Lebanon at the crossroads

Lebanon at the crossroads: the Doha Accord halts political feuding, but it remains to be seen whether it's a new beginning or just the calm before the storm. Ed Blanche reports from Beirut.

THE QATAR-BROKERED AGREEMENT of 21 May appeared to resolve Lebanon's 18-month-old political crisis, but the country remains in a precarious position as the Middle East lurches towards great change fuelled by skyrocketing oil prices, waning American power and Iran's expansionist ambitions.

Political divisions, and deeply-rooted sectarian rivalries, remain beneath the thin veneer of cooperation engendered by the Doha Accord and parliamentary elections, scheduled for summer 2009, and could ignite a new flare-up in the confrontation triggered by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in Beirut on 15 February 2005.

The agreement hammered out in five days of talks in Doha came about after Hizbullah and its allies invaded Sunni-dominated West Beirut on 9 May in a blatant show of military power that humbled the western-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his chief ally, Hariri's son and political heir Saad. Fighting spread to the Chouf Mountains above Beirut and to north Lebanon. All told, some 70 people were killed.

Hizbullah struck after Siniora's beleaguered government, for reasons that have still not been explained, challenged it by threatening the private communications network, separate from the state system, it had set up as part of its military arsenal against Israel. He also dismissed the army general in charge of security at Beirut Airport because he had allowed Hizbullah to spy on aircraft movements.

The government knew full well it did not have the muscle to make these provocative decisions stick, but seems to have sought to bring its long-running rivalry with Hizbullah to a head. This was either a monumental miscalculation, or the government was pushed into a potentially dangerous confrontation with Hizbullah, backed by Iran and Syria, possibly by outside powers with promises of military support. If that was the case, the government grievously failed to take US weakness in the region into account.

Whatever the reason, Hizbullah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah called the government's move a "declaration of war" and ordered his fighters into the Sunni bastion of West Beirut. Within hours they had overwhelmed Sunni groups, although there were strong counterattacks in Sunni bastions in north Lebanon.

The Lebanese army command, supposedly fearing that the military would disintegrate along sectarian lines as it did during the 1975-90 civil war, made no effort to stop the fighting. Its failure to act weakened its reputation as the only national institution still standing. An estimated one-third of the 60,000-strong army is Shi'ite.

Eventually, calm was restored, but Siniora was forced to rescind the moves against Hizbullah, a crippling setback. But it also had to agree to virtually all of the demands made by the pro-Syrian, Hizbullah-led opposition that it had been refusing for so long. The most notable of these was a national unity government in which the opposition had the power of veto, an arrangement that carries the seeds of potential conflict in the months ahead.

Qatar's mediation also produced an all-party agreement in Doha under which the commander of Lebanon's armed forces, General Michel Suleiman, was elected president by parliament, ending a six-month constitutional vacuum. That may turn out to be another gain for the opposition. Suleiman was appointed military commander while Lebanon was under Syrian control and he could still lean towards Damascus.

Once he was sworn in, Suleiman abjured Lebanon's fractious politicians to give up "the language of treachery", declaring "it is essential to fortify the nation and to coexist through the discourse of dialogue, not by making Lebanon a battleground". But there was no talk of Hizbullah surrendering its arms.

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Hizbullah's victory was a major setback, too, for Saudi Arabia, the champion of the region's Sunnis, and for the Americans whose helplessness simply underlined the extent to which their longtime power in the Middle East is fading by the day in the face of Iran's expansionist ambitions.

The Doha deal has cemented Hizbullah's power, which will be difficult to undo. But it averted a return to mass violence if not all-out sectarian war since if Hizbullah had not got what it wanted it would undoubtedly have had to resort to military action on a wider scale that would have engulfed the country.

However, the Doha Accord did not address the fundamental problems that plague the Lebanese. These problems include the constant sectarian rivalry that stands in the way of a united nation, and the need for a more equitable distribution of political power than the French-engineered independence constitution that was heavily weighted in favour of the Maronite Catholics and the Sunnis.

The Shi'ites, long repressed and shackled in poverty by the more powerful sects are now the single largest sect and are demanding, with some justification, a greater representation in parliament. The 2009 elections will highlight this yet again.

The central problem, according to analyst Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut, "is the Hizbullah-state relationship, which is directly or indirectly linked to other tough issues such as Syrian-Lebanese ties, and the role of external powers such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

"If Lebanon does not make progress on these issues in the coming years and instead falls back into a pattern of stalemate and street fighting, a civil war is likely, and no country that I know of has survived two civil wars intact. A resumption of fighting on a large scale will see the country slip into a slow and steady pattern of dysfunctional statehood and patchwork sovereignty, somewhere between the Yemen and Somalia examples."

The most pressing aspect of this problem is Hizbullah's refusal to relinquish the weapons it was allowed to keep under the 1989 Taif Agreement that ended the civil war, so it could fight the Israeli occupiers in South Lebanon.

