Beirut
AFTER TWO ROUNDS OF PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS with little competition between candidates and consequently very low voter turnout, the third round of the Lebanese political season featured a vigorous battle between General Michel Aoun, just returned from almost 15 years of exile in Paris, and a coalition including Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated former prime minister, and the Lebanese Forces, a Christian party. Aoun trounced his competitors, and surprised even himself by winning 21 seats (out of 128) in Lebanon’s first post-Syrian occupation government. The general’s poor showing in the fourth and final round last week can hardly obscure the fact that his bloc constitutes an opposition power center, one that the more established political players–including Hariri’s group, Jumblatt, Hezbollah, and Amal (the Shiite militia)–will now have to reckon with. Aoun’s hard-won seats are a tangible sign that democracy really is taking root in this country.
I met with Aoun shortly after his third-week victories in his villa in Rabieh, a town high in the mountains about 30 minutes north of Beirut. He is a robust and energetic 70 years, and smaller than the televised image of the man who took on the Syrian army 15 years ago and is now embarked on the equally daunting, and perhaps thankless, task of reconfiguring postwar Lebanon’s political culture.
“Our democracy is very primitive,” Aoun says. “It’s the worst form of democracy–no laws are implemented, a bad electoral law, there’s no separation between powers. I want to modernize this democracy.” He’s just finished lunch, and I ask him if his headstrong approach is why he’s being portrayed as a divisive figure, someone who’s driving a wedge into the national unity engendered by the “Cedar Revolution.”
“Whoa!” he says, his eyes widening behind his narrow glass frames. He seems almost wounded by the question, a strange reaction for a political figure whose often aggressive rhetoric, anticorruption crusade, and impatience with the local press is reminiscent of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Among Aoun’s first words upon his May 7 return from exile in France was a request for the assembled press corps to “shut up.” However, as with Giuliani, few people doubt his integrity.
Aoun hands me a pamphlet, “The Alternative,” detailing the reform initiatives of his party, the Free Patriotic Movement. They cover such areas as public education, the environment, independence of the judiciary, freedom of speech and assembly. These are all the subjects Arab liberals agree need to be tackled across the region but will rarely discuss openly, never mind publish. Aoun boasts that “this is the first time a Lebanese political party has presented a written program, not just verbal promises. We have to fulfill it.”
Aoun’s camp is staffed mostly by volunteers, some of them wearing orange, his party’s color, and the “new black” of democracy movements across the world. It’s clear that the general’s energy and forthrightness have inspired large parts of a community accustomed to double-dealing, and multiple discourses (depending on which confessional community is being addressed–or targeted). To his supporters, Aoun signals a break with that kind of local, even tribal, leadership. Says American University of Beirut professor Farid al-Khazen, a newly elected deputy who ran on Aoun’s list: “He’s a Christian who has large popularity within the Muslim community, and his political discourse is very much national in focus.”
“I’m aware of what I represent for Lebanese people of all confessions,” Aoun says. “I’m a guy who looks out for the interests of his country, and after 15 years of exile is still popular. The Lebanese look at me as a unique figure in their history. Or, that’s what I hear from them,” he says somewhat self-consciously after skipping a beat. “I don’t say that about me–you can ask them.”
One of Aoun’s press aides, an attractive young woman in her early 30s, nods cheerfully. She and many of Aoun’s supporters say they were first inspired by the general back in the late ’80s when he took on Syria and challenged the U.S.-led international order that had handed the country over to the Assad regime. During his exile, while his supporters were regularly harassed and jailed by the security services, Aoun lobbied Western governments to get Syria out of Lebanon. He was a driving force behind both the September 2004 U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, and the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act passed by Congress in 2003. Still, it was only after September 11 that Aoun began to get a hearing in Washington with a series of speeches that echoed the Bush administration’s new talking-points: The connection between authoritarian regimes and terrorism, zero tolerance for dictatorships, especially Syria’s, and the need for democracy in the Middle East, which Lebanon had historically, and uniquely, represented in the region.
