Beirut: Shaikh Ahmad Al Assir, a firebrand Sunni cleric who presides over the Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque in Sidon’s Abra area, and Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, seldom mince their words.
In the current political environment, the little-known but immensely charismatic cleric filled a tactical void within his community in response to what many of his coreligionists perceived as an anti-Sunni wave throughout Lebanon, while the equally alluring Shiite cleric, who branched out into international politics and searched for global audiences, repeatedly warned Al Assir to cease and desist.
Caught among such magnetic personalities, Prime Minister Najib Miqati sought to balance extremist views, even if his lacklustre performances engendered ridicule. To be sure, Miqati worked hard to prevent an all-out sectarian war that threatened a resumption of the dormant civil war, although many doubted his intrinsic capabilities to deliver.
Beyond calls for calm, as well as repeated pleas with both Al Assir and Nasrallah to limit their war of words, Miqati muzzled appeals to unleash the army and risk its break-up. Instead, he opted for a ‘quick fix’ in Sidon, which required negotiations. For the prime minister, this quick fix was another way of saying that one imposed his will at great risk, and contended that the security situation was “still acceptable.”
Still, and in as much as this focus in the ‘still acceptable’ formula aimed to prevent a spillover of the Syrian civil war into Lebanon, Miqati overlooked an even greater challenge that he knew was existential in nature.
What preoccupied him was the gradual erosion of the Sunni community’s traditional role in Lebanon, with extremely grave consequences to the fragile 1943 National Pact, and the equally brittle 1989 Ta’if Accords. Serious sectarian clashes in Tripoli, disturbances in Sidon and the astonishing performance of the outgoing Grand Mufti, Shaikh Mohammad Rashid Qabbani, highlighted his numerous concerns. Remarkably, the mere fact that the prime minister failed to persuade the Grand Mufti to participate in the Higher Islamic Councils’ elections, further tarnished his image.
In the event, Qabbani refused to hold any meetings at Dar Al Fatwah to consider a new term and, in the process, not only challenged state authorities that financed the institution but also significantly weakened the office of the prime minister that legitimised Sunni weight on the internal chequerboard. To make matters worse, and though Miqati claimed that security was “still acceptable,” the Syrian ambassador to Lebanon, Ali Abdul Karim Ali, announced that Syria submitted a protest letter to Lebanese authorities, which complained of “violations of the neighbouring country’s territory along the border.”
Damascus warned that its forces would fire into Lebanon if “terrorist gangs” continued to infiltrate Syria, which was ominous to say the least.
Equally gloomy was Michel Aoun, the head of the Free Patriotic Movement that allied itself with Hezbollah, who warned that Lebanon was going through a period that was reminiscent of 1975, the beginning of the civil war. Although he quickly reassured his audiences that politicians were aware of how to prevent a similar conflict, Aoun raised the spectre of takfiris (extremist Islamists) operating in the country, obliquely referring to Al Assir in Sidon and leading Sunni movements in Tripoli.
Uncouth in tone as well as substance, such remarks against the Sunni community challenged Miqati, who was, to put it mildly, caught between a rock and a hard place. The ultimate test that confronted him was to project the state’s authority, which he incarnated by virtue of his position, in an equidistant mode. Equally important were his skills at subduing elite disputes for raw power, as leading protagonists etched for fresh disturbances, each confident of imminent victory.
