And the winner is... (just a comparison)

Compare the ballot of the Dutch parliamentary elections (where each voter gets to choose ONE person):

…to the two ballots (different districts) for the Lebanese parliamentary elections – in the district of the left ballot, voters choose five people, in the district of the right, they choose TEN.

libanees-stembiljet

This is not a giant hand - the ballots are really this small. I guess this is the first time the Lebanese win the trophy for efficiency and environment-friendliness...

Electoral Observations

The polling stations closed just minutes ago, and the results probably won’t be in for another day (can you imagine counting 2.5 million votes by hand?), but so far it has been an interesting day and I would like to share some of my observations with you: - Yesterday on TV a reporter was asking some people in Jdeideh (North of Beirut/Metn) who they were going to vote for. “I’m 71 and I’ve never voted in my life,” said one guy, “and I’m surely not going to start voting now!” Most others said they would vote for ‘the one who is best for the country.’ Nobody actually named a candidate. One man said “I don’t know, I have to ask my son who we’re voting for this time.”

Business is business: On Place Sassine, flags of competing Christian parties are sold by one vendor.

- Two days ago we were in Laqlouq, in the mountains North of Beirut, where we entered a restaurant full of army and police smoking arguileh and drinking araq. They were sent to the village to guard the electoral process, and were now looking for places to eat and sleep (all 30 of them) until Election Day.

- All voters in Lebanon have to dip their thumb in ink after they have voted, except the President of the Republic. He walked out with perfectly clean hands.

Electoral posters of the opposition and independent in Beirut (third district).

- When you have to cast your vote at a polling station in a district that is very popular amongst the party you don’t like, you’d better bring your own ballot (or remember all the names in their correct spelling): my mother in law did not find a single distributer of the list she wanted to vote for in the entire neighborhood of her polling station, and we had to drive over to the office of one of her favorite parties to get the correct list. When we asked them why they weren’t distributing lists at her location, they said: "Are you kidding? Have you seen the COLOR of that neighborhood? No way can we distribute anything there!"

- When an entirely veiled woman (and I mean entirely, head to toe including the face and the hands) got to the voting station, the policeman at the door asked for her ID, checked the picture, looked at her veiled face and let her pass. I don’t know how he knew it was actually the person on the ID.

- Speaking of entirely veiled: would this woman be required to take off her gloves to dip her finger in ink?

An Electoral Bureau: a place for (in this case) Hariri supporters to gather.

- While we were waiting outside the polling station, a group of 4 ‘observers’ of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections walked up. Two of them, Lebanese girls, went inside the station, while the other two, foreigners, waited outside. A member of the most prevalent political party walked up to the policeman guarding the entrance with bags of waterbottles that he wanted to distribute inside. The policeman stopped him, but the man argued a bit, then took him aside, handed him some papers (we couldn’t see what they were) and was let in the station with his water. The observers looked on, but obviously did not speak Arabic, so they had no idea what happened. I wonder what the report will say. Something happened. It looked fishy, maybe?

Supporters of Hariri expressing their excitement across the neighborhood.

Between the criminals

A friend of mine works as a psycho-therapist with the people in Roumieh prison. A large part of them are serving time for drug-use, but there are also those who are convicted for much more severe crimes. He says it’s not always easy work, and sometimes he has to forget about all the psycho-analytical theories he has learned to be able to deal with the prisoners, but it does give him some good stories. For example when one of the prisoners came to him one day and asked: What did I do wrong? I didn’t insult religion, I didn’t lie, I didn’t steal… The guy insulted my mother so I killed him. Now why am I locked up with the criminals? Honestly, how can you answer this?

Marginalization and Mobilization of Youth in the Near East

“…More than other groups, [Youth in the Near East] have to face situations in which the cultural scripts, messages and codes of the various agencies of socialization are often inconsistent and irreconcilable. Just witness the disparate and conflicting messages they are being subjected to: religious authority, state, national or secular ideologies, family and kinship groups, peer subculture, popular and cyber culture and, as of late, all the seductive appeals of global commodified consumerism, virtual images and life styles. Arab youth today are consequently caught between a poignant and unsettling predicament: traditional vectors of stability and loyalty (family and state) are being undermined, while the modern alternative sources of education, employment, security, public opinion have proved unable to fill the void. The young are also afflicted by another dissonant reality. They are often conceived and celebrated as the “hopes and builders of the future,” yet stigmatized and feared as disruptive and parasitic forces.”

I’ll be speaking at this two-day conference at the American University of Beirut tomorrow afternoon. Come join us if you have the chance! The program can be found here.

And the Resistance can even cure cancer!

Last Monday was Liberation Day, and to celebrate the end of the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon in 2000 we went to Bir Hassan to see the movie ‘Ahl el wafa’ (‘the loyal people’). It’s the story of a Resistance operation in 1994 against the Israeli army and their collaborators (the South Lebanese Army) in the valley of Nabatiyeh, as directed by the famous Syