Tag: lebanon

Links for November 26th

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ICG on “Hizbollah and the Lebanese Crisis”

International Crisis Group – Hizbollah and the Lebanese Crisis:

Looking back over the past ten months, Lebanese can feel somewhat relieved. The massive demonstrations in December 2006, followed by a general strike and clashes between pro- and anti-government forces with strong sectarian overtones, as well as a series of assassinations and car bombs, brought the nation perilously close to breakdown. State institutions are virtually paralysed; the government barely governs; the economic crisis is deepening; mediation efforts have failed; political murders continue; and militias, anticipating possible renewed conflict, are rearming. Still, fearful of the consequences of their own actions, leaders of virtually every shade took a welcome step back.

An important explanation lies in Hizbollah’s realisation that its efforts to bring down the government carried dangerous consequences. Facing calls for its disarmament and denunciations of its (allegedly foreign-inspired) adventurism in triggering the July 2006 war, the movement concluded that the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and its backers were hostile actors intent on cutting it down to size and further aligning Lebanon with the West. As a result, it carried the fight squarely on the domestic scene, removing Shiite ministers, taking to the streets and pushing for the government’s ouster. This resort to street politics was risky and ultimately self-defeating. At almost every social level, Shiite support for Hizbollah has solidified, a result of both the movement’s longstanding efforts to consolidate its hold over the community and a highly polarised post-war environment. Former Shiite adversaries are, for the time being, silencing their differences, viewing the movement’s weapons as their best defence in an environment where Shiites feel besieged from both within and without.

But while the movement demonstrated its mobilisation capacity and enjoyed support from an important segment of the Christian community, its use of an essentially Shiite base to bring down a Sunni-dominated government reinforced sectarian loyalties. Sunnis and many Christians were alarmed at Hizbollah’s might and ability unilaterally to trigger a devastating confrontation; they increasingly saw it as a Shiite not national movement and as advancing an Iranian or Syrian not Lebanese agenda. In short, while the movement sought to highlight the conflict’s political stakes, the street battles quickly morphed into confessional ones, forcing Hizbollah into a sectarian straitjacket and threatening to distract it from its primary objectives.

Some interesting stuff about the Aoun-Hizbullah relationship coming to a head over the presidential elections towards the end.

Spy or sex tourist?

Israeli in Lebanon under investigation in muder case and on espionage charges – Haaretz:

During questioning, it emerged that Sharon had visited Lebanon 11 times on his German passport over the last two years. He denied allegations he was on an espionage mission and said he was in Lebanon for leisure purposes, according to the source.

Media reports said that police in the Merje area, a hotbed of the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement in Beirut’s southern suburbs, were investigating the killing of Moussa al-Shalaani when the probe led them to Sharon.

Al-Shalaani had been shot with a gun belonging to a security officer who had been his roommate. The roommate was summoned for questioning, and maintained that he had lost his gun.

The roommate also said that during the time of the murder, he had been with his German friend who was residing at the Four Points Sheraton hotel in Beirut’s luxurious Verdun neighbourhood. A hotel employee told the police that Sharon had paid him to not write his full name on any documents.

“His conflicting testimonies led the authorities to arrest him, and further investigations are underway in a murder case and espionage,” the judicial source said.

“He is denying charges of espionage and insists that he is gay and he likes to have sexual relations with Lebanese men and that is why his visits to Lebanon were frequent,” the source said.

“But further investigations into the case showed that Sharon had a friend in the Lebanese security offices who used to facilitate his entries to Lebanon and with the help of a hotel clerk he managed to hide his real name,” the source added.

A Lebanese security agent was also held for questioning about his relations with the Israeli man after the two maintained contacts through the Internet, said officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Lebanon forbids any contacts or dealings with Israel.

Lebanon’s General Prosecutor Saeed Mirza said investigations were underway into how the story was leaked to the press.

During questioning, it emerged that Sharon is well-versed regarding Lebanon, speaks Arabic well and knows how to use he language’s many idioms. According to reports, Sharon learned Arabic in the United Arab Emirates from a teacher of Bahraini citizenship. The Lebanese media reported that Sharon kept his cool during questioning and denied accusations that he was a spy.

