by Robert Fisk
Five years after the former prime minister was
killed, rising sectarian tensions and a teetering government are
threatening a new conflict.
I guess that you have to live here to feel the vibrations. Take last
week, when I instinctively ducked on my balcony – so did the strollers
on the Corniche – at the supersonic sound of an F-16 fighter aircraft
flashing over the seafront and the streets of Beirut.
What message were the Israelis sending this time? That they do not fear the Hezbollah?
That they can humiliate Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri?
Heaven
knows, they hardly need to do that, when Hariri has several times taken
the desolate road to Damascus for a friendly chat with the man he
believes murdered his father Rafiq, President Bashar al-Assad.
But
who cares about the Israeli plane? Supposing a Syrian MiG had buzzed
Tel Aviv during a busy shopping day last week? Hillary Clinton would be
shrieking condemnation from the State Department, UN Secretary General
Ban Ki Moon would have solemnly warned Syria of the consequences and the
Israelis would be pondering an air strike on Syria to teach President
Assad a lesson. But no.
The Israeli overflight was a clear
contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 – Israel breaks
1701 every day with overflights, but not at this low level – and I could
find not a single report of the incident in the American press. The
Israelis are the good guys. The rest are bad.
Then came the story
of the priest who died at the Maronite archdiocese at Sarba last week,
overcome by smoke. Poor Father Pierre Khoueiry had fallen two floors off
a balcony after his building caught fire – two other priests had made
it safely out of the house – and the church explained that the cause was
an electrical fault.
It was obviously true: I saw the junction box that had burned out.
But
OTV brazenly led its nightly local news by suggesting that this could
be the continuation of fundamentalist attacks on churches in Iraq and
Egypt. Beirut's outraged information minister, Tark Mitri, complained
bitterly of the "irresponsible coverage" of the church tragedy.
In
Lebanon these days, just a hint of sectarianism can set the political
petrol alight. Of course, we can dismiss this nonsense. Didn't 20,000
young Beirutis run a marathon round the entire city on Sunday, beating
drums and clashing symbols and dancing the "dabka" in the streets? Sure.
But why has my landlord welded a new steel door over his French
windows? And why has he installed a security light at the back which
illuminates my kitchen all night?
Maybe it's the sulphurous language of Lebanon's hopeless politicians.
Ever since Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Shia Muslim Hezbollah chairman
who handed over an Israeli assault rifle to Iran's president in Beirut,
urged Lebanese to reject the Hague Tribunal investigating Rafiq Hariri's
death – Nasrallah believes leading Hezbollah members will be accused –
we've been waiting for the cabinet to fall.
The French ambassador
believes Prime Minister Hariri will not last this week. I think he's
wrong, but I worried about my predications when Hezbollah and the
largely Shiite opposition refused to join President Michel Sleiman's
reconciliation conference nine days ago. Under a crafty arrangement
engineered by the Emir of Qatar, the Christian-Sunni majority in the
Lebanese cabinet can make decisions. But the opposition and the
Hezbollah have veto rights. Yet when the opposition won't come to the
president for talks with the rest of the government, it seems they don't
even care about their veto.
Christian politicians flocked up to
their Patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, thus once again turning the
Maronite Church into a political party – though that's not surprising
when the other Nasrallah (the Hezbollah one) has turned the Shiites into
proxies for the Iranians.
Others (please read Hezbollah, the
Shiites and Iran) were trying "to impose on the Lebanese an impossible
and unjust formula – deny justice in order to preserve civil peace, or
sacrifice civil peace for the sake of justice".
Michel Aoun, a
cracked Christian ex-general whose own party supports the Hezbollah in
the vain hope they will make him president – Nasrallah enjoys telling
the world this alliance gives him cross-sectarian support – would also
be happy to see the tribunal abandoned. Even Druze leader, Walid
Jumblatt, whose politics perform a windmill cycle every three or four
years, now says that its existence is not as important as "the serenity
of Lebanon". Needless to say, Madame Clinton has been on the phone to
Hariri, nagging him to disarm Hezbollah and to stick to the tribunal. In
Washington, this makes sense. In Lebanon, she sounds as if she is mad.
