Nearly five months after President Michel Sulaiman completed his term in office, and following 14 convocations of the Electoral College to perform a constitutional duty, the Lebanese parliament was paralysed, unable to elect a new president. Why is the election of a head-of-state becoming nearly impossible?
No matter how unpalatable the creation of Greater Lebanon was back in 1920, Lebanese politicians earned their independence after they settled on a functional National Charter in 1943, signed on to a constitution and saved themselves from regional catastrophes. A confessional mechanism — that conserved sectarian privileges — was applied that, despite shortcomings, preserved freedoms and encouraged political and economic liberties for all. For decades, Beirut welcomed Arab and Muslim dissidents, which defined its intrinsic mandate to stand tall. Yet, and caught in the whirlwind of a civil war that tore the country apart, the Lebanese never fully recovered. Most of the guns fell silent, though unending struggles continued on various fronts, most recently on the very doorsteps of the presidency.
To be sure, the 1989 Taif Accords that ended the conflict affirmed the principle of “mutual coexistence” (Al ‘Aysh Al Mushtarak) between different sects and restructured the political system by transferring some of the powers of the president to the cabinet, even if the pact was haphazardly applied. The agreement reformed the power-sharing formula that favoured Christians to a 50:50 ratio and enhanced the powers of the Sunni prime minister over those of the Christian president. It also provided for the disarmament of all militias, but Hezbollah ignored it on the grounds that it was a “resistance force” rather than a mercenary force.
Beyond its acknowledged confrontation against Israeli occupation, few doubted that Hezbollah leaders, Shiites in their majority, perceived the militia as a tool to gain additional domestic gains. Relegated to the presidency of parliament, and aware of significant demographic changes in the country, Shiites believed that Sunni and Christian political privileges ought to be proportionate and, towards that end, floated the idea that the time was right to convene a fresh constitutional convention to debate and agree to a new tripartite power-sharing formula between Christians, Sunnis and Shiites, dubbed the Thulathiyyah [Trisection] Accord. Of course, the proposal abandoned Taif, even if doing so upset the proverbial applecart.
It was within such a framework that the ambitions of the former commander of the Army, General Michel Aoun, surfaced. An anti-Syrian officer who fought a “Liberation War” against the occupier in 1989, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of unarmed soldiers and civilians after Aoun accepted aid from Saddam Hussain, the general was allowed to escape. Aoun’s exile in France ended on May 7, 2005, eleven days after the withdrawal of Syrian troops, itself provoked by the Cedar Revolution that followed the February 14, 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Ironically, and instead of aligning himself with his natural constituency that would have sealed his election, Aoun reconciled with Damascus, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Hezbollah in 2006, reluctantly accepted the 2008 Sulaiman election and counted on the 2009 parliamentary election results to reserve the presidency in 2014. Disappointed in more ways than one, the 81-year-old still held on to what he perceived was a “right”, allegedly because his Free Patriotic Movement held 27 seats (out of 128) in parliament.
Naturally, Hezbollah portrayed the 2006 memorandum with Aoun as a symbol of Christian-Muslim coexistence, and while the general was persuaded that he, and only he, could eventually force a disarmament of Hezbollah, the party intended to be the main driver of the agenda, including the adoption of a defence strategy to protect Lebanon from the Israeli threat, the deployment of fighters in Syria and, something that few Lebanese signed on to, a re-alignment of the country with Iran.
Aoun accepted all of these conditions. He visited Tehran in October 2008 where he met president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki and Majlis speaker Ali Larijani. When Mottaki asserted that Tehran and Beirut shared similar interests, Aoun announced that Iran was the most powerful country in the region, which surprised most Lebanese officials. In December 2008, Aoun visited Damascus, where he declared that Syrians welcomed him with “admiration and respect ... [claiming that he] was a rival and the rivalry ended”. This was a first-rate rehabilitation campaign that served personal ambitions, while it greatly assisted Hezbollah to add to its long-term gains. Nothing stood in its way, not even the August 2010 arrest of a close Aoun aide, General Fayez Karam, for collaboration with Israel.
Aoun’s strategic error denied him the presidency in 2005, though he still hoped that his alliance with Hezbollah may open the Baabda Palace’s doors. Similarly, by holding on to a compromised Maronite leader with a checkered past and, equally important, by entertaining post-Taif conventions to recalibrate Lebanon’s magic co-existence formula, Hezbollah failed to recognise that real power in this confessional parliamentary democracy deterred extremist innovations.
Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the forthcoming Iffat Al Thunayan: An Arabian Queen, London: Sussex Academic Press, 2015.