When the original six countries signed the pact that in March 1945 established the pan-Arab institution known as the Arab League, they made sure to include in the pact’s preamble a commitment “to strengthen the close relations and numerous ties” which bind the Arab world.
Though over the years these disparate, heterogeneous nations, now comprised of 22 members, have predictably and inevitably found it difficult to develop a common position on political issues, they remain in agreement that the league does not sanction the invasion, occupation, control or interference in the affairs of one country by another.
All of which brings us to the political drama that has played out in Lebanon in recent weeks following the assassination of Rafik Hariri two months ago.
Now we learn that, according to American, European and United Nations officials, not to mention Lebanon’s opposition groups, Damascus is working covertly to ensure, via a “network of Lebanese operatives,” a continued domination of Lebanon even after it withdraws its troops and security forces from the country. These folks also claim that Syria is using its allies in Beirut (the Lebanese president, the acting prime minister and at least 70 of the 128 members of Parliament are said to be pro-Syrian) to stall the coming spring elections, the key to political change.
In the past two weeks or so, American officials have issued tough demarches warning Damascus against the use of any residual, pro-Syrian assets in Lebanon after the withdrawal. And last Sunday, UN envoy Terje Roes-Larson, during his third and final round of talks with President Bashar in the Syrian capital, stressed the importance not only of removing Syria’s 15,000 troops but also of all “vestiges” of Syria’s influence in the political affairs of its neighbor.
After the meeting the UN envoy said that he had been assured by Syrian officials that “all Syrian troops, military assets and the intelligence apparatus will have been withdrawn fully and completely by April 30, at the latest.”
Roed-Larson will submit his report to the Security Council within days.
Fine, so to that extent, it can be said that the United States, the European Union and the United Nations have crafted a well-defined, joint policy on Lebanon — exit Syrian troops, hands off the country’s political life.
The question is this: Can international pressure really bring about such a facile terminus to the Syrian presence in Lebanon after 30 years of determined efforts by Damascus to, effectively, reverse the consequences of the Sykes-Picot agreement that enabled French colonial overlords to carve out the Lebanese state out of Syria’s western heartland?
Syrian influence in Lebanon has been pervasive since 1976, permeating the country’s social, political and economic institutions to a point where even the appointment of civil servants had to receive Syrian approval beforehand. There are well over half a million Syrian workers — in a country with fewer than 4 million people — many of them providing much needed cheap labor on farms in the Beka’a Valley. Their contribution to the Lebanese economy is pivotal, much in the manner that, without the contribution of the roughly 10 million illegal immigrants who live in the US today to industries like construction, the catering business, and particularly agriculture in states like Arizona, whole sectors of the labor market, not to mention the cost of living, will have to be redefined.
And lest we forget, Syria and Lebanon have a joint defense agreement, and until and unless that is abrogated by the Parliament (as, say, the 1969 Cairo Accords, that allowed the PLO to operate in the south, were) Syria will continue to have the legal pretext to return when it deemed it fit.
But more importantly, will Syria’s intimate relationship with and influence over Lebanon’s own security agencies continue — security agencies, incidentally, that last week’s UN report by Peter Fitzgerald (“the fighting Irishman”) accused of “planting, moving and discarding evidence” that would have helped the investigation into the assassination of Hariri on Valentine’s Day?
It would be naive to expect that relationship and all that influence would disappear overnight into thin air. The impact of three decades of Syrian engagement in Lebanon will be hard to undo.
There are social classes, political elites and sectors of the Lebanese economy whose survival depends on continued Syrian presence in the country. As Timur Goskel, a former UN adviser in Lebanon who currently teaches at the AUB in Beirut, was quoted in the Washington Post last week: “Many Lebanese opportunists, former warlords, nouveau riche types who made their fortunes by linking their fates to Syrian presence and thus contributed more than anyone else to turn Lebanon into a Syrian protectorate have truly created an atmosphere of total Syrian dependence.”
Some commentators in the US have branded Syria a “brutal occupier” in Lebanon along the same lines that Israel has been in Palestine these last 38 years, and are calling on the US military to cut it down to size by doing an Iraq number on it. (Best way to do it? The cookie conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer writes: “Being a state, Syria has an address, the identity and location of its leadership, military installations and other fixed assets are known...” And so on and so forth.)
To say that Syria is a “foreign” occupying power, equating its presence in Lebanon with that of Israel in Palestine, is to fly in the face not only of evidence but reason. Syria after all has not expropriated the Lebanese people’s land, blown up their homes, annexed their capital and built a wall of hate around their country.
But to say, however, that Syria has failed in its mission in Lebanon, ending the civil war there, is true, for that war raged on for another 14 years.
And to say, finally, that Syria has overstayed its welcome in Lebanon, and should leave well enough alone, is equally true. The Lebanese need a respite from that civil war and from that outside control.
No Arab, perusing the preamble of the Arab League charter, would disagree here.
