An Iran on the Mediterranean?
May 23rd, 2008 by Torstein Schiøtz Worren
I wrote a reply to a friend of mine about Lebanon and figured I might as well publish an edited version here. My issues, as always, comes from how Lebanon’s problems (that is to say the government and the opposition) are portrayed in the media. From here it all looks very simple: The freely-elected and Western-backed coalition of Lebanese religious and sectarian groups are clinging to power under the onslaught of the Shia Hizbollah, a terrorist group that seeks to extend its power over all the country and turn it into an “Iran on the Mediterranean” as the Lebanese government put it. I am no fan of Hizbollah, but it benefits no one to portray what is going on in Lebanon in this way.
1. The whole notion of Lebanese democracy
The idea that there exists a democracy in Lebanon is a Western idea based on someone fighting someone we don’t like through the political system. True, Lebanon has VOTING, but that is not the same as a democracy. Democracy requires representation, and that is a dubious term in Lebanon, not least because those in power are scared to do another demographic census (last one was in the 1940s if I remember correctly) because they know the situation has changed a lot since then. The Lebanese political system is based on a Lebanese invention of The Confessional System where the different religious groups and sects are given positions and seats in parliament according to their percentage of the population (70 year ago). Here’s a cut from Wikipedia:
The Parliament is elected by adult suffrage (majority age for election is 21) based on a system of proportional representation for the various confessional groups. Most deputies do not represent political parties as they are known in the West, and rarely form Western-style groups in the assembly. Political blocs are usually based on confessional and local interests or on personal/family allegiance rather than on political affinities…
Lebanese political institutions often play a secondary role to highly confessionalized personality-based politics. Powerful families also still play an independent role in mobilizing votes for both local and parliamentary elections. Nonetheless, a lively panoply of domestic political parties, some even predating independence, exists. The largest are all confessional based.
Democracy in the Western sense is “one man one vote”, where vote implies that you can vote for whoever you want. This is not the case in Lebanon. Politics is run by the same families that have always controlled different sects in different areas. The fact that they prevent an opening of the political system to let anyone vote for any party or person is clearly because they stand to loose out in a new and truly democratic system. As it stands now, most of Lebanon’s politicians are more concerned with their own power and privileges than creating opportunities for all the Lebanese. This disdain for the politicians can be found on all levels of society and in all sects.
2. The ‘Everyone against Hizbollah-syndrome’
In the media, the political conflict in Lebanon is portrayed as the Western-backed alliance of Sunnis/Christians/Druze against the Shias of Hizbollah. However, what is always left out is that there are two huge political ALLIANCES that are opposed to eachother in Lebanon. It is not as if all non-Shia Lebanese are on one side and Hizbollah and Amal on the other. The sectarian system in Lebanon requires alliances with ALL sects in order to be a viable political alternative (as the president has to be Christian, the prime minister a Sunni etc). Hizbollah is the most powerful partner in the opposition, but they are allied with political parties from the other sects in Lebanon, including Christians, Sunnis and Druze as this is the only way to fill all positions in government and parliament. Now, you could say that the others are only in there for their own personal gain, but that describes the situation for Lebanese politics in general. In other words, the conflict is more political than sectarian. What Hizbollah wants is representation, something they feel is being denied to them. That’s where any conflict resolution needs to start as that is the basic grievance. And this is where they have now come to agreement in discussions in Qatar. Now, if everyone was against Hizbollah, giving them their proper representation (which is considered to be around 40 percent or maybe a bit less) it would not give them the ability to control the government as they do not have the majority. This is where the ALLIANCE comes in, as their allies would give them a majority in parliament. That might be frightening as it is an unknown force, but that is the weakness with democracy. Is democracy only a good system as long as a country’s inhabitants vote for people we like? Or does it give them the right to vote for whoever they want (as long as they follow the constitution of course)?
3. Hizbollah as a foreign import.
Portraying Hizbollah as a foreign import simplifies the matter in a way that is very dangerous, a simplification that is related to the idea that Iraqis would welcome foreign soldiers just because they hated Saddam Hussein so much. True, Hizbollah was formed as a resistance movement in the second half of the civil war, largely in opposition to Israeli interventions. But it is an inherently Lebanese phenomenon built on Lebanese experiences and politics. A lot of the time it is described in terms of being an extension of Syrian and Iranian interests, but that is to put the problem on its head. A lot of the time there are converging interests between the three, but this does not make it a foreign import. “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” applies here as elsewhere and Hizbollah, especially as long as they have a ‘valid’/'acceptable’ reason to struggle (politically or militarily) they are going to take support from whoever is willing to give it to them (just like the Christians of Lebanon have been supported by Israel and just like all factions in the political struggle in Lebanon currently have foreign sponsors, as they’ve always had). This is why Hamas, a strict Sunni-Islamist organisation takes money from Shia Iran. Hizbollah is concerned with Lebanese interests and not Iran’s interests (which is why they stay out of the whole Sunni-Shia conflict elsewhere in the Middle East). The reason it’s portrayed as a foreign import by the current government is of course because they know this is what triggers support from abroad. They therefore describe the conflict as “The beleaguered democrats”, that are clearly identifiable and easy to sympatise with from our perspective, against “the crazy fundamentalists working for the Axis of Evil that want to take away everyone’s freedom”.
4. Hizbollah as crazy fundamentalists
This is where it’s getting tricky as it’s hard to make judgements about an organisation that has never been forced to convert its rhetoric to actual national politics. However, there is a lot more to the story than Islamism. Even if Nasrallah wanted a country where everyone is forced to live according to the sharia, he knows this is not conceivable nor possible. And he has said as much, expressing all sects’ right to live according to their own rules (as has always been the case). Analysing Hizbollah only according to the black and white idea of good (non-Muslim) secularists versus bad (Muslim) fundamentalists is pointless. Hizbollah is a political movement. This is why (with the exception of revenge killings) Hizbollah is not on neither the UN’s nor the EU’s lists of terror organisation and the group has never used terror outside of Lebanon (and Israel of course). Furthermore, since the civil war the party has stayed on the political path in the internal conflict. Demonstrations, sit-ins and so forth are all legitimate political tools and is found in Europe also. This time they crossed the line and used force (only the target was militias and not the national army or government institutions.) Furthermore, Hizbollah is praised by many non-Shias for its integrity and honesty (which is always relative and becomes so clear-cut when opposed to the rest of Lebanon’s corrupt politicians) and I think it would get many votes from non-Shias if the voting system was changed to let everybody vote for whoever they wanted (just like many Shias would abandon it as they now had proper political representation).
Reality is never black and white.