Ben Gilbert's Notebook:

Violence, and a summit, make it hard to read the tea leaves in Beirut

Lebanon's interior minister will ban motorbikes this week during certain hours and security officials have warned of more violence following two incidents that highlighted the country's precarious calm.

The motorbike ban comes after a stabbing on Tuesday in the Christian neighborhood of Ain El Roumaneh in Beiurt by youths on scooters from the neighboring, mainly Shia muslim neighborhood of Sheeyeh.

The next day at least 10 people were injured in tit-for-tat attacks in the Jabal Mohsen and Bab al-Tabaneh neighborhoods of Lebanon's northernmost port city, Tripoli.

Violence in the two neighborhoods last year between Sunnis Muslims and Alawites resulted in dozens of deaths and injuries and barricades set up reminiscent of Lebanon's 1975 to 1990 civil war.

The Ain El Roumaneh incident also brought memories of the 15-year civil war, as the stabbing took place at an intersection that was one of the first demarcation lines between East and West Beirut.

The Lebanese government has been stuck inn political limbo since the June 7 parliamentary elections. Prime Minister designate Saad Hariri has been unable to find a formula for a "national unity" cabinet that is agreeable to all the disparate political parties and players.

Security officials told the Beirut based news website Naharnet that they feared a "return of a wave of assassinations in case the Lebanese government was not formed next week."

"Incidents in different Lebanese regions indicate that local and regional powers want to push the process of cabinet formation forward," the website wrote.

There is hope that the visit this week by Saudi Arabian King Abdullah to Damascus will help to speed the cabinet formation. Saudi Arabia and Syria have clashed over Lebanon since the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which the Saudis blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime. Since 2005, the Saudis have supported Saad Hariri's March 14 alliance, and the Syrians the Hezbollah-led opposition.

Political disagreements between the two sides have resulted in street violence over the last four years, although the situation has calmed since the 2008 Doha accords resulted in a government agreeable to all sides of the regional and local political divide.

Some say a similar agreement is upcoming due to the Saudi and Syrian meeting in Damascus. Assad and Abdullah issued a joint statement supporting the formation of a national unity cabinet in Lebanon.

Lebanese Druze leader and politician extraordinaire Walid Jumblatt told Lebanese newspaper As Safir that the Lebanese could "benefit from the golden opportunity" the Damascus meeting presented to form the cabinet.

Jumblatt said the meeting "is enough. It is not up to us as Lebanese not to put obstacles and benefit from the golden opportunity ... and speed up our moves because some local, regional and international powers want to thwart the Syrian-Saudi gathering," he told the paper. On a regional level, many analysts, here summarized by the Associated Press' Zeina Karam believe the Saudi-Syrian summit will help to ease tensions around the Middle East. The Christian Science Monitor says it could help further U.S. President Barack Obama's peace plans.

As for the motorbike ban, which many use here to save on gas and to beat the hour-long traffic jams that develop on the hopelessly insufficient roads, at least the delivery drivers will still be allowed to ride. Lebanese Interior Minister Ziad Baroud ordered non-delivery drivers can only ride between 5 a.m. and 6 p.m. So, you can still order your Barbar and an Argeelay and watch the political circus unfold on TV.

Finally: Al Jazeera in America

Al Jazeera English will begin broadcasting in the U.S. on July 1 in the Washington, D.C. area, the first time the Qatar based satellite channel will be available to a wide swath of American households, the website Arabian Business reported Thursday. 

“On July 1 we are going to launch the first operation in cable distribution in the United States,” Al Jazeera's director general, Wadah Khanfar, told Arabian Business in an interview. 

Khanfar said his network will be distributed by a Washington, D.C.-based cable company that has 2.3 million subscribers. 

Al Jazeera has been accused by some of being a "mouthpiece for terrorists," but the English service, launched in 2006, has won accolades for its coverage of such events as the Gaza war this past winter. The network launched with  a rumored $1 billion start-up cost and attracted such names as famed television interviewer David Frost.

The network is curently only available in the U.S. on two local cable networks in Burlington, Vt. and Toledo, Ohio. Al Jazeera is also available via the internet on YouTube, and in the Pentagon. Reports have said the network is the top choice for news for many active U.S. soldiers.

Still, U.S. cable operators have been reluctant to add Al Jazeera English to their line-ups amid concerns that the network shows Osama bin Laden and kidnapping videos, and is anti-American.

But Khanfar told Arabian Business that a more "benevolent political climate" has lessened those conerns. 

“I think the atmosphere is changing now. We have negotiations taking place with many cable companies in the United States and Canada and I hope that very soon we are going to hear a lot of good news,” he told the website.

“Starting next month, we will have a growing audience in the United States.”

