BEIRUT — The respected lawyer, professor and democracy activist Chibli Mallat is running for president in Lebanon, at a time when no presidential election has been officially declared, in a system in which parliament chooses the president. Succeed or not, his candidacy is worthy because he is challenging, and may help to change, two core enigmas of the modern Arab world and its bizarre political order: executive power that remains in the hands of the same person for many years; and, individual citizens who feel helpless and angry, but do not try seriously to change their unsatisfactory autocratic systems.
Mallat’s candidacy provides a rare example of how individuals can instigate change by demanding that those who wield power should be held accountable to the law. It also affirms the novel idea that any Arab citizen can aspire to become president through democratic political action and personal initiative.
This is not new ground for Mallat, who has a track record in challenging the political impunity of leaders throughout the Middle East. He actively and publicly campaigned for years against the practices of leaders like Muammar Gadhafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
He was one of a handful of lawyers who took the daring step in June 2001 of filing a criminal complaint in a Belgian court on behalf of 28 witnesses and survivors of the 1982 massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, which resulted in the brutal death of between 700 and several thousand Palestinian civilians. The suit charged Israel’s Ariel Sharon and General Amos Yaron, and several members of a Lebanese Christian militia, with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Mallat and colleagues made their point on the global stage: political impunity and wanton killing of any people, by any people, is unacceptable, and has to be ended.
Sharon’s name will forever be linked with the Sabra and Shatila massacres, partly due to this legal action. Five books have been written on the “Sharon case” in Belgium, including a splendid volume of essays edited by Dr. John Borneman of Princeton University. Entitled The Case of Ariel Sharon and the Fate of Universal Jurisdiction, it was published in 2004 by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.
I visited Mallat in his office last week to find out more about his motivation and expectations in running for president, assuming that his candidacy was something of a long-shot. Yet, like the Sharon case in Belgium, I also knew that Mallat’s political activism and legal initiatives tended to anchor a specific local event in its much wider, often universal, moral and constitutional context. In this case, the core issue is one he has been writing and speaking about for years: the crucial constitutional rotation of presidential power.
Mallat, Jean Monnet Professor of Law at St. Joseph University in Beirut, sees his presidential candidacy as a logical continuation of the same legal and ethical principles that demanded that the Sabra and Shatila killers be held accountable. No person, group or country was above the law. All had to be held accountable for their transgressions. Impunity was intolerable.
He, like a majority of Lebanese, was outraged in autumn 2004 when Syria unilaterally extended the 6-year mandate of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud for another 3 years. Mallat saw this as clear foreign interference in Lebanon’s domestic affairs, making the extension “illegitimate and unconstitutional because it reflected external coercion and therefore it must be reversed.”
He also believes that many of the assassinations, threats and explosions that have rocked Lebanon since autumn 2004 are linked to Lahoud’s extension.
“We have to reverse the presidential extension through more than just talk or political pressure,” he told me, “we must create a real, viable alternative to unseat Lahoud.”
So he launched his campaign, a very organized affair, with a website updated daily, media releases, local and international support committees, position papers, regular press interviews and public lectures, and a complete action for national political renewal. He meets regularly with politicians, members of parliament, and small groups of interested citizens. Win or lose, he sees his candidacy in the wider context of the urgent need to change the political culture throughout the Arab world.
“We have to promote democracy in the Arab world by ensuring that power at the top of the executive branch rotates regularly. We must unblock the hold of power at the top of our systems. In this case, parliament has a duty to reverse the president’s term extension and unseat Lahoud,” he says.
He also feels that his candidacy has triggered two other important ideas: “The dike has broken on the idea that a normal Arab citizen cannot aspire to compete for the top post in the country,” and, “we insist on ending the norm that governments or officials can get away with killing people”.
How sensible, how long overdue, and how unsurprising that it should be a single man of the law in little Lebanon that translates these ideas into action. This strikes me as a candidacy not only worth watching, but also worth emulating in other Arab lands. We need to break more dikes.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 24 January 2006
Word Count: 859
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