BEIRUT, 5 August 2005 — The last Syrian troops have left Lebanon. A parliamentary election has been conducted in peace. But the euphoria felt by many Lebanese has evaporated, along with any illusion that the path to a “new Lebanon” will be easy.
The assassination of ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February had appeared briefly to change Lebanon’s political landscape, filling the streets with tens of thousands of Muslims and Christians seeking “freedom, sovereignty and independence”.
But the May-June elections proved disappointing. At least in Beirut and the south they were stitched up, with powerful leaders striking alliances based more on sectarian allegiance or personal ambition than on any coherent political program.
Syria may have ended its 29-year military presence in April, but it recently sent a pointed signal of its ability to make life miserable for its former client state with a 23-day border clampdown that temporarily strangled Lebanese overland exports.
A series of bomb explosions and assassinations since the killing of Hariri has rattled nerves, prompting some politicians to take extreme security precautions and previously outspoken intellectuals to lie low.
“My sense is of a huge political impasse after an aborted revolution, with violence possible,” said a human rights advocate who asked not to be named. He had been a vocal critic of Syria’s past role and the Lebanese politicians who did its bidding.
Two of the politicians perceived to be closest to Damascus, President Emile Lahoud and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, have hung onto their jobs, surviving intense pressure from the leaders of anti-Syrian protests sparked by Hariri’s death.
The United States, France and their allies had also seemed keen to see Lahoud go — it was the Syrian-inspired extension of his term last September that prompted UN Security Council Resolution 1559 opposing that move and demanding a Syrian pullout and the dismantling of all militias in Lebanon.
Western diplomats had avoided Lahoud since Hariri’s killing, so when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited him during a trip to Beirut last month, Lebanese took it as a signal the Maronite Christian president would serve out his term.
“It was a good time to send Lahoud a signal that he has a constructive role to play in reforms, in implementing 1559 and in getting the Syrians to play along,” one diplomat said.
European Union observers have delivered a scathing critique of the electoral law, criticizing almost every aspect of the polls in May and June, and calling for a thorough overhaul. Equally urgent, diplomats and many Lebanese argue, is cleaning up a political and economic system that has allowed corruption, cronyism and patronage to flourish.
New Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s Cabinet, which won parliament’s confidence last Saturday, plans to get a grip on security and push ahead with political and economic reform, but it has avoided any explicit commitment to implementing 1559.
The UN demand for Hezbollah guerrillas and Palestinians in refugee camps to be disarmed is political dynamite in a country deeply scarred by its 1975-90 civil war.
Hezbollah, a formidable force among the Shiites who form Lebanon’s biggest community, has 14 seats in the 128-member Parliament and one minister in the 24-strong Cabinet.
“The international pressure to implement 1559 won’t go away,” said political scientist Nizar Hamzeh, an expert on Hezbollah at the American University of Beirut. “The government will try to get a grace period for an internal dialogue, but it then has to use this wisely to implement 1559 without bloodshed or instability,” he said.
A Western diplomat noted that the resolution contains no deadline, but said the Beirut government should take “visible, meaningful steps toward militia disarmament”.
The Lebanese Army cannot forcibly disarm Hezbollah, hardened by two decades of battling Israel. Any hostile deployment of soldiers, who are mostly Shiites, to the south could split the army and provoke instability, or even civil war, Hamzeh argued.
He said it was naive to expect a purely Lebanese consensus to resolve an issue in which Hezbollah’s outside backers are also entangled, along with the Palestinians and Israel.
Any success for international diplomacy would also hang on defusing regional tensions, notably the nuclear issue now threatening a crisis between Iran and the West, he said.
Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hailed Hezbollah’s role in resisting Israel when the movement’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah visited him in Tehran this week.
Tackling disarmament head-on could ignite sectarian tensions and derail any real reform drive in Lebanon, whose fractious politicians and sects have yet to work out a national identity independent of Syria, or even how to coexist amicably.
“While Christians may play less of a pivotal function than they used to, the other communities, particularly the Sunnis and Shiites, have yet to truly negotiate power relationships with each other — something the Maronites and Sunnis spent many decades doing,” analyst Michael Young wrote in the Daily Star.
