by their religious sect, but as members of an officially recognized secular community, must be tried.
The mechanisms of the sectarian state are cumbersome, and demoralizing when the political
murder that the Lebanese are commemorating today seems to radiate much discord amid the concord. But Lebanon's "arrangement" has its assets, which
we should bear in mind while
mentally reviewing the past year.
Hariri and all the others surely didn't
deserve to die, but the
system remains greater than the sum
of its parts, and the sum of its
deaths.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.