During the war years, Aoun’s belief in the sovereignty of the Lebanese nation led him to oppose the Lebanese Forces, at the time a powerful Christian militia that had essentially established a state within a state. If that confrontation opened wounds in the Christian community that still haven’t entirely healed, it also fortified Aoun’s credentials as a nonsectarian leader. He believes that Lebanon will eventually embrace secularism in government but, he explains, it will not be imposed from above, as in Syria, but will rather come from the ground up. Aoun sees it happening, perhaps over-optimistically, within the next 10 to 15 years.
In the meantime, confessionalism remains the basis of Lebanon’s politics, and the key to its elections. The parliament’s 128 seats are divided evenly between Muslims and Christians, and further subdivided among sects, including Maronite Christian, Shiite Muslim, Sunni Muslim, Druze, and others. Perhaps it is because the electoral reality is so complex that many observers, Western and local, tended to reduce the recent campaign to a contest between the anti-Syria coalition and its opponents, who have been unfairly painted as pro-Syrian, including, bizarrely enough, Aoun himself.
In the early spring, shortly after the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, most of the country rallied behind its “opposition” leaders, perhaps most famously Walid Jumblatt, the Druze chieftain whose personal courage in taking a stand against the Syrian occupation helped galvanize international attention. But Jumblatt is a less than pristine figure. Indeed, everyone who held political power in Lebanon over the last 15 years was seriously compromised by the Syrian presence–even Hariri, the man now regarded as the signal martyr of the “independence intifada.” After all, Hariri was prime minister during the bulk of the occupation.
The fact is that some figures in the anti-Syria group jumped the Damascus leash before others, and some never jumped at all. During the elections, Jumblatt and Saad Hariri, the late Rafik’s son, allied themselves with Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist group still under Syrian tutelage.
It is unclear, then, how this grouping could be described precisely as being the anti-Syria opposition, or Aoun as pro-Syrian. Aoun, for his part, made common cause with several politicians who had profited handsomely from Syrian control, but he is hardly, as Jumblatt describes him, a “little Syrian tool.”
“This was all propaganda,” says Khazen. “As though people voted in favor of a pro-Syrian figure. The Western media was as responsible as the Lebanese media for spreading this nonsense. For the voters this was a nonissue. Syria had no role, no agenda, no candidates.”
Still, Syria will continue to have an interest in Lebanon, as will other states, including France, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. The Lebanese are accustomed to the fact that foreign powers will always play a role in this small country, but those interests with any luck will now begin to be articulated through legitimate bilateral relationships, not political assassinations. And it is up to Lebanese officials to leverage those interests in order to serve Lebanon.
After a 30-year hiatus, the Arab world’s original democracy is practicing real politics–deal-making, coalition-building, horse-trading. Of course, after so long under the gun, the Lebanese are entitled to expect something more than just politics. The national unity on display after the assassination of Rafik Hariri was a useful narrative. It galvanized both the Lebanese and an international community that looked on with sympathy and admiration for a country where Christians and Muslims marched together peacefully to determine their own political future. “People have a lot invested in the idea of national unity,” says Lebanese analyst Elie Fawaz. “But the fact is that the Lebanese have unequivocally expressed that they are unified in their opposition to violence as a means of settling political issues.”
Simply because Muslims and Christians don’t march hand in hand every day doesn’t mean that civil war is in the offing. The test of a democracy is not how much people agree on the same things, but how much space is given for debate and the contest of competing interests. To put it another way, as Aoun told me, “Lebanon’s national unity, democracy, is expressed through a diversity of opinion.” As with national unity, many Lebanese have had overly high expectations of Aoun, first when he took on Syria and again now. He’s neither the country’s savior nor its sole liberator; rather, he’s an important, indeed singular, element in Lebanon’s renascent democracy.
Lee Smith is writing a book on Arab culture.
