Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  On my first day back in Beirut, it took less than ten minutes to get from the Shiite stronghold of Hezbollah, conspicuous by the posters of martyrs and turbaned mullahs, to a Christian suburb where a van with a fifteen-foot dying Christ on a crucifix drove solemnly through the streets, religious hymns echoing through a megaphone, in the run-up to Easter.

  That disparate identities coexist in a confined space is a virtual miracle in the turbulent Middle East. “If you understand Lebanon, it’s because someone hasn’t explained it to you,” reflected Paul Salem, the head of one of only two independent think tanks in the Arab world and son of Lebanon’s former foreign minister.

  A T-shirt I found for sale at the glitzy new Virgin Megastore, which is housed in the former Beirut Opera House, summed it up: WE ARE DIFFERENT. WE ARE LEBANESE.

  But Lebanon has always been a fragile miracle. Its future now depends on what an array of younger actors do about sectarian divisions. Since 2005, Lebanon has witnessed breathtaking moments of hope as well as events that generated crushing despair. Lebanon is rarely a country of moderation.

  Saad Hariri is one of the young faces in Lebanese politics. Born in 1970, he was elected to parliament in 2005. He also heads Lebanon’s new Future Movement. Among Lebanese, he is considered something of an Arab heartthrob. He wears his wavy black hair gelled back and just long enough to curl up a little on the nape of his neck. He has a mustache and cropped goatee that curve around his mouth, a style now widely emulated by his peers, a Lebanese hairdresser told me.

  Hariri’s goal is to eliminate the role of religious sects in politics—completely. “Most people are fed up with the rhetoric of confessionalism,” Hariri reflected, when I visited him at Qoreitem Palace in the Muslim-dominated sector of West Beirut. Hariri is a Sunni Muslim, one of Lebanon’s three most numerous sects.

  “The problem is: How do we strengthen our sense of belonging to this country, rather than to just our religion?” he said. “Over the past year, as we’ve talked about reconciliation and unity, the sense of confessional loyalties has actually grown.”

  The underlying conundrum is that Lebanon exists only because of its sectarian identities.

  After World War I and the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, France took control of the Levant region along the Mediterranean, while Britain took the inland area that became Iraq and Jordan. Each power drew up borders as it saw fit. To protect the Maronites, France decided to create a separate nation. It carved a slim strip of land, from the mountains to the Mediterranean coast, out of Syria. Lebanon comes from laban, a word in Aramaic, the language of Christ, meaning “white” and referring to the snow-capped Mount Lebanon range that was for centuries a Christian refuge in the Muslim region. European Crusaders built strongholds among the Maronites more than 800 years ago.

  Before departing in the 1940s, France brokered an unwritten gentleman’s agreement, known as the National Covenant. It stipulated that Christian sects would abandon any claim to European protection, and Muslim sects would abandon any pan-Arab aspirations, including a return to Syria’s fold. Based on a 1932 census, which showed that Christians were fifty-four percent of the population, the covenant also gave Maronite Christians permanent right to Lebanon’s presidency. The premiership went to Sunni Muslims. And parliament’s speaker went to Shiite Muslims.

  All seats in parliament and all government jobs—from the top judge and army general down to kindergarten teachers and traffic cops—were then divided up in a permanent ratio: six Christians for every five Muslims. Within each category, Christians and Muslims then divided up slots among their own diverse sects. It was the ultimate quota system.

  Ever since then, religion has always trumped merit in Lebanon. In elections, all candidates have to run as members of their faith. And all voters cast ballots only for candidates in the town where their ancestors first registered to vote—often connected to one of the seventeen sects—even if the family has not lived there for generations.

  In everyday life, Lebanon also practices a version of sectarian apartheid, or segregation, which affects everything from the way people are married to where they are buried. To wed someone from a different sect, Lebanese have to find a civil authority in another country to officiate. Cyprus is the most common destination. Marriage is only performed—and recognized—within a sect. Every Lebanese identity card lists religion, so there is no getting around the rules.

  “Our system doesn’t allow us to be just Lebanese,” sighed Lebanese political scientist Nawaf Salam, a friend from my days covering the civil war who was appointed to Lebanon’s electoral commission in 2005 to reform the law. “We have to have a declared religion, whether we practice it or not.”