The network is interested in breaking into the New York City market as a next step. Al Jazeera English is a susidiary of Al Jazeera, which also runs the Arabic news service. Both are based in Doha, Qatar, not far from the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command.

Lebanon's Hezbollah a mirror image of the Islamic Repubic?...well...not really...

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran’s presidential election earlier this week, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was quick to congratulate him.

“Bless you this precious public confidence and this great love expressed by the Iranian people through re-electing you for a second term," Nasrallah told Ahmadinejad in a letter, according to the Lebanese newspaper Al Nahar.  "I assure you that your re-election represents a great hope for all the oppressed people, the Mujahideen, the fighters, the resistance and those who reject superpowers and occupiers.”

But, after massive protests in Tehran began to challenge the legitimacy of the vote, Hezbollah stayed very quiet. 

The group’s satellite TV station has largely toed the Iranian government line on the election dispute.   The Iran page on the station’s website shows a cautious following of events:  the site basically reports what Iran’s national news agency is reporting, and focuses on the actions of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

Iran has long had links to Lebanon.  The country’s Shiite clerics have for centuries traveled to the Iranian city of Qom for religious education.  Families have intermarried and moved back and forth. But it was the Islamic revolution in 1979 that created the bonds found today between the two countries.

Iran’s revolution came to Lebanon soon after it was established; in the early 1980s, the war-ravaged Mediterranean country was open to foreign money, weapons and training — especially Lebanon’s largely rural Shiite population.  They had suffered from Israeli attacks on the Palestine Liberation Organization, which controlled South Lebanon since the early 1970’s.  In a country of militias defined by their different religions, the Shiites, who make up an estimated 30 to 40 percent of Lebanon’s population, needed an army of their own.  Iran was ready to help them.

In the early 1980’s, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran) sent operatives to Lebanon’s Bekka valley to train Shiite militiamen (see photo above for the similarities between the organizations'  flags).  The training eventually gave birth to Hezbollah.   The group issued a manifesto in 1985, calling for the establishment of an  Islamic state in Lebanon, and pledged its allegiance to Iran's supreme leader.  Hezbollah eventually grew into a popular force that provided both social services and fought to free southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation, eventually forcing the Israeli army to withdraw in 2000. 

Iran still supports Hezbollah to this day, donating millions of dollars annually for weapons, social services, road repairs and reconstruction money to Lebanon’s Shiite dominated south and Bekka Valley regions.  Posters and cardboard cutouts of the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, can be found throughout those regions, and in the Hezbollah dominated southern suburbs of Beirut. 

Although Hezbollah is a Lebanese political party and militia, it also views itself as part of a wider ideological grouping that, along with Syria, Iran and Hamas, opposes Israel and the U.S.   For example, the Hezbollah flag, in Arabic, says: “The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon,” not, “The Lebanese Islamic Resistance.”  

It is that broader regional agenda that makes Hezbollah’s relationship with Iran a major source of friction in Lebanon. The Lebanese public is largely split down the middle when it comes to opinions on Hezbollah’s stockpile of weapons, the group’s militia, and its consequent ability to start a war with Israel without consent from the Lebanese government, or the country's other groups. 

After Hezbollah and their allies were defeated by a U.S. and Saudi backed coalition two weeks ago in Lebanon’s elections (although the Hezbollah coalition did win the popular vote), and this week’s events in Tehran, some staunch opponents of Hezbollah took the opportunity to congratulate Lebanon for avoiding a situation that would have allowed Hezbollah to consolidate its current veto power over any Lebanese government decision into domination of the state. 

“With the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acting with great brutality to impose a doubtful election victory, we can legitimately ask… whether Hizbullah would not have used a win of its own to place a similar headlock on the Lebanese political system in the future,” wrote Michael Young, the opinion editor at Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper, in an editorial on June 18.

“In that way, the party could have used its authority to predetermine the outcomes in next year's municipal elections and the 2013 parliamentary elections to guarantee a lasting majority for itself and its allies,” Young wrote.

Lebanese Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir warned before Lebanon’s elections that a win by Hezbollah’s coalition would have jeopardized the “Arab” identity of Lebanon – perhaps hinting that Hezbollah and its constituents are not Arab, but Persian.

Hezbollah leader Nasrallah attacked the Patriarch’s comments last week.  And despite the fact the group has never rescinded its original goal of establishing an Islamic republic in Lebanon, the party has gone to great pains to say it adheres to the Lebanese system of consensual government between the country's 18 differnet recognized religious sects.

Its enemies used the Islamic republic goal as a weapon against the group in the elections two weeks ago — and it was an often heard justification  for not voting for the group's  coalition, especially among Christians.  Nasrallah says the accusations are baloney. 

Others aren’t so sure.  The scene of a semi-official militia beating up students in the streets of Tehran doesn’t help to assuage fears among some Lebanese that this is the behavior Hezbollah would imitate if it were to come to power. 

