Opinion | Columnists
A clash of interests
Even without interfering in Lebanon's domestic affairs, everyone is observing with concern the developments in the country.
- By Mohammad Abdullah Al Mutawa, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:03 May 13, 2008
Understanding what is happening in Lebanon is vital for a complete comprehension of the political scene in the Middle East. Lebanon, for long considered as the voice of freedom in the Arab nation, has become an open arena for different powers to try various designs for the Middle East.
The small country has always paid the price of regional and international power struggles, and its people suffered for decades just because they lived in a flashpoint of political, sectarian, ethnic and class conflicts.
This brings to mind the time I met the late leader of the Lebanese Progressive Socialist Party, Kamal Junblatt, who was a politician, a philosopher and a well-spoken person.
We were a group of university students, brought together by the love of their nation and humanity, and a firm belief that progress is the norm of life, and that no power can prevail for long unless it was working for the best interest of humanity.
In the 1970s, the human will came out victorious in Vietnam, while anti-human powers emerged in different parts of the world such as Iraq and Latin America, where democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende was assassinated.
People all over the world were looking for a stable and peaceful future, with no injustice or domination by a powerful minority.
It was a period of romantic fantasies, of youth from various backgrounds and conflicting ideologies looking for a saviour. What they had in common was the search for a solution for human crisis in general and Arab issues in particular.
More than three decades later, I can still remember the face of the wonderful Junblatt when he spoke to us at the Istiqlal Club in Kuwait about the world struggle and stressed that a bullet of resistance can cause a tremor.
Dr Ahmad Al Khatib, founder of the Arab Nationalists Movement and others were listening to Junblatt and realised that political change can be brought about by many means; the most extreme of which is the use of weapons, when other means fail. People resort to arms when words fail, we all learned back then.
We also learned that this is one of the things that set democratic societies in the civilised world apart from Third World countries, with the two exceptions being South Africa's Nelson Mandela and India's Mahatma Gandhi, who peacefully struggled for a better future for humanity and achieved victory.
Nowadays, a question arises as to how we can apply such principles in a world dominated by a single superpower, and when conflicts take a religious and ideological form and the mechanisms are different from what they were in the last century with increasing religious and sectarian conflicts.
Various forces
The great powers that controlled the world had supported various forces to fight their enemies on their behalf during the Cold War, such as supporting religious parties to fight communism, especially in Afghanistan and Lebanon.
As far as they were concerned, the ends justified the means, which was the principle adopted by all parties.
Resistance movements were used to serve the interests of the emerging powers, while the weaker parties had to forge alliances with stronger ones, who could easily sacrifice them at the first sign of victory.
This is a reminder that lacking a method will lead to disaster, which is evident in the events of the second half of the 20th century in the Arab nation, in which the development project was undermined due to the lack of method.
This prompted some Arab intellectuals to look longingly at the past, when Egypt, Iraq and some other Arab countries were kingdoms. They wonder if it were possible for these states to develop normally towards achieving democratic multi-faceted societies, had the military coups in these countries not taken place.
They cannot help wondering what the situation would be like if humanitarian powers ruled instead of the religious powers, which are currently dragging everyone towards a civil war.
Even without interfering in Lebanon's domestic affairs, everyone is observing with concern the developments in the country, fearing the repetition of the Lebanese experiment in the rest of the Arab nation.
Dr Mohammad Abdullah Al Mutawa is a Professor of Sociology, UAE University, Al Ain.
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