Even when the Israelis ended the occupation in May 2000, Hizbullah insisted it still needed the arms to liberate the Shebaa Farms, a disputed slice of border land that the Israelis still hold. Most Lebanese acknowledge that this is a flimsy pretext but no-one is prepared to stand up to Hizbullah on the issue.

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Lebanon's future as a sovereign state, even in the loosest interpretation of that word, is at stake here. The final outcome may yet be a failed state, splintered, as it was for much of the civil war, into sectarian enclaves.

In recent months, and particularly in the bloodshed that accompanied Hizbullah's invasion of West Beirut, backed by gunmen from smaller Syrian-backed factions, this scenario has often seemed to be playing out again.

The power struggle that is underway in Lebanon, long a cockpit for regional conflicts, is being waged against a backdrop of major geopolitical changes in the greater Middle East as Iran, with Syria in tow (so far), asserts its new-found power as America's declines, draining away by the day into the blood-soaked soil of Mesopotamia, history's first battleground.

America's traditional Arab allies Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are being left to make the best deals they can get with Iran in this emerging new order. This has triggered a surge of regional diplomacy, such as Qatar's intervention in the Lebanese imbroglio and Turkey's mediation between Israel and Syria, to resolve the region's disputes instead of relying on the Americans. The Hizbullah conquest, however brief, of West Beirut, and its political gains in Doha were serious setbacks for US policy in the region. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's indirect peace talks with Syria through Turkey has also dismayed the Americans, who fear a peace pact will undermine their efforts to isolate Syria.

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However, an Israel-Syrian peace deal, even one driven by the scandal-plagued Olmert in a bid to bolster his standing at home, would inevitably degrade Damascus' relationship with Hizbullah, whose usefulness as a means of military pressure on the Jewish state would be eliminated.

Both these developments served to remind Washington that its power in the region had suffered immensely since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and this must impact on what will now take place in Lebanon.

As it happens, there have been signs for some time that Hizbullah's relations with Damascus were deteriorating as the interests of its mentor, Iran, and Syria were diverging in Lebanon.

Syria was using Hizbullah as its main proxy in post-Hariri Lebanon to maintain political pressure to topple Siniora's government and to restore Syria's power in its Mediterranean neighbour. Tehran's objectives are far more strategic: extending Shi'ite power westwards deep into the Sunni Arab world and pushing out the Americans. The Syrians had little interest in bolstering Hizbullah's political power (which could ultimately challenge Damascus), but Tehran did.

The 12 February assassination of Hizbullah's security supremo, Imad Mughniyeh, a close ally of Iran's intelligence services and branded a master terrorist by the Americans, in a car bombing deep in the heart of Damascus deepened Hizbullah's suspicions about Syrian intentions.

The Syrians blamed the Israelis as did just about everyone else in the region and vowed to announce the result of a top-level investigation into Mughniyeh's murder. But they still have not done so. This has fuelled suspicions that some figures in Syria's pervasive intelligence establishment wanted to distance Damascus from Iran's principal proxy.

That in turn has fostered speculation that the secular Syrians may be prepared to cut a deal with the Americans and end their alliance with fundamentalist Iran in exchange for power in Lebanon, as they did in 1990 when Saddam Hussein, Assad's longtime enemy, invaded Kuwait. Then, the late President Hafez Assad was rewarded for sending an armoured division to join the anti-Saddam coalition with Washington's tacit agreement that Syria could have control of Lebanon. Assad then sent his armed forces to end the civil war.

With Hizbullah triumphant, there are now fears that the Sunnis, particularly those in the north around Tripoli, will turn to Salafist groups, or even Al Qaeda, to defend them against Shi'ite dominance. The ease with which Hizbullah overwhelmed Beirut's Sunnis fuelled those concerns.

The United Nations has warned that pro-Syrian groups are smuggling weapons in across Lebanon's porous border with Syria. Armed Palestinian groups, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation Palestine-General Command, maintain camps along the frontier which facilitate the gunrunning and impede Lebanese efforts to tighten control.

Al Qaeda is reported to have been infiltrating activists into Lebanon, while the Saudis are alleged to have funded and armed other Sunni groups in its clandestine campaign against the Shi'ite's growing power, just as Riyadh has done in Iraq. Osama bin Laden's eminence grise, Ayman Al Zawahiri, recently declared that Lebanon would be pivotal in the war against "the Crusaders and the Jews".

Fatah Al Islam, a jihadist group allegedly sponsored by Damascus, fought the Lebanese Army in a brutal insurgency from May to September 2007 in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr Al Bared outside Tripoli. Some 250 of its fighters were killed in the brutal siege, that involved close-quarter house-to-house combat, and around 170 soldiers were killed. It was the bloodiest fighting in Lebanon since the civil war.

But Fatah Al Islam and other such groups remain active in other camps, particularly Ain Al Hilweh, the largest of Lebanon's refugee camps, outside the southern port of Sidon. A suicide bomber killed a soldier near Tripoli on 31 May and another was shot dead by troops outside Ain A1 Hilweh a few hours later, a chilling reminder that the jihadist threat should not be ignored.