A question to Lebanon watchers

This may be rather naive, and considering the vitriol being thrown around on the issue of Lebanon these days I want to tread carefully: but how come analysts have such detailed knowledge of the voting patterns according to sectarian affiliation in the recent Metn by-election? Are these published in official records? Are they based on exit polls? To see what I mean, see for instance this analysis which takes to task a recent Hassan Fattah article in the NYT (as many March 14 supporters have been doing, which for Hassan must be a change from being attacked by March 8 supporters):

In 2007, Michel Aoun’s candidate won the seat by a razor-thin margin – 418 votes, or 50.2%. Overall, Metn voters were split down the middle in the by-elections. This is a far cry from Aoun’s dominant showing in 2005, where he claimed to have won 70% of the Christian vote in Mount Lebanon. In addition, Gemayel was the clear choice of the Maronite community, winning 58.6% of Maronite votes to the FPM’s 40.7%. Contrary to Mr. Fattah’s assertion that the Metn by-elections showed that the Christians are “increasingly alienated” from the March 14 coalition, the actual breakdown of results shows the exact opposite.

So, again, the question is: how is it that such detailed info on what I had assumed was a secret ballot is available, and how reliable is it?

Update: I left a comment on the NOW Lebanon site linked above asking the same question. The site’s staff pointed me to the chart below, which does offer a breakdown by community. Hover on the bars to get the community information. There is no sourcing or methodology info here, however, so I’d still appreciate it if someone can confirm that these statistics come from officials and that this is routine dissemination in Lebanon.

Lebanon’s Daily Star, USAID, and Solidere

There’s been an interesting scandal brewing in the last few days about Lebanon Examiner, a section of the Beirut Daily Star sponsored by USAID to carry out investigative journalism. A piece that recently came out about Solidere — surely the first and foremost investigative business journalism story to do in Lebanon — apparently pissed off the paper’s USAID backers and their friends in government. Solidere, the Downtown Beirut real estate rehabilitation project, was THE post-civil war reconstruction initiative of the 1990s. It was an odd creature, partly government-backed and partly owned by the late Rafiq al-Hariri. Some of its shares also belonged to the inhabitants of Downtown Beirut, and it was traded on the Beirut stockmarket. It has always been controversial, for architectural/aesthetic reasons as well as for financial and political ones, especially considering the rather murky share splits and ways the company was managed. In other words, it is a perfect topic for an investigative newspaper story, and the one written a few days ago Lysandra Ohrstrom begins the scratch the surface of what may be a key aspect of 1990s Lebanese politics by focusing on a recent lawsuit:

On May 29, a committee of 500-dogged, disenfranchised former downtown property owners filed a suit at the Majlis al-Shura against a two-month old ministerial decree approving Solidere’s decision to create an international branch in Dubai. The case is the latest in a long line of lawsuits against Solidere over the past 12 years that raises questions about the company’s dubious legal foundations and its checkered past. Solidere’s operations range from the “immoral to the unconstitutional,” according to its most vocal critics, and all were perpetrated under the cover of the Lebanese state in the name of “national interest.”

Like its predecessors, the current case may never receive a ruling, but the Downtown Rights Holders Committee is optimistic that with the government led by staunch-Solidere ally Premier Fouad Siniora in danger of collapse, and the possibility of a power sharing agreement increasingly imminent, they may be able to hem in Solidere’s “unlawful expansion” – 37 percent of which was financed with local capital – so company profits are used to complete outstanding rehabilitation commitments in BCD, and not to finance speculative ventures in countries outside the state’s control.

“We don’t like this move because [Solidere] is still supposed to be a public purpose company whose main mission is development, whose mission is to serve downtown property owners by finishing project quickly and distributing [dividends] to us so we can buy back our property in downtown. We don’t want Solidere to go do other projects when they are barely 25 percent done in Lebanon.” explained Constantine Karam, who filed the petition on behalf of the rights holders committee.

That sounds straightforward enough. But successive leaks to the Angry Arab allege that USAID and the Siniora government are angry about the story, and trying to reign in the Daily Star:

