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Lebanon Against Itself (Again) Marc J. Sirois February 4, 2011 Search MERIP (Marc J. Sirois is a Canadian journalist based in Beirut since 1997.) Middle East Report The year 2011 has brought For background on the Tribunal, see Lebanon’s political tug of war Heiko Wimmen, “The Long, Steep Fall of Online Subject Index the Lebanon Tribunal ,” Middle East into the streets again, with Report Online , December 1, 2010. thousands of protesters burning Afghanistan and tires and blocking roads over the apparent failure of their Pakistan candidate to secure the office of prime minister. But months of Algeria hype to the contrary, this time the raucous demonstrations were Arab and Muslim Subscribe Online to Americans Middle East Report not staged by Hizballah and its allies in the March 8 coalition so named after a day of protests in 2005 designed to “thank” Syria Arabian Peninsula before its withdrawal of forces from Lebanon. Instead, the protests Egypt were mounted by the rival March 14 alliance, so named for the Elections Order a subscription and day of “Syria out!” rallies that followed less than a week later. Europe and the back issues to the award- Middle East winning magazine Middle East Report . The protests erupted on the evening of January 25 after news From the Editors Horn of Africa Click here for the order reports made it clear that a majority in Parliament would side page. against the incumbent premier, billionaire Saad al-Hariri, whose Human Rights fractious “national unity” government collapsed on January 12 International after more than a third of its ministers resigned. The resignations Law/International SPECIAL Justice PUBLICATIONS were an expression of protest over Beirut’s collaboration with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, a hybrid UN-Lebanese body Interventions Primer on Palestine, Iran Israel and the investigating the 2005 bomb blast that killed Saad al-Hariri’s Arab-Israeli Conflict Iraq Click here (PDF) father, former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, and 23 others (including one who died weeks later). All but one of those who Israel [Click here for HTML walked out came from the opposition March 8 alliance, which had Israel and version] warned for months that the Tribunal was preparing to frame Lebanon/Syria Jordan figures belonging to one of its key member parties, Hizballah, for the assassination, and that it would bring down the government if Kuwait Kurds and the latter continued to cooperate with the Tribunal. Kurdistan Some members of March 14 called the resignation a “coup d’état,” Lebanon and Syria but the Lebanese constitution is unequivocal: If a cabinet loses a Morocco and the third of its members, it is automatically dissolved and the president Maghrib consults with members of Parliament to determine which of the Mediations country’s Sunni Muslim politicians (the office is reserved for them) Occupied has the most support in the legislature to form a new one. Palestinian Territories After months of breathless warnings that Hizballah was weeks, Oil and Economics days or even hours from carrying out an armed takeover, the only Palestinians in drama was in the timing: On January 12, just as Hariri was meeting Israel in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama, his tenure was Peace Process ended. Refugees Sanctions A Consensus Candidate Saudi Arabia Sudan The government collapse started with the defection of MP and Turkey Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a March 14 stalwart since the United Nations alliance’s formation following Rafiq al-Hariri’s death, and six US Policy 1 of 7 05/02/2011 11:39 members of his Democratic Gathering. Jumblatt, whose adherence Western Sahara to the Hariri camp had constituted a major departure from his Uzbekistan record, had been increasingly at odds with some March 14 stances Women since August 2009. Now he completed his volte-face , opining that Yemen the Tribunal could not deliver justice because it had degenerated into a “bazaar of blackmail and counter-blackmail.” Absent other changes Jumblatt’s defection would have deadlocked Parliament, with both March 8 and March 14 commanding 64 seats. But then former Maronite warlord Samir Geagea announced that his Lebanese Forces party would stand by Hariri. He also ridiculed the expected March 8 candidate, veteran former Prime Minister Omar Karami, and this outburst probably ruined Hariri’s chances. Karami is the younger brother of the late Rashid Karami, another slain premier whose assassination in 1987 is widely attributed to the aforementioned Geagea. Rashid Karami was a highly respected statesman, particularly in the northern city of Tripoli, which he represented -- and it so happens that a couple of more independent-minded MPs, people on whose votes March 14 had been counting, hail from the same place. Geagea’s comments were taken as an insult to the memory of one of Tripoli’s