Why? Shiites are the largest community in Lebanon, yet their sons and brothers make up a majority of the Lebanese national army.
It's
not that the Hezbollah have infiltrated the ranks. It's just that since
the Christian and Sunni elites have maintained the Shiites in
comparative poverty, the youngest sons need a job and are sent off to
the army. Think Manchester or Glasgow between the wars.
Furthermore,
the Lebanese army is top heavy with generals and colonels. As Carnegie
scholar Nadim Hasbani pointed out, the minister of national defence
tried vainly to open an account with the Central Bank, to which private
citizens could donate money to support the army's weapons procurements.
There is, in reality, no account because by law the cabinet must
organise any such budgetary arrangement. Anyway, how can a national army
organise its weapons purchases on the basis of charitable donations?
But
back to the Shiite soldiers. If they were indeed ordered to march south
Grand Old Duke of York-style, does anyone believe that these young men
are going to bash their way into their own Shiite homes to shoot their
Hezbollah brothers, fathers and cousins to a chorus of White House
cheers?
No, they would refuse and the Christian-Sunni soldiers
would be tasked to attack the armed Shiites. The army would split.
That's how the civil war started in 1975.
Does Madame Clinton –
and France's foppish foreign minister, the saintly Bernard Kouchner who
has turned up in Beirut to support the tribunal – want another civil war
in Lebanon?
There's another problem. Given their numbers, the
Shiites are grossly under-represented in the Lebanese parliament and
government. And there's been an unspoken – certainly unwritten –
agreement in Beirut that to compensate for their lack of political
power, the Shiites can have a militia.
If God was to tell
Nasrallah to disarm the Hezbollah – he would surely obey, for no-one
else in the region would dare to make such a request – then Nasrallah
would immediately demand an increase in Shiite numbers in government,
commensurate with his perhaps 42 per cent of the population.
There would, therefore, in effect, be a Shiite government in Lebanon.
Is
that what Clinton and poor old Obama want? Another Shiite Arab state to
add to the creation of the Shiite Iraqi state which they have bestowed
upon the Saudis and the rest of the Arab Sunnis as a neighbour?
Hezbollah
risk, of course, getting what the Lebanese call "big noses". In other
words, if the Hezbollah's noses get too big, someone will cut them off.
It's
one thing for Nasrallah and his armed militia – along with the
gentleman from Tehran – to spit at the Americans. But the UN is a
legitimate international body; the place of recourse – however
hopelessly – of the oppressed and benighted of the world.
Indeed,
there was a time when the Hezbollah hung religiously – or almost
religiously – on every UN resolution remotely critical of Israel.
Yet
does Mr Ban really want to take on the Hezbollah? For he knows all too
well that if the Hezbollah have "big noses", the Hezbollah have the UN,
so to speak, by the balls (always supposing the UN has any).
For
down along the Lebanese border are 13,000 UN soldiers, including NATO
armoured units from France, Germany and Belgium – and China, while we're
at it – with a clutch of NATO generals in command. They are supposed to
be keeping Hezbollah weapons out of the area between the Litani river
and the border, but for the first time last week the UN commander
admitted that without the power of entering civilian homes – he needs
Lebanese military permission for that (no laughter) – he cannot be sure
there are no arms in his operational area.
All this goes back to a
massive explosion earlier this year when a vast store of weapons
exploded east of Tyre. A slightly unhinged French UN colonel –
mercifully now back in Paris – ordered French and German soldiers to go
pushing through front doors of the locals to look for guns. He had been
warned by Lebanese army intelligence officers not to insult civilians.
He paid no attention.
