BEIRUT — Every time I walk through the front line of the political confrontation in downtown Beirut between the American-Saudi-backed Fouad Siniora Lebanese government and the Iranian-Syrian-backed Hizbullah-led opposition, I have the distinct if surreal sensation of walking through a 1970s-eras American rock festival on a WWII movie set. This downtown Beirut scene encapsulates today’s multiple ideological and cultural confrontations in the Middle East and the world, and may be the most visible front line of a wider global face-off. Like all other things Lebanese, this serious, often tense, and increasingly unpredictable confrontation is garnished with a bit of levity, and much humanity.
On one side are numerous encampments of the government’s gun-toting soldiers, amidst armored personnel carriers and several layers of barbed wire barriers, reflecting both the special camaraderie of their martial profession and the deadly serious nature of their mission. The simultaneously relaxed demeanor of the troops, though, suggests that D-Day is some ways away. One giveaway is that this muscular war scene takes place on a stretch of road that houses a music conservatory, a church, a Buddha Bar, a Subway shop, major banks, the prime ministry, and one of Beirut’s best cigar shops.
Facing this military encampment across the front line — an unglamorous but utilitarian street junction and corner of a parking lot — is the tent city of several hundred fulltime protestors from Hizbullah — the Free Patriotic Movement and half a dozen other mini-movements — where the young lads seem to sleep most of the day and rally most of the night to fine music and fractious political rhetoric.
When the weather is fine, especially on evenings, weekends and official holidays, thousands of families converge on downtown Beirut to rally for the opposition. The smell of grilled meat wafts over the scene, music interspersed with political speeches fills the air, and hundreds of young couples, families, and groups of friends sit around on chairs and mats, playing cards or backgammon, waving flags, and, mostly, smoking water pipes loaded with nicely flavored tobaccos such as watermelon and rose.
For an indiscreet moment, you think that this is what Paradise must be like: friendly folks having a good time, with plenty of camaraderie, good food and music, and only pleasant garden smells from a thousand water pipes. That is a passing thought, for this is serious business, pushing Lebanon towards an increasingly strident confrontation with no clear outcome.
The dramatic front line in downtown Beirut is much more than just an anthropologically fascinating bifurcation of a very pluralistic and tolerant society. It is also more than a great urban center’s ability to keep adding to its historical repertoire by inventing new ways for people to congregate and affirm their powerful humanity as well as their simple need to enjoy life.
These sharp cultural and political distinctions between the two camps that face off in central Beirut will now spread throughout the city, following the January 8 decision by the Hizbullah-led opposition to escalate the peaceful protests to other government offices and public facilities. Like the central Beirut dynamic, this escalation is matched step by step by an increasingly self-confident and assertive government. Among its important moves has been the widespread deployment of the army and police force to preserve order and keep open all public facilities. Little encampments of army and police are visible all over the city at strategic junctions. Mostly they comprise a single armored personnel carrier with a typically dashing young soldier hanging out of the hatch door, smoking a cigarette or munching on a high-quality shawarma sandwich, with a few other mates standing around on the street.
The message of all this resonates far beyond central Beirut, reflecting a trend that we are witnessing in several Arab lands simultaneously: Incumbent governments facing challenges from Islamist-led oppositions are standing their ground, defending their positions, and fighting back politically; in cases like Palestine, Iraq and Somalia, the state also fights back militarily. Beirut’s stand-off remains peaceful and political, even though politicians on both sides occasionally verge into silly-land with their vitriolic rhetoric.
Here is the long delayed synthesis between anthropology, ideology and politics in the modern Middle East, as groups with very different agendas and significant domestic and foreign support square off and battle for control of the governance system. The roughly equal weight and determination of the two main camps in Lebanon augurs for a compromise settlement in due course, unless foreign interests on both sides push for a prolonged battle.
Watch this political battle closely. Lebanon may emerge from all this as a historic beacon of peaceful, increasingly democratic contestation of power in the modern Arab world; or, if things go badly, it may shatter and collapse in an ugly heap of its own self-destruction, fuelled by a combination of mediocre local provincial politicians egged on by selfish foreign patrons.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 09 Janaury 2007
Word Count: 804
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