Traveling in the Middle East last year, Lebanon was the only place where I felt a strong sense of unease. Unlike in Syria, Jordan, or even Israel — which all felt fairly safe — in Lebanon I felt a palpable sense that things were highly unstable. Although Lebanon had been depicted to me as a “paradise on the Mediterranean,” the “Paris of the Middle East,” and even, by some disgruntled foreigners, as “the only place in this goddamn region worth visiting,” social and political factors made the atmosphere on the streets feel tense and flammable.
I was there roughly a year after the Rafik Hariri assassination and remnants of the car bomb were still scattered across the street where he was killed (just a block away from my hotel, in fact). Syrian forces had been accused of the crime and, in the wake of major protests, had been forced to exit the country not long after, leaving a power vacuum. Parliamentary elections had swept a confrontational anti-Syrian coalition into power, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon appeared to be gearing up to oppose the new government. People on the streets in Beirut and elsewhere, I recall, seemed genuinely frightened about what to expect next — a Syrian re-invasion, attacks from Israel, or even an uprising from Hezbollah supporters.
And perhaps their fears were justified. Just months later, Hezbollah captured a few Israeli soldiers and sparked a major confrontation that resulted in Israeli destruction of huge parts of Beirut (not to mention southern Lebanon). Hezbollah, not long after, began a massive sit-in in Beirut to protest the distribution of power in parliament, effectively crippling the actions of the Lebanese government. Most recently, Fatah al-Islam, the Syria-inspired jihadi group based in a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli, began to wage attacks on Lebanese targets, resulting in a violent confrontation between the army and the jihadi militants.
Unfortunately, these latest confrontations may be just the tip of the iceberg. Lebanon is one of the most fractured societies in the Middle East. Unlike many other parts of the region (Iraq excluded), sectarian divides are still a subject of much notice and conflict in Lebanon. Furthermore, there is a fairly perceptible hostility between poor and rich (more so than in other neighboring countries), as well as between Lebanese and Palestinian. In short, the country dangerously lacks any sense of national unity.
In my own travels, I felt and saw this instability in a number of different ways. It was evident in the blinding divide between rich and poor (downtown is just blocks away from the Shia-dominated slums), in the unnerving and tense co-existence of both the Lebanese army and the Hezbollah militia, in the weird idolization of the country’s ‘fallen Sunni hero’ Rafik Hariri, and in the contempt that some Lebanese expressed towards the country’s Palestinian minority. In truth, it’s hard to quantify or record in a blog post, but I can say that I sensed a level of social division (and class animosity) that I didn’t see anywhere else in the region.
Much of this can be traced back to the aftermath of the country’s scaring 15-year civil war (1975-1990), a conflict that pitted Lebanon’s ethnic and religious groups against each other in bitter struggle. Although the 1989 Taif Accords — the agreement that ended the war — was supposed to provide the basis for national reconciliation and unity, things have not panned out as many have hoped. Rather than bringing people together, in many ways the agreement appears to have only pressed the pause button on the country’s civil war.
A recent article in The Middle East Journal sheds some light on the idea that Lebanese society is still flammable and divided. Oren Barak, a professor at Hebrew University, argues that despite efforts to create a unified Lebanon in the wake of the civil war, the problem is that many Lebanese have been hesitant to deal with or even talk about the consequences of the war (one scholar called it “collective amnesia”). The result is a fractured and unstable country that has failed to come to grips with its past. Barak draws the following parallel:
In a classic episode of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers, in which the actor John Cleese plays the role of Basil Fawlty, the inept owner of a family-run guesthouse in the heart of the English Riviera, German tourists are due to arrive. Although initially instructing his staff to be polite to their German guests and not “mention the war” in their presence, Fawlty/Cleese, who is accidentally knocked down with a frying pan by a member of his staff, ends up prattling about the war in front of the Germans, who become irritated to the point that they get up and leave.
As this episode suggests, the memories of war cannot be brushed aside: They lurk beneath the surface and turn up unexpectedly, defying “official attempts to suppress them.” Postwar Lebanon is one place where the above anecdote seems pertinent.
The author goes on to suggest that the policy of “don’t mention the war” is evident in the evasive way in which politicians have dealt (or not dealt) with the war’s aftermath. He also notes that it is visible in the efforts to rebuild Beirut in the early 1990s. Rather than building a civil war memorial, attempts were made to actively demolish many of the traces of the war. But a failure to come to terms with the country’s brutal history has obvious consequences. As Lebanese scholar Ghassan Salame has concluded, the unwillingness to maintain “our collective memory” about the civil war is tantamount to “preparing the way to ignite the same wars again.”
And that’s the crux of it. Lebanon’s refusal to deal with its past has paved the way for a highly unstable and fractious country. The news from Lebanon these days confirms that there is still “unfinished business” from the civil war that is likely to result in continued conflict. Indeed, although Iraq is often cited as the region’s most unstable country, I’d put Lebanon as a close second.