High stakes - The bigger picture behind the urgent need to preserve Lebanon's democracy and independence
In the contemporary world it is fashionable to represent conflicts as involving various shades of gray among contending parties, with clear moral choices being problematic. In the current Lebanese crisis, however, the choice is clear it is between day and night, between light and darkness.
Above all, Lebanon's future depends upon the survival and consolidation of its recently renewed democracy and independence. This requires agreement among political leaders on a new president committed to democracy and independence, implementation of the Lebanese state's rightful monopoly of force on all its territory, and total cooperation with the international community in the proceedings of the coming UN murder tribunal. The Syrian/Lebanese security apparatus that commanded Lebanon until 2005, an apparatus still headed by Presidents Bashar al-Assad and Emile Lahoud, remains the prime suspect in the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Until the culprits for this crime and a succession of plainly associated murders and attempted murders of Lebanese critics of the Syrian regime are apprehended, political murder will rule supreme and Lebanese democracy cannot be secured.
A more immediate priority involves the survival of the constitutional government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, product of May/June 2005 parliamentary elections that were the first free expression of the will of the Lebanese people since 1972. Siniora's government wishes to assert a right to national independence that is taken for granted in the case of every other country in the Arab world. This has made it the target of a vicious campaign of death and destruction coordinated by the ruthless ruling clique in Damascus. It is instructive to read in the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Rai al-Aam on July 11 of Syrian military intelligence chief Asef Shawkat, brother-in-law of Assad, defending the jihadist group Fatah al-Islam. Shawkat reportedly berated a Lebanese Shia deputy from parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri's Amal movement, remarking: "the story is far bigger than the affair of a faction fighting with the [Lebanese] army."
Indeed the story is bigger; the Syrian regime wishes to re-impose its hegemony over Lebanon, wiping-out Lebanese democracy and independence.
This aspiration was most recently expressed in the insolent July 10 declaration by the regime mouthpiece al-Thawra that solutions in Lebanon "go through Damascus." The free flow of weaponry and jihadist fanatics into Lebanon from Syria expresses the Syrian regime's contempt for Lebanese state sovereignty and Syria's determination to foment violence in and from Lebanon.
Syria's overriding concern is to subvert the UN murder tribunal by any means, whether through provoking enough chaos in the Levant to force the West to do a deal with it, or by producing anarchy or a government change in Lebanon that would derail Lebanese cooperation with the UN inquiry and tribunal. On April 24, in a discussion with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Assad threatened the UN Security Council over its looming approval of the tribunal under Chapter VII of the UN Charter in thuggish Mafioso terms "instability would intensify," with "grave consequences that could not be contained within Lebanon." He told Ban Ki-moon how "the Syrian people hated the March 14 Movement," meaning the Lebanese parliamentary majority and Prime Minister Siniora the sort of reference generally taken in Beirut as a death threat. Yet another murder of March 14 parliamentary deputy Walid Eido followed a few weeks later.
There can be no doubt that Lebanon's pluralist traditions face a savage enemy and an existential challenge. These traditions are worth defending by Lebanese and others. In the Arab world only Lebanon, with an unrivalled 143-year electoral and representative tradition dating back to the Ottoman autonomous province, has a serious history of a parliamentary role in government, political pluralism, and public freedoms. Lebanon's eccentric confessional democracy remains a flawed work in progress, riddled with imbalances, patron-client networks, and poor accountability, but it is by light years the most inclusive and participatory political system in the Arab world. Above all, Lebanon's reconciliation of representative government with its communal compartments is a precious counterpoint to the notion that autocracy is best political practice in the fractured Middle East.
Beyond the worthiness of Lebanese democracy, the Lebanese crisis poses the fundamental issue of stamping out political murder. The Syrian regime's apologists whine that the Hariri assassination in fact the mass murder of more than twenty people and one event in a continuing chain of murders is not a suitable matter for international intervention. But, even setting aside international security in the Levant and foreign Syrian interference in Lebanon, who else except the international community could pursue the criminals given that the Lebanese legal system has been terrorized and corrupted into impotence? No democracy and no pluralism can coexist with impunity for political murder. This is an international matter. Exemplary punishment for Hariri's assassins and their masters and accomplices at the hands of the international community will send a powerful global message. It would be an international disaster for the UN's first ever murder inquiry and court to become a fiasco.
William Harris is a professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand. His most recent book is The Levant: A Fractured Mosaic (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2005), which won a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title Award. He is currently working on A History of Lebanon, 1640-2007 for Oxford University Press in New York.
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