  The arrangement did, however, produce the Middle East’s first fledgling if flawed democracy, way back in the 1940s. In 2005 and 2006, Lebanon still ranked the highest of any Arab country on an international freedom index.1

  Ironically, Lebanon is also strictly secular. It has no Islamic law and no Christian law. Its constitution borrows heavily from that of France, the former colonial power. Article Nine of the constitution stipulates: “There shall be absolute freedom of conscience. The state in rendering homage to the Almighty shall respect all religions and creeds and guarantees, under its protection, the free exercise of all religious rites.” And it does.

  The result is a maelstrom of diversity that has made Lebanon the political laboratory for the Middle East since its independence in 1943. The Lebanese embrace East and West, Christianity and Islam, postmodernism and traditions dating back millennia to their seafaring Phoenician forefathers—and both decadence and piety.

  A Hedonist’s Guide to Beirut describes the Lebanese capital as “party central” in the Middle East “highlighted by extravagant dining, drinking, and decadent partying” at some of the chicest nightclubs in the world.2 Casino du Liban is also the region’s most infamous gambling joint. Lebanon makes the best wine in the Middle East; its Kasara label was once (although only once) internationally rated. Beirut’s racetrack, which runs only purebred Arabian steeds, is packed with rowdy bettors on Sundays. The Mediterranean beaches are awash with men in the barest swimming briefs and women in skimpy bikinis, while billboards are plastered with lovely young things, alluringly posed, legs spread, lips glistening, in ads for jeans. Singers from all over the Middle East come to compete in Superstar, the wildly popular Arabic version of American Idol. Radio stations play punk, rap, heavy metal, hip-hop, and the new electronic music. And when I was there in 2006, the most sought-after theater ticket was for a local variation of The Vagina Monologues.

  Another local T-shirt succinctly frames the country’s laissez-faire attitude: TALK ARABIC. THINK ARABIC. FEEL ARABIC. LIVE LEBANESE.

  Yet Lebanon is also a place where people cling to the practices and allegiances of both Christian and Muslim faiths.

  It is the only Arab country where thousands of men turn out annually with chains or whips for the self-flagellation ceremony of Ashura, when Shiites commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein in the seventh century. Both the book and movie versions of The Da Vinci Code were banned after an insistent appeal by the Christian Maronite patriarch. Police once seized hundreds of DVDs—including Some Like It Hot, Rush Hour, Key Largo, Jesus of Nazareth, The Nutty Professor, and all of Stanley Kubrick’s films—from the Virgin Megastore on grounds that they “undermined religions and contravened good morals.”3 Conservative Islamic dress and headscarves are as common in some areas as barely butt-covering skirts and tight tank tops are in others. The main beer available in conservative southern Lebanon is nonalcoholic, imported from Iran. Competing with Superstar for the biggest audience share on television and radio are the sermons of Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. And the most unusual interview I did in Beirut was with a gynecologist who performs hymen reconstruction—on both Christian and Muslim females—so grooms will not know their brides have already had sex with someone else.

  But the formula for coexistence—to make sure everyone fe
els included—has also made Lebanon a battlefield.

  The covenant designed to avert sectarian tension became a nightmare as demographics shifted in favor of Muslims. Shiites particularly had higher birth rates; tens of thousands of Maronites emigrated. Unlike Iraq, where one sect has the largest representation because it has the votes, Lebanon’s seventeen sects have permanently allocated seats in parliament—even though their shares have not reflected their numbers for decades. The Lebanese have been both unwilling and unable to carry out a new census since 1932, for fear of what it will show. So the system has no elasticity; the political pendulum can not swing. Battles over the imbalance of power almost undid Lebanon during a civil war that raged for fifteen years.

  I arrived back in Beirut on April 13, 2006—the thirty-first anniversary of the day the war erupted. I lived in Lebanon for five years of the worst fighting. The conflict ended in 1990, but almost a generation later many buildings still had gaping holes from artillery or deep pockmarks from rockets, grenades, and sustained gunfire. The Murr Tower, the unfinished shell of a high-rise where militias used to post snipers and execute rivals by pushing them off upper stories, still stands empty in the middle of town. I went to dinner at a fancy refurbished restaurant but parked around the corner in front of a gutted building with broken glass on the ground that had probably been there since I left in the mid-1980s.