favorite sons. If even one of the Tripoli bloc had bolted, March 8 would have been in the driver’s seat. One of these Tripoli MPs was Najib Miqati, a telecommunications tycoon whose brief tenure as interim prime minister in 2005 earned him considerable credit for managing the first elections held after Syrian forces withdrew following the elder Hariri’s death. Shortly after Geagea’s attack on Karami, Miqati announced that he had put his name forward as a compromise candidate. This move earned him all manner of accusations from the Hariri camp, which sent its supporters into the streets to express their rage at the “traitor.” Although the pro-Hariri camp has continued to cry “coup,” accused March 8 of sowing sectarian divisions and claimed that the altered balance of power in Parliament violates the will of the electorate, March 8’s maneuver was carried out in accordance with constitutional provisions. The only “violation” was of the pledge made during negotiations in 2008 at Doha that the opposition ministers would not bring down the government. But when their rivals continued to champion the Tribunal, effectively going against their own promise at Doha not to govern unilaterally, the opposition judged themselves free to do so. So is Miqati really “the Hizballah candidate,” as Future TV, the mouthpiece television station of Hariri’s Future Movement, dismissed him during its evening newscast on January 24? It is hard to see how. At the most basic level, even the walkout that brought Hariri down included just two Hizballah members. The rest came from the Free Patriotic Movement (4), Amal (3) and former cabinet minister Suleiman Franjieh’s Marada grouping -- plus one non-aligned minister, ‘Adnan Sayyid Husayn. Even when Jumblatt’s change of allegiance made Hariri’s ouster possible, March 8’s preferred candidate was the aging Karami, certainly more friendly to their interests but hardly a Hizballah puppet. There were still plenty of congenial Sunni politicians to pick from, but these men were bypassed in favor of Miqati precisely because he was thought capable of gaining consensus support. Roots of the Crisis 2 of 7 05/02/2011 11:39 Saad al-Hariri’s cabinet was an unlikely collection of committed enemies that took four months to be formed following the parliamentary elections of June 2010. Its unwieldy structure and misleading moniker, however, were not solely a result of how close those polls were, nor even of the long-standing reliance on “consensus cabinets” to compensate for the built-in disparities of the Lebanese political model. Instead, the formula was determined by the 2008 Doha accord, a Qatari-brokered arrangement to alleviate an 18-month political crisis that had degenerated into violence. Primarily, the idea was to prevent March 8 and March 14 from resorting to the deeply divisive and highly destabilizing strategies that had wrought the crisis in the first place. March 14, led by the Future Movement, had taken to ignoring the tradition -- honored by virtually every government since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war -- of shelving decisions when strong disagreement existed within the cabinet. March 8, known primarily for its inclusion of Hizballah but composed mostly (in Parliament at least) of former Lebanese army commander Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, eventually reacted by pulling its ministers out of cabinet in late 2006. That walkout stemmed from the creation of the same tribunal that has sparked the current saga. For months, representatives of March 14 had been negotiating with the UN to have that body create a panel to unravel the mystery of assassination of Hariri, which the latter’s political heirs blamed presumptively on the Syrian government. March 8 voices were exceedingly wary of this route, particularly since Hizballah had just emerged from a hard-fought war with Israel and remained very much in the diplomatic crosshairs of the US and its allies. A de jure UN court, the opposition argued, would de facto be a US court, and since Hizballah’s resistance activities had long benefited from Syrian support, the fear was that Washington would try to use the Tribunal to cripple one or both of these parties in order to remove two of the most considerable obstacles to US policy -- and Israeli hegemony -- in the region. Nonetheless, March 14 continued to negotiate unilaterally with the UN Security Council, largely freezing the foreign minister, Fawzi Salloukh, a March 8 figure, out of the process. When March 8 was presented with a draft of the pact -- which had yet to be translated into Arabic -- less than two days before it was to be voted on, Hizballah and the other Shi‘i party in the cabinet, the Amal movement, pulled their ministers out and declared the government dissolved. The cabinet, they said, no longer enjoyed representation from all the country’s major sects, as mandated by the constitution.

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