But an important aspect of the events in Tehran is what it shows about such seemingly unified institutions as the Islamic Republic’s government and Hezbollah. It is obvious that the political class in Iran is composed of a variety of different players, despite them all being supportive of the principles of the revolution. 

“On foreign affairs related to the Arab world, Iraq, and Lebanon, [Mousavi] has very similar views to those of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his two predecessors, Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani,” wrote Syrian political analyst Sami Moubayed in Gulf News last week.  “Let us not forget that all three presidents were committed to Hezbollah.” 

But if Iran has  this much disagreement within the status quo, it makes one wonder  what kind of internal dialogue is going on inside Hezbollah, and how much the cleavages in Iran are at play in the Islamic Republic’s little brother here in Lebanon.  So far, the Party of God is playing it very cool.  As one analyst put it, “they don’t want to be seen as taking sides.  They stay very close to the Supreme Leader because, in the end, it’s his opinion that counts.” 

Hezbollah, of course, would never admit to internal cleavages.  But it will be interesting to see what various members of the party say about the topic in the coming weeks, especially if conflict in Iran continues to intensify.   
 

Polls close in Lebanon's hotly contested election

The voting stations have closed and the votes are now being counted in Lebanon’s tightly contested parliamentary elections. 

At least 52 percent of the electorate turned out for the poll, said Ziad Baroud, the Lebanese Interior minister. That’s a seven-point increase on the country's last parliamentary elections, in 2005, when only 45 percent of registered voters turned out.

The voting day passed with few problems amid tight security.  Fifty thousand soldiers and police guarded more than 500 voting stations and directed traffic in the country of nearly four million. Voters complained that lines were too long, due to the polls being held for the first time in recent history on one day.  

Among the voters from Metn, Beirut and Zahle, the vote was largely seen by both sides as a referendum on Hezbollah’s militia and stockpile of weapons.  Hezbollah and its allies, predictably, say they need the weapons to defend against Israel.  One Hezbollah supporter went as far as to say (yawn) that March 14 is full of traitors.  The March 14 coalition, of course, says Hezbollah’s weapons are the real cause of conflict in Lebanon — having been used twice in the last three years — in May 2008  to take over west Beirut, and on Israel in the summer war of 2006.

If all  the above is nothing new, then here are some images you haven't seen in four years. 

As polls  closed, election workers and observers in Beit Mery, a small town near Beirut located in a battleground voting district, began popping open sealed containers to count votes.  The votes were counted in different rooms depending on religious  denomination and  sex.  The picture below is from the first moments after the clear plastic box holding ballots  for the male Maronites in Beit Mery was  popped open and  the votes arranged for counting.

The next step was actually counting the votes.  The votes are put in front of a camera that broadcasts them on TV screen for all to see.  The votes are then read aloud by the election official.  Here, you can see the ballot underneath the camera.  The two white cubes are bakery boxes they stacked on top of one  another to ingeniously make the vote clear after some debate about it's  blurriness. It was kind of nice seeing all the parties in the room  counting ballots together, not at one another's throats or honking maniacally.  It also reminded me of AUB's student election ...

Here is a picture from outside the vote counting room.  A police officer providing security looks on.  The voting and counting took place in public buildings, including this school. One can see the ballot projected onto the screen to the right. 

It should be noted that this process is one way that marked ballots can be identified by parties who bought the vote. Provisions in the 2008 voter law that would have instituted a standard ballot, and moved vote counting to a central, non-localized location, were both voted down by parliamentary blocs from both sides.

I left the ballot counting around 7:45. Not far away, supporters of both Michel Aoun and March 14 had taken to the tiny main street in Beit Mery to honk horns, race back and forth, wave flags and generally make as much noise as possible (see photo below). Aoun's people definitely won for enthusiasm, organization and lots of orange. Apparently, the Lebanese Army  broke up a few fights this evening between the two  sides because of these types of demonstrations  getting out of control.  But all is well in Beit Mery for now. Elections results are expected to be released around midnight or early this morning. Here are a few shots of the after election party. Sorry to return to the everyday. 

Lebanon election may determine future of US support

Campaigning  for Lebanon’s parliamentary elections has ended as voters prepare to go to the polls on Sunday. The electorate is deeply divided between two main political coalitions, and the fault lines between them were on display this week on Sassine Square in largely Christian east Beirut.

On one side of the square stood the supporters of MP and former general Michel Aoun. His mostly Christian party is allied with the Iranian-backed Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah, whose reason d'etre is resistance to Israel. The two parties make up the biggest blocs in Lebanon’s so-called “March 8” opposition.