  The Lebanese did most of it to themselves. Many sectarian leaders had their own militias, armed with vast arsenals. The truest believers—Christians and Muslims—were among the most brutal. An array of regional players, from Israel to Iran and often featuring the Palestinians, exploited the divide, armed allies, and dispatched their own forces into the militia melee. At least four percent of Lebanon’s population was killed between 1975 and 1990—the equivalent of twelve million Americans.4 Iraq’s insurgency may be nastier, but no other Middle East country has been so traumatically riven for so long by people who worship the same God, only in different ways or on different days.

  Politics in labyrinthine little Lebanon are complicated by the clans. They are more like political mafias with bosses—zaim in Arabic—who function with a modern version of feudal patronage. Many of the faces of the twenty-first century are from the same families—including the Gemayels, Jumblatts, Chamouns, Franjiehs, Karamis, Murrs, and Salams—that have dominated politics as far back as the 1930s.

  Saad Hariri is no exception. He inherited his political position from his father Rafiq Hariri, a man of epic wealth, wide girth, and Groucho Marx eyebrows. The difference is that the elder Hariri was trying to change the face of Lebanon both politically and physically. He founded the Future Movement.

  Born in 1944, Rafiq Hariri was the son of a greengrocer. He went to Saudi Arabia as a young math teacher but turned to construction and amassed billions from putting up office blocks, palaces, and conference centers during the boom oil years. He grew close to the royal family; the king eventually made him a Saudi citizen. With holdings all over the world, including Houston and Boston, Paris and Monaco, Forbes ranked him among the world’s wealthiest men.

  But Hariri never lost ties to Lebanon. During cease-fires in the 1980s, he spent millions to clean up Beirut. He even paid to have new palm trees planted on the long seafront corniche. I remember the big orange trucks that came in to clear away rubble; they were one of the few signs of hope in the midst of anarchy. But it was always for naught, as the fighting soon started again. He also built a new university and a hospital in his hometown of Sidon. And his Hariri Foundation funded more than 20,000 scholarships for Lebanese youth, both in Lebanon and abroad.

  In 1989, Hariri was pivotal in organizing and bankrolling a reconciliation conference hosted by Saudi Arabia in Taif, a mountain retreat near Mecca. The meeting brought all the warlords together and finally ended Lebanon’s grisly conflict.

  The Lebanese celebrate that turning point in a T-shirt too. It says: THE GREAT LEBANESE WAR 1975–1990. GAME OVER!

  The Taif Accord radically overhauled Lebanon’s National Covenant. It stipulated an end to politics based on religions. It called for a transition, in phases, to full democracy. Terms were to be worked out in a new commission—with equal representation of Christians and Muslims. It also required all government jobs to be based on capability rather than sect. And it mandated the disarming of all Lebanon’s militias.

  During the interim, it changed the ratio of Christians and Muslims in government to parity—fifty-fifty in everything, even though that still did not fairly represent their shares. Muslims by then outnumbered Christians by at least three to two, which effectively meant that a Christian vote counted more than a Muslim vote.

  In 1992, after Lebanon held its first elections in two decades, Rafiq Hariri ended up as prime minister. He approached the post-war era with the same swashbuckling ambition he did business. He lacked charisma. He did not come from one of Lebanon’s clans and did not have a militia to enforce his will, so he used the leverage of his wealth as a tool.

  “I want to go down in the history books,” he said, “as the man who resurrected Beirut.”5 He boasted that Beirut would become the Singapore of the Middle East.

  “Rebuilding the country,” he added, “is the revenge of honest people on war as an idea and the miseries arising from this choice, including all the savagery, destruction, and catastrophes. It is revenge on the idea of resorting to weapons to resolve problems.”6 His big ideas, wealth, plain talk, and political aspirations occasionally led to comparisons with Ross Perot.

