BEIRUT, 12 December 2003 — More than 10,000 Lebanese University students and professors took to the streets here yesterday in a massive demonstration to demand funding and the independence of the country’s only public university. Converging from the four corners of the country, the demonstrators shouted protests as they marched peacefully toward the Grand Serail, or the offices of the prime minister, in downtown Beirut.
As proof of the gravity of the situation, all the political movements, from the Shiite Hezbollah to Christians showed up for the demonstration, the largest since the end of the country’s 15-year civil war in 1990.
A cordon of anti-riot police escorted the protestors who included veiled Hezbollah students who marched next to leftists sporting T-shirts bearing the effigy of revolutionary leader Che Guevara.
The arrival of a delegation of students from the Jesuit University Universite Saint-Joseph (USJ), joining the protest in solidarity, was welcomed with loud applause. “Muslims and Christians, all united to save the university of the poor,” said the protesters. “Bread, education and freedom,” was the main slogan shouted by the demonstrators, who also claimed they wanted “a government of patriots, not a government of crooks.”
Prime Minister Rafik “Hariri and (Finance Minister Fouad) Siniora are thieves,” they also said. The slogans which stayed away from the usual political references said: “No to the politicians’ interference in deciding the fate of the Lebanese University.”
The university’s some 3,000 professors have been on strike for three weeks. They are demanding 2.3 billion Lebanese pounds ($1.7 million) in arrears and better funding. Demonstrators also hope for improved teaching conditions at the 70,000-student state institution. The level of teaching has greatly declined in recent years, threatening the public university’s survival, while private universities abound with many of them funded by religious missions.
UL is up against prestigious competitors, such as USJ and the American University of Beirut, whose tuition fees that can reach $10,000. The level of teaching has greatly declined in recent years, threatening the public university’s survival, while private universities abound. UL is up against prestigious competitors, such as the American University of Beirut and St. Joseph University.
The students called for more funding to modernize the university’s old buildings and lecturers demanded better benefits. Lebanon is counting on serious belt-tightening to help ease a more than $30 billion public debt that at close to 175 percent of GDP is strangling growth and consuming most government revenues.
The Lebanese University hosts more than 70,000 students, mostly from middle class and poor families who cannot afford expensive private colleges. A full-year costs about $200, while studying in a private university can cost thousands of dollars annually.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s pardoning commission refused Wednesday to commute the death penalty for 31 convicts, who risk being hanged if President Emile Lahoud does not excuse them, a court source said yesterday.
The death penalty — by hanging for civilians, firing squad for the military — is still practiced in Lebanon, but it has not been enforced for the last three years, following the refusal of former prime minister Salim Hoss to sign an execution order for three convicts in 2000.
While former President Elias Hrawi was in power from 1990-1998, 12 people were executed, although a sweeping law forbade judges from abusing their power in premeditated murder cases. In the aftermath of its 1975-1990 civil war, Lebanon made the death penalty mandatory in 1994 for first-degree homicide, regardless of extenuating circumstances.
