Reflections on an assassination

Saturday. My dad calls and asks: ‘So how is Beirut today?’ I feel the oh-so-familiar knot tying itself in my stomach – I’ve been out all morning and haven’t checked the news yet, so who knows what has happened. ‘Why, did they blow up someone else?’ ‘Well, the guy from three days ago…’ Ah yes. The guy from three days ago (now almost a week). François el Hajj, a general in the Lebanese Army, mentioned as a possible successor to Michel Sleiman (the current commander of the army), if Sleiman indeed becomes the next president of the Lebanese Republic. He came from a poor family in the South, el Hajj, and as one of 10 children this job represented a rare chance for someone of his background to make it to the top. In Rmeish, his village in the South, there was even talk of him becoming president, eventually – for a commander of the Army, necessarily a Maronite Christian, not a strange career-move in Lebanon.

I arrived to work Wednesday last week to find one of my colleagues crying. ‘The explosion this morning, it was her uncle’, whispered another colleague to inform me. Other than her red, teary eyes, there was nothing that day that reminded me of the awfulness of what had happened that morning. Nothing on the streets, nothing in the conversations – not even the loud accusations of Syria, the country that gets blamed first (and exclusively) for every assassination, by members of the current government.

One of my colleagues thought it was because he was from the army, and the army is supposedly ‘neutral’ in Lebanon – neither with the government, nor with the opposition – so if you have no political party to stage the mourning for your martyrdom, your death hardly receives any public grief.

Yet the silence over el Hajj’s murder, the absence of government-members blaming Syria, might have another source: apparently, el Hajj refused to join the ‘Southern Lebanese Army’, an armed group that helped the Israeli army, when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Being from a village on the border with Israel, he has seen the destruction and aggression from Lebanon’s Southern neighbor, and his moral stance against Israel hasn’t changed over the years. This means that having him as the leader of the Lebanese Army (which is deployed in South Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah from re-arming, or even disarm them) might be disadvantageous to countries other than Syria, to put it mildly.

Question remains: who blew him up? Maybe this time, we shouldn’t look to the East for an answer…

It's a brain thing

Similar to many people I know here in Lebanon, I don’t follow the news. I don’t read newspapers (the few available sources in English, like Daily Star and Naharnet, being of abominable quality), I don’t watch the news or listen to the radio (I still don’t understand much of the classical Arabic in which the news is broadcast), and political discussions among friends tend to go from English to Arabic in 2 seconds, making it very easy for me to tune out. Generally, my attitude is one of: if something really bad happens, I am bound to notice (wars tend to be very noisy); otherwise there is no need to get scared by the fear-inducing way of reporting that is going on. For my friends it is less easy to completely disregard the political situation: they understand the discussions and because opinions are so polarized, so black and white, so completely one-way or the other, it is hard not to join them. And so, before you know it, you are vigorously defending a political standpoint that is only remotely connected to what you really believe in, just because the politician who defends your cause said this or that. What’s worse, this politician may very well change his mind entirely, retrace his steps and seek alliance with his former ‘enemies’. As one of my colleagues said: ‘Sometimes you lose a friend because you spend a whole night fighting about a political issue, only to hear the next day that your politicians have suddenly agreed on the issue.’

To preserve friendships, it would of course be possible not to discuss politics at all. For example, I never knew the political conviction of one of my friends here, I thought he was neutral – until his girlfriend let slip that the only fights they had were over politics, she being with the government, he with the opposition. I guess that when you get this close, there is no way to hide your convictions. Or, as Rayan said: ‘You know, even when you don’t talk about politics, it is hard to be friends, because if they are on the other side, politically, and you know that, you will always wonder if there is something wrong with their brain.’

It's what the Dutch did with Melkert and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In an opinion poll conducted by an international information company, Lebanese people were asked what they thought would be the best way to protect their politicians from assassinations. No less than 40.3% was of the opinion that for the politicians to emigrate / leave the country would be the best solution.

Imagine that: "Today's session of the Lebanese Parliament will be held in... Luxembourg!" At least it would finally bring an end to the lie (as recently restated by the Italian minister of Foreign Affairs, when discussing the Lebanese presidential elections with his French and German counterparts) that "the Lebanese future is decided in Lebanon".

Marriage proposal (type 3)

I have plenty of marriage-proposals to entertain you with, so there will certainly be a number 4, 5, 6 and onwards. But number 3 is not on this blog.

Number three is here.

And this time, the answer is yes.

It would be funny...

… if it weren’t so damn tragic. Today is the last day of the current president’s term. This means that if the current government (pro-Western) and the opposition (pro-non-Western) do not agree on a new guy, by midnight tonight Lebanon will not have a president. Unless, of course, the current president illegally extends his term (yet again), or appoints a military government. The thing with these two ‘solutions’ is that the government and their supporters will not accept that. If the president does nothing, the power is automatically transferred to the prime minister, who can then elect a new guy together with his ministers. The thing with this 'solution' is that the opposition and their supporters will not accept that.

(And here we haven’t even mentioned all the solutions that are unacceptable for the Arab League, Syria, France, Iran or the United States, because apparently they all have to agree on a new Lebanese president too.)

Sietske thinks a power vacuum that will occur because of a lack of president might not be such a bad thing. She writes:

Personally I don’t think this would be a great loss; it would make the current government illegal, and thus we are a country run illegally. This would suit the Lebanese spirit just fine. You may argue over the ‘run’ fact’. I don’t think Lebanese are easily ‘run’. We thrive on ‘lack of rules’ and so no president won’t be that big of a deal. We (the Lebanese) will just keep the show running, president or no president, government or no government. We probably do better without. Let’s see.

I beg to differ. Everyone I know is either ignoring politics entirely (the ostrich-approach: head in the sand and hope it will all go away) or completely stressed out. The Lebanese population pretends to thrive on chaos and hardship, but there is no country in the world where anti-depressants and tranquilizers are standard fare in every household and often available from the pharmacy even without a doctor’s prescription.

As I wrote before, many Lebanese even boast about how good they are during war, how they ‘hold on’ and withstand the crisis, but, as May Kahalé, press secretary and advisor to then-president of the Republic of Lebanon, phrased it: ‘Ironically, I believe this solidarity among the Lebanese people prolonged the war because we proved too adaptable. To survive, we accommodated ourselves too adeptly to each twist and turn that the war took.’ If only for once they would accept that they cannot deal with all the chaos and instability, they might finally stand up against their war-lording politicians and demand some real ‘running’ of the country.