Beirut
AT 6:35 P.M. on Monday, February 28, Syrian-backed Lebanese premier Omar Karami told parliament that he would resign “so that the government does not become an obstacle to the good of the country.” When Karami’s words crackled over large screens and radios set up outside the parliament building, the response was electric.
A roar of applause erupted from 25,000 people. Amidst the hugging and tears, deafening chants of “Freedom, sovereignty, independence!” and “Syria out!” released decades of pent-up resentment against Lebanon’s colonial masters into the Mediterranean breeze. “I can’t explain the joy and the power I had at that moment,” says 19-year-old Reem Sedek, an accounting student who’s lived for the past two weeks in a tent in downtown Beirut with hundreds of other young people to protest the Syrian occupation.
Twenty-four-year-old Chirine Ammar’s face lights up when she talks about that evening: “You know that sense of victory? That’s what we felt. We won the first step on our way to freedom.” What transpired in Beirut was a dramatic show of “people power” toppling a puppet regime most here had grown to hate. The 25,000 who turned out last week drew their support from transatlantic opposition to Syria, a sense that living under autocracy is no longer inevitable in the Middle East, and a healthy dose of anger. “After September 11, a new look started coming over the Middle East,” says Rony Chidiac, 23, a student protester. “Regimes that depend on security and oppression are losing their power.”
Until well into the early hours of the next morning, downtown Beirut was the scene of unadulterated exhilaration (a marked contrast to the days immediately after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the anti-Syrian former prime minister, which ground a grief-stricken country to a halt for three days). Pickup trucks flying oversize Lebanese flags zigzagged through the closed-off downtown streets for hours with speakers blaring Lebanese nationalist ballads. The din was such that it’s hard to imagine anyone in the nearby residential areas slept that night. Hundreds of Lebanese troops watched on the streetcorners, offering smiles to the joyous salutes of revelers.
Emile Lahoud, Syria’s puppet president in Lebanon, had apparently reminded officers over the weekend that he was still in charge. But that wasn’t apparent Monday. Lebanese troops at security cordons on major roads leading downtown quietly pointed protesters toward side streets, even though the demonstration was officially banned.
“You can tell from the looks in the soldiers’ eyes, and from their smiles, their true stand,” said Druze member of parliament and opposition leader Marwan Hamade, who had himself been targeted in a still-unsolved car bombing last October.
Lebanon’s historically divided sects also made a show of unity–perhaps more apparent than real. Muslims hugged Christians, although few from Lebanon’s majority Shia community turned out to protest Syria, a sponsor of the popular Shia-led Hezbollah resistance movement.
Nevertheless, a man parading through the crowd, holding aloft a cross in one hand and a Koran in the other, drew cheers. In Martyrs’ Square, protesters were told not to wave pictures of sectarian leaders like Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt or slain former Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel. Instead, thousands thrust red, white, and green Lebanese flags into the cool night breeze as they shouted anti-Syrian epithets, called for the resignation of Lahoud, and sang hoarse renditions of Lebanon’s national anthem.
Some tried to quiet the din for a few minutes when Jumblatt appeared on a large TV screen rigged up in the square. “The people have won,” Jumblatt proclaimed from his stronghold high in the Chouf mountains. Few could hear him, but they cheered his appearance anyway. The crowd particularly seemed to relish hurling insults at Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. In years past, Lebanese could only whisper when talking about Syria. In conversation, they would use codewords like “Switzerland” instead of Syria and the English translation of Assad’s name (“the lion”) to avoid trouble from Syria’s mukhabarat secret police, who roamed Lebanon’s streets and who most assumed were too uneducated to understand the English reference to the Syrian leader.
In the wee hours of the next day, when the streets finally quieted, hundreds returned to the tent city they had built around Martyrs’ Square in the city’s downtown. Burlap tents, all flying the Lebanese colors, have lined the grassy area of the square for the past two weeks. One night, Walid Jumblatt’s wife Nora slept alongside the students.
“Bashar al-Assad is not going to do what we want directly,” says Chirine Ammar outside her tent. “We’re going to stand up and we’re going to fight.” “We love this country,” Reem Sedek says at a nearby tent. “There’s no other country like Lebanon, and we’re not leaving until Syria is gone.”
Will Rasmussen is a reporter living in Beirut.