  Some Lebanese saw Hariri as a savior, others as an exploiter—and many saw him as a bit of both. He ran Lebanon’s reconstruction like a personal business, reaping profit along the way. He was the largest shareholder in the company that rebuilt Beirut. His government borrowed heavily from his banks at steep interest rates, in what even allies admitted was a gross conflict of interest. He reportedly used government contracts and his profits to curry favor with the traditional political elite and the warlords.7 His plan put Lebanon into exorbitant debt for expensive infrastructure—a new international airport and new roads—while the poor felt few immediate benefits.

  Yet Rafiq Hariri did have a vision, however controversial. He was particularly devoted to renovating the commercial district of picturesque old French buildings along the notorious Green Line that divided Christian and Muslim militias during the war. The ravaged area reemerged as an architectural jewel in the center of Beirut, bringing in high-end businesses, charming outdoor bistros, classy boutiques, bustling city life, and revenue-generating tourists. If Hariri had not run reconstruction the way he ran his businesses, given Lebanon’s squabbling warlords and tendency to implode, it might not have happened.

  “I was afraid that if I did not contribute, confidence in the project would be lost,” he once explained, “and many people would in turn not contribute, which could lead to the failure of the project.” All profits, he claimed, went into the Hariri Foundation for charities.8

  In the end, Hariri did what virtually no other Lebanese politician could do—restore confidence that Lebanon was a viable country. Lebanon’s beleaguered currency soared by thirty percent after he took office; the famed black market disappeared.9 Since he had no role in the war, Hariri could also credibly reach out to all of Lebanon’s sects. He eventually won grudging respect even from those who did not like or trust him. He became known as Mr. Lebanon. Political analysts wrote about “Hariri-ism.”10

  But to be Lebanon’s prime minister, Hariri also had to make a devil’s bargain with Damascus. More than a half century after they had been separated into two states, Syria was not over losing Lebanon. Damascus still dominated its little neighbor. It intimidated politicians. It harassed newspaper editors. It threatened religious leaders. Its intelligence services were widely linked to assassinations of anyone who dared to defy it.11 After the civil war erupted, Syria was one of a handful of nations that dispatched troops to Lebanon under an Arab League mandate to try and end the war. They failed. In 19
79, the other nations left; Syria stayed—and stayed and stayed—in defiance of Arab and United Nations requests to leave. Lebanon once again fell under almost total Syrian control. And every leader had in some way to do its bidding.

  Hariri was no different. He acquiesced on appointments, security, foreign policy, and working with Syria’s hand-picked candidates for president of Lebanon.12Baksheesh is the Arabic word for bribe; it is an integral part of life in the Middle East. Hariri reportedly paid plenty of baksheesh to Syria, including construction of a new presidential palace in Damascus.13

  Asked once about the ubiquitous pictures of Syrian President Hafez al Assad in Lebanon’s international airport, Hariri told The Boston Globe with unusual candor, “It’s not a problem to put them up. It’s a problem to take them down.”14

  Hariri calculated that restoring Beirut’s old splendor and strengthening its economy would, in time, create leverage to counter Syria’s pull.15 In the meantime, however, the relationship was a roller coaster. Hariri resigned once after Assad handpicked an army general and ally, Emile Lahoud, to be Lebanon’s president in 1998. Lebanon’s president is elected by parliament, and Syria then controlled the majority by graft, intimidation, and manipulating the political system of a country its troops had occupied for decades.

  Hariri returned to the job after new Lebanese parliamentary elections in 2000—and Assad’s death. But in 2004, relations ruptured permanently when Syria pressured Lebanon to pass a constitutional amendment extending Lahoud’s term for three years. Lebanon’s president is limited to a single term of six years.

  Hariri opposed the extension. Behind the scenes, he appealed to French President Jacques Chirac to help stop the erosion of Lebanese sovereignty. Chirac took the appeal to President Bush. In 2004, Paris and Washington were still deeply at odds over Iraq. But Lebanon was one issue on which they could agree—and which they could use to rebuild their own relations. Together, they agreed to go to the United Nations to propose an unusual resolution. It called for presidential elections in Lebanon as scheduled, “without foreign interference or influence.” It also called for all foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon, an even bigger affront to Damascus. Without its heavy military presence, Syria would have limited leverage.