On the other side of the street stood partisans of the March 14 coalition: the American and Saudi Arabian supported group of parties who say they are not interested in Hezbollah's war with Israel. They want Lebanon be to more like "moderate" Arab states, and U.S. allies, like Jordan and Egypt, and advertise their ability to attract foreign investment and tourists to Lebanon.

Both sides filled the square with cars festooned with campaign posters, while pedestrians waved their respective party’s flag. Lebanese soldiers toting automatic rifles positioned themselves on the concrete median in the middle of the square, separating the two sides.

It’s in Christian areas like Ashrafeeyah, where Sassine Square is located, that Lebanon’s election will be decided. Due to the country’s complicated power-sharing system, most of the seats in parliament have already been decided, except about 28. Those 28 seats are here and in the mountains above Beirut, where the election has split the electorate, and families, down the middle.

“The people who are running with general Aoun have been giving, since 2005, cover for
Hezbollah's policy [in Lebanon] and we are against the Hezbollah policy," said Elias Moukheiber, a candidate with March 14. "The problem with Hezbollah is that they are implementing an Iranian agenda in Lebanon.”

Elias said the biggest issue in the election is Hezbollah’s militia and the group’s stockpile of weapons.  He would like to see Hezbollah give its weapons to the Lebanese army, so it can’t start another war with Israel, like in 2006.

Elias’ campaign seeks to unseat his first cousin and current parliament member Ghassan Moukheiber, who is with Aoun and the opposition. Ghassan said Hezbollah should keep its weapons until the weak Lebanese army can be built up to defend Lebanon against Israel. But he said Hezbollah is not the election’s central issue.  Ghassan  said “when” his coalition wins, they will focus on fighting Lebanon’s endemic corruption and reforming Lebanon’s legal system.

“I believe that our group in the post-election period will stand for completing the architecture of the constitution and the Lebanese legal system, to make it more democratic, more participatory, and more respective of freedoms," he said.  "And definitely an effective Lebanese constitutional system will prevent the interference of foreign powers, whether Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or any others.”

Between the Moukheiber family’s two sides, and the two political coalitions, voters are nearly evenly divided. Analysts say the election could be determined by as little as 7 percent of the electorate in the districts that are up for grabs. So both the March 8 opposition and March 14 are trying to buy up votes.

One Lebanese voter from a tightly contested district north of Beirut told Global Post she was offered $1,000 by a candidate to switch her vote, as were five other members of her family.

“I had a call from [a candidate] saying that he is willing to visit my family to change our beliefs, and he said he will pay," said the voter, who asked that her name not be published.  "Actually, we need the money but we don’t sell our honesty and integrity."

There are other ways of buying votes. Lebanese can only vote in Lebanon, so expatriates from Dubai to London have been offered free flights home by both sides of the political divide.   Lebanon's National News Agency reported nearly 20,000 expatriate Lebanese arrived at Beirut’s international airport on Wednesday and Thursday. Paul Salem at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut said the vote buying may have a big impact on the election.

“In some of the districts it could be decisive," he said. "Flying in an extra plane load could give you that 50 or 100 votes that you needed.  It’s neck and neck in some districts, and they’re pulling out all the stops, and wherever they can make a slight difference they’re going to try.”

The Lebanese parliament passed a new electoral law last year to try to combat this kind of corruption.  But the majority of MP’s from both political coalitions voted against some of the most important provisions, including the U.S. backed March 14th. Some in the opposition even accuse the U.S. government of blackmail. U.S. officials warn that if the Hezbollah coalition wins, American economic support, which totaled more than half a billion dollars in the last four years, could end. 

“I believe such a declaration is not helpful in Lebanon, and [it’s] trying to influence the elections," said Ali Hamdan, spokesman for the Amal Movement, a party allied with Hezbollah and Aoun in the March 8 opposition.

Former Bush administration officials say a Hezbollah victory would constitute a “major U.S. defeat.” They posit Lebanon’s elections as one battle in the cold war between Washington and Tehran. Paul Salem of the Carnegie Center said if the Hezbollah coalition wins, and March 14 refuses to take part in the government, Lebanon could face international isolation and be treated much like Tehran and Damascus are now.

"There would be no breaks, no accommodation there," he said. "I think both from the U.S. and [oil rich Arab Gulf  states], they couldn’t but dramatically reduce their support, their enthusiasm to such a government.”

But Salem notes that in the end, the Lebanese government may not look that different after the election. The winning coalition may only hold a majority of about three to five seats in the 128-member parliament. As long as both sides are willing to compromise, Lebanon's relatively peaceful, if dysfunctional, status quo should remain. The results of the Iranian presidential election next week could also have considerable influence on Lebanon’s political future.

Ben's Links:

Global Blogs:

• Latest

More Dispatches:

• Latest

Sponsored Links

Prom Dresses
Brokers Online Health Insurance
Casino News
drug addiction treatment
P90X
Credit Card