Then French peacekeepers on patrol in
southern Lebanon found themselves pelted with stones. The Hezbollah said
that the explosion was of old Israeli munitions left over from the 2006
war. (Hollow laughter here).
The Israelis then cashed in on the
whole affair, producing aerial photographs – taken from a pilot-less
drone, the principal weapon in the next Hezbollah-Israel war – with a
claim that they showed an unexploded missile being loaded onto the back
of a truck in the same village, watched by three Hezbollah gunmen. Quick
as a flash, the Hezbollah came up with a videotape showing the same
truck. But the "missile" was a damaged roll-up garage door and – alas
for Israel – the three "gunmen" were clearly identifiable as members of
the UN's French battalion.
Then last week came further
humiliation, when a gang of unarmed Hezbollah housewives grabbed a
briefcase of secret documents from two hapless UN tribunal investigators
as they tried to find telephone records in a south Beirut
gynaecological clinic.
Even several anti-Nasrallah and
pro-government supporters in Beirut could scarcely suppress their
laughter when the Hezbollah duly paraded two donkeys through the
streets, each bearing a perfect replica of the blue UN shield beneath
their furry necks. But again, do not laugh too easily. In the Arab
world, the donkey is regarded as the most humiliating of beasts, worthy
of execution. So watch out the UN. And back to the Israelis, who roar as
much about "world terror" as Nasrallah does about the inevitable doom
of Israel. This time it was the head of Israeli military intelligence
Amos Yaldin – never regarded in Lebanon as the brightest of men – who
told the Knesset foreign affairs committee in Jerusalem that Hezbollah
could take over the whole of Lebanon "in a few hours".
Israeli
defences were being undermined by Hezbollah's missiles and increasing
the likelihood of conflict, he said – he was right there – but then he
went into the same apocalyptic mode as all the other Israeli generals
who have come to grief in Lebanon.
The next war, he said, will be
far more devastating than any other in Lebanon – this is difficult to
imagine – and "it will not be similar to anything we have grown
accustomed to during the Second Lebanon War or (the) Cast Lead
(operation in Gaza)."
Now this is very odd stuff, because the
third Lebanon war – which Yaldin was predicting – took place in 1993, a
massive bombardment that emptied southern Lebanon of almost a million
people.
The first Israel-Lebanon war was the invasion of 1978 –
Operation Litani, which Yaldin obviously forgot – and then came the
second Lebanon war in 1982 (Operation Peace for Galilee), which Yaldin
weirdly thinks was the first conflagration.
Then came the 1993
conflict, and then the 1996 war (Operation Grapes of Wrath) and then the
2006 Hezbollah war. So the next war – after the past five failures –
will be Israel's sixth.
So what does all this mean?
Well,
what we are seeing is an horizon of foreign powers all longing to
interfere in Lebanon as they did during the country's merciless 1975-90
civil war. Washington is ranting about the tribunal's importance, so is
France – the Brits, whose diplomats talk to the Hezbollah, are quietly
and wisely asking if there might be a postponement of the tribunal's
accusation – while the Syrians and Iranians are crowing at the UN's
crisis.
The Israelis are, as usual, threatening semi-Armageddon.
The Saudis, who back the Sunnis – Hariri holds a Saudi passport – have been trying to mediate.
So,
in a backward way, have the Syrians. A week ago, Syria's ambassador to
Lebanon, Ali Abdul-Karim Ali, invited to lunch both the Saudi
ambassador, Ali Awad al-Assiri, and his opposite number in the Iranian
embassy, Ghadanfar Rokon Abadi, an old Beirut hand who was here during
the 1996 war. All of which suggests the Muslim nations of the region
don't particularly want a civil war.
And the Lebanese? My driver
Abed, as good a weather vane as any, used to have a small black sticker
attached to his car mirror. "Haqiqa", it said.
The Truth. He expected the tribunal would tell him the truth about who killed Rafiq Hariri.
While I was away this summer, with great sadness, he tore it down.
Source here.
