Lebanon - shifting from emotions to power politics

by Rami G. Khouri

Three weeks after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the fog of emotion and anger is clearing and is being replaced by the more legible confusion of political battles, old and new.

The easy victories have been achieved, the spontaneous mass public sentiments have been expressed, and the more significant political battles are just beginning. All the principal parties have now logged on to the virtual ideological chat room that Lebanon has become.

We will know in the coming weeks if Lebanon will make political history by being the first Arab country in which mass popular mobilisation changed a government and reversed the policy of a powerful neighbour (Syria in this case). Conversely, this may turn out to be a fleeting moment of romantic idealism, in which the spirit of sovereignty and freedom from Syrian domination that genuinely drives so many Lebanese will fall victim to more powerful forces of entrenched Arab interests and Western diplomatic expediency.

The important development now is that the principal players have entered the political fray and made their opening moves. Syrian President Bashar Assad Saturday announced a phased pullback of Syrian troops to the border region, and Monday the Syrian-Lebanese Higher Committee added new layers of imprecision to this. It announced that the initial pullback would be made this month, but further moves would depend on bilateral consultations at a later stage. This is known as thumbing your nose at Washington and Paris.

The Lebanese opposition, and the US, UK, French, German and other foreign governments, quickly expressed disappointment with the Lebanese-Syrian redeployment announcement, insisting that a full, immediate withdrawal from Lebanon was required to meet the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1559. This is known as thumbing back at Damascus.

The Lebanese opposition to Syria's presence in Lebanon, in turn, held a rally in Beirut Monday in which some tens of thousands took part, demanding an immediate and full withdrawal of all Syrian military and security personnel. The main pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon, headed by the powerful Hizbollah party, weighed in this weekend with a speech by its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. He thanked the Syrians for their efforts to protect Lebanon and rejected calls to implement Resolution 1559, which calls for Syria's withdrawal and also disarming the Hizbollah militia. A massive march in central Beirut Tuesday was the pro-Syrian Lebanese's response to the anti-Syrian opposition movement's dominance of the street since the Feb. 14 Hariri assassination. Welcome to the increasingly noisy chat room.

Three things are happening simultaneously here that need to be watched closely, in order to know which way events will unfold. The first is a process of localisation and provincialisation of these dynamics into very narrow Lebanese terms - ones that are existentially important for the Lebanese people, but less compelling for the rest of the world. The second is the transformation of raw human emotions into hard-nosed political ideology - as all Lebanese and Syrian actors mobilise and flaunt their power assets and start the process of making compromise deals to achieve reasonable results for all concerned, while preserving the national unity and stability of Lebanon. The third is the slow disaggregation of local, regional and global political dynamics from each other, as the parties identify their core interests - incumbency, honour, security, dignity, hegemonic power, wealth, credibility and survival come to mind as key priorities - and discard marginal issues.

In this respect, the pressure that has been mostly focused on Syria and its hand-picked Lebanese leadership in recent weeks will now shift to the Lebanese opposition and Hizbollah. The Lebanese opposition is being tested on several important counts. Is it really broad based, or primarily a traditional Christian opposition to Syria's dominance in Lebanon these last 30 years? Can it channel the emotional power of its supporters in the street into a credible political force that achieves meaningful demands? After it brought down the brittle Omar Karameh government, has it aimed too high in demanding the resignation of seven top Lebanese security directors? As some expect, would asking for the resignation of President Emile Lahoud fragment the opposition fatally? And, how will the opposition reconcile the demand of Resolution 1559 to disarm Hizbollah with the strong Lebanese national legitimacy and popularity of Hizbollah?

Hizbollah itself now faces perhaps the biggest political test of its life since it came into existence in the early 1980s. How will Syria's imminent withdrawal from Lebanon impact on Hizbollah's domestic standing? Will it engage more directly in Lebanese national politics or remain apart as the "resistance" that safeguards Lebanon's security from Israeli threats? How will Hizbollah reconcile the widespread Lebanese demand (now also with official Syrian approval) to implement 1559, without disarming itself?

The Lebanese-Syrian decision Monday to redeploy Syrian troops by the end of this month will elicit stronger American and Western pressure on Syria, which we've already witnessed since Saturday night. This, in turn, will heighten pressures on Hizbollah and the Lebanese opposition groups to clarify their positions and, more importantly, sort out their assorted contradictions and weaknesses.

Only one thing seems certain right now: the Syrians will withdraw all their forces from Lebanon in the coming months, because of the immense local and global pressures to do this, which Syria acknowledges. All other developments will depend on how the parties mobilise and use their political assets in making threats and deals.

This article was published in the Wednesday, March 9, 2005 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.