Proud of themselves but wary of their contemporary history, the Lebanese shy away from meaningful discussions of their affairs, which is the primary reason why schools refrain from teaching what actually occurred in this country after 1975 when the still incomplete civil war started. Of course, a Ministry of Education project was initiated in 2010 to draft a “common” history textbook that aimed to unify the Lebanese, although chances for it to pass the government’s paddock remain nil for political reasons. On Monday, the Progressive Socialist Party leader, Walid Junblatt, wrote a new chapter of that primer when he testified at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) that is trying five Hezbollah men presumed to have carried out the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri and his companions.
Erected over tectonic sectarian plates that sharpened over time, Lebanon failed to earn its independence, as most only honed survival skills. Disputes over the three-decade-long Syrian occupation, for example, which culminated in the 2005 Independence Intifada that later became the Beirut Spring before it evolved into the ‘Cedar Revolution’, divided otherwise sincere decision-makers.
The very phrase ‘Cedar Revolution’ was deleted from a draft national middle school history curriculum, replaced by the more neutral “wave of demonstrations,” allegedly because it was a foreign invention.
According to then Culture Minister Gaby Layyoun, Jeffrey Feltman, once a US Ambassador to Beirut before he became Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and now the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, coined the term.
Layyoun was not accurate in his assertion since the expression originated with Under-secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula J. Dobriansky. Of course, the dispute was not about the words themselves for there is universal acceptance that the 2005 tsunami ushered in a second independence, and may well have contributed to the post-2010 Arab uprisings. Rather, it was about the country’s very identity, something that the Lebanese continued to struggle with nearly 72 years after independence. No chapter was more painful that the troubled relations with neighbouring Syria, perceived by most Lebanese as a friendly nation, even if Damascus seldom tolerated Beirut’s propinquity for liberalism.
At the STL hearings, Junblatt recounted the nature of the ties between the two neighbours, focusing on the ruling Al Assad family. He boldly accused President Bashar Al Assad for being hostile towards Hariri long before he was chosen to lead Syria, and noted the Syrian’s animosity towards the Lebanese.
In a troubling recent book titled Madmen at the Helm: Pathology and Politics in the Arab Spring, Muriel Mirak-Weissbach drew a clinical profile of Al Assad, documenting the leader’s “carefully crafted deception game” as an “antisocial personality disorder,” which psycho-analysts “describe as one that does not overtly manifest any recognisable signs of neurotic, let alone psychotic behaviour.” Individuals who suffer from this disorder, according to the author, can be intelligent, at ease in social situations, likeable, logical and rational, though they also tend to be insincere.
In his STL testimony, Junblatt confirmed this diagnosis, although his more revealing avowals focused on how Al Assad manipulated President Emile Lahoud, who was elected president in 1998. He told the tribunal that he opposed Lahoud’s election because of the latter’s military background and “complete affiliation with the Syrian regime,” stressing that “the president and prime minister in Lebanon had no control over the Lebanese army, which was under the command of Lahoud,” and underscoring that “the army answered to Syria.”
This was unacceptable to Hariri and Junblatt and while the Druse chieftain stood his ground on principle, he advised Hariri to tolerate Lahoud for his own safety.
In ongoing conversations, no subject is more sensitive to most Lebanese than the Taif Accords that presumably sealed the 1975-1990 civil war, although everyone awaited their full implementation. To be sure, Damascus approved Taif, even if presidents Hafez and Bashar Al Assad intended for Syria to remain the dominant power in Lebanon and, towards that end, relied on their friendship with Lahoud to tighten the noose around Lebanese necks.
Junblatt provided rare insights on the actual mechanisms used to achieve this objective, as the Syrian security apparatus thwarted every effort for Beirut to determine its own destiny.
“Lebanese officials were summoned to the headquarters of the Syrian intelligence... where they were ordered to fulfil [specific] demands” to elect Lahoud, Junblatt told the court, adding that “very few people had the courage to oppose them.”
According to these disturbing testaments, the control was so tight that Damascus felt no compunction to repeat its methodology in September 2004 to extend Lahoud’s term when the now deceased Rustom Ghazaleh — then the head of Syrian Intelligence in Lebanon who passed away on April 24, 2015 after he was severely beaten by the bodyguards of Lt Gen Rafik Shehadeh over policy disagreements — informed him of what needed to be done. What happened next was telling as a fatidic August 2004 meeting between Hariri and Al Assad sealed the premier’s fate and, perhaps, the country’s too.
At the STL, Junblatt confirmed why any discussion over the development of a new history curriculum was impossible because the Lebanese ignored what truly occurred before and after 1975, were sharply divided, and the war was not over. Yet, examining what happened, even if all of the dirty linen is washed in Holland, was necessary to awaken public opinion. To learn the truth and, perhaps, to limit the dangers for renewed civil strife.
Credit: Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of Iffat Al Thunayan: An Arabian Queen, London: Sussex Academic Press, 2015.
