Lebanon between the squares
For three weeks Lebanon was represented by those who laid claim to Martyrs Square -- not any more, writes Graham Usher in Beirut
This week "Lebanon" changed places. It was no longer assembled in Beirut's Martyrs Square, candle lit grave-site of the assassinated former prime minister Rafiq Al-Hariri and host to daily protesters demanding that his killers be brought to justice and that Syria end its long, 29-year tutelage of their country. It became Beirut's Riad Al-Sulh square, pulsating shore to a sea of people whose demands were written on two enormous Lebanese flags hoisted by cranes: "Thank you Syria," said one; "No to foreign interference," said the other.
The shift was engineered by two monumental decisions. The first, on 5 March, was President Bashar Al-Assad's announcement that Syria, under mounting international pressure and 15 years late, would implement those clauses of the 1989 Taif Accord that requires its forces to re-deploy to Lebanon's Beqaa Valley and thence to Syria. The former will be completed by the end of March, said Al-Assad, following a meeting with Lebanese President Emile Lahoud on 7 March. The latter is subject to further Lebanese-Syrian "consultations".
The second decision, on 6 March, was by the Lebanese resistance movement, Hizbullah. Following three weeks of thunderous indecision, it finally threw its weight behind this old/new dispensation, positioning itself as the guardian of Taif, the "only foundation" on which Lebanon, with all its confessions and multiple identities, can rest. It also believes it can serve as the "bridge" between the squares, 300 metres and several worlds apart.
It will take some spanning. On 7 March perhaps 10,000 Lebanese commemorated the third week since Al- Hariri's murder. They were mostly Maronite Christians, with some Druze and a smattering Sunni Muslims. They were overwhelmingly young, Westernised and rich. They are united in opposition to Syria's 29-year occupation of their country but are divided on the means to end it.
Some of their parties -- like Michael Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement -- seek implementation of UN Resolution 1559, passed last September, which calls for the disarmament of "militias" (i.e. Hizbullah) and a Lebanon free of all "foreign" (i.e. Syrian) influence. Others -- like Druze leader Walid Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party -- is wary of 1559, sponsored by the US and France, Lebanon's former colonial master. Still, like Aoun, he wants a "clear cut timetable" for the withdrawal of Syrian troops and intelligence forces from Lebanon.
On 8 March perhaps hundreds of thousands Lebanese converged on Riad Al- Sulh Square and much of central Beirut. They were mostly Muslim, overwhelmingly Shia, bussed up from the south and Beirut's southern suburbs. Many were conservative, religious and poor. And they were adamant that theirs was an authentically Lebanese movement no less than those that gather in Martyrs Square.
"You are seeing the real Lebanon now," said Munir Bargas, from Mount Lebanon. "The people are not just from [Christian] East Beirut but from the north, west, east and south of Lebanon. They are Lebanon".
And they came not to praise 1559 but to bury it. "We have come here to voice to the world our opposition to UN Security Council Resolution 1559," raged Hizbullah leader Al-Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, at Riad Al-Sulh. And "to those who are keen on the implementation of 1559, we say that we criticise your insistence for toppling the Taif Accord as the move means overthrowing national consensus and overthrowing the blood and recommendation of the martyr Rafiq Al-Hariri, and consequently overthrowing the foundations of Lebanon after the destructive civil war."
Nasrallah called for dialogue and the swift formation of a "national unity" government, dismissing the opposition's demands for a "neutral" government as "meaningless".
But the opposition is refusing any consultation with existing "caretaker" Lebanese government unless it receives a timetable for a complete Syrian withdrawal, an international investigation into Al-Hariri's assassination and the up-front resignation of seven of Lebanon's security chiefs. Nor, for now, is it interested in a dialogue with Hizbullah. Instead it is sending delegations to Europe, with Jumblatt going to Germany and Russia and others seeking support from France and the European Union.
The message it receives there is unlikely to deviate much from that decreed by George Bush on 8 March, that Syria uphold 1559 through the withdrawal of "all military forces and intelligence personnel ... before the Lebanese elections [in May] for those elections to be free and fair".
And this is the fear. In the aftermath of Al-Hariri's assassination the opposition was extraordinarily successful in presenting the crisis as a case of the Lebanese people in one trench and its Syrian installed regime in the other, fuelled by the enormous popular resentment over its oppressive, unaccountable control of their lives. It was -- said one commentator -- "a triumph over confessionalism".
But with Al-Assad's speech and the mammoth demonstration of Hizbullah's strength, the fault-line has been redrawn. All are agreed on Syrian withdrawal. But they fracture between Taif and 1559, with those (like Hizbullah) who believe in "Lebanese nationalism" in alliance with Syria -- and those (like the opposition) who believe in "Lebanon" -- and finally Western, Arab and others, who are prepared to defend it.
On the evidence of the demonstrations in Martyrs Square and Riad Al- Sulh this is starting to look ominously like the triumph of confessionalism over "independence and freedom", and less the way to the new Lebanon than a dangerous return to the old one.
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