My highly reliable (and well-placed) sources in Beirut are telling me that there were very strong reactions against the article by the Sanyurah government and its allies in the US embassy. The strongest reaction came from the USAID which funds the investigative page through an “accountability and transparency” grant. Don’t you like how the US defines “accountability and transparency”? The person who secured the USAID grant wrote that “the political agenda of the donors is not to undermine the fuoad Siniora government”. Long live transparency, accountability, and democracy. The person* complained for the second time that the examiner has become a “hizbollah rag”-the first was after Jim Quilty wrote a story on the reconstruction of bint jbeil, the person said donors were “bored” with the reconstruction topic. Long live the donors. Apparently the donors received phone calls from march 14 people all day yesterday, accusing the staff of the Daily Star of having timed the release of the story to the elections to prop up the opposition. The staff of the paper were ordered to print a full rebuttle. They “ordered” them to cover the following topics in the following three issues:
1) Municipal governmence at the Interior Ministry–they included four sources for reporters to interview who surely would allow for a “balanced” article. 2) The Finance Ministry’s ease of doing business reforms. 3) The five year industrial program drafted by the Ministry of Industry under Pierre Gemayel. 4) Sami Hadad’s leadership at the economy ministry. One editor from the daily star is resigning and telling them to find someone else who does not mind being subject to editorial oversight from the US government.

So not only do they want a rebuttal but also to place their own story with positive spin for the government… More allegations of US embassy micro-management of the Daily Star here.

Now, this post is not meant to be about taking sides in the Lebanese political deadlock. It’s not like al-Manar is a bastion of independent journalism, or that many Lebanese papers don’t slavishly follow the party line of whoever is paying this month. Even well-regarded papers such as as-Safir and al-Akhbar in Lebanon are frequently accused of being bought one way or another, and there sure seems to be a lot of esteem for the Saudi royal family in pretty much every Arab newspaper. However, there is something particularly cynical about using a grant to develop investigative journalism and micro-manage a paper’s coverage. At least Rafiq Hariri would write the cheques and send them personally (or simply send them without even a quid-pro-quo, hoping to curry favor. It often worked). This particularly the case because a USAID program to boost serious investigative journalism in the Arab world is a great idea considering the general lack of such type of stories and one that should be carried out seriously. As someone who has worked in small Arab world publications, I find it particularly offensive and even frankly dangerous. The Daily Star’s reporting has never been known for its frank coverage of Lebanese politics, particularly during the civil war. (Its editorial pages, edited by the quite forthrightly pro-March 14 Michael Young, are a different thing and indeed the best thing about the paper even if you might not agree with Young.) But political caution is a different thing than being told what to do by a foreign embassy’s staffers. I hope the Daily Star does not rebut the story and keeps on doing this kind of work.

Hizbullah tightening media coverage

I remember last year journalists covering Lebanon were quite positive about the professionalism and relative openness (for a militia that faces constant dangers) of Hizbullah’s press officers. I had read before (from McClatchy reporter Hannah Allam’s excellent blog) that they were now impossible to deal with, and it is confirmed again by Charles Levinson’s recent experience:

My experience with Hezbollah this week has left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. I had heard this from other journalist friends who have recently returned from Lebanon, but discovered it for myself this week: their interaction with the press borders on fascist. In southern Lebanon it is very difficult to find people of any confession who speak freely about the organization. Even mentioning Hezbollah by name in interviews seems often to make whoever you’re talking with a touch edgy and uncomfortable. By the end of the week, my Italian colleague was comparing trying to cover the Shiite organization to trying to cover the mafia in her home country.

For Hizbullah, this will prove counter-productive in the long-run…

Hizbullah’s House of Spiders

Charles Levinson visits a Hizbullah exhibition on last summer’s war:

The first exhibits are two reconstructed Hezbollah bunkers. One looks like some sort of command post. There is a manikin dressed like a Hezbollah fighter in fatigues with an AK47 slung over his shoulder. He’s eyeing a wall map of “Occupied Palestine”. There’s a desk with a laptop computer, a walkie talkie, a phone and two korans. On the other side of the passage way there is another reconstructed bunker, this one made to resemble the rooms where Hezbollah fighters sleep. There are two manikins here, one kneeling in prayer, the other relaxing on a mattress on the floor, a koran in his right hand, his left resting casually on an AK47. A radio blasts old Al Manar news reports from the front lines of last summers war, mixed with martial anthems.

Visitor move on and enter the main hall of the exhibit. The first display is a series of six foot tall portraits of US and Israeli leaders with quotes from last summer’s war underneath each picture.

A picture of Rumsfield has the quote in Arabic and English: “Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire.”

Condi’s picture is accompanied by the quote: “This war is part of the birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

The picture of Bush shows him clutching a Thanksgiving turkey, presumably before the traditional holiday pardon. His quote: “Our nation is wasting no time in helping the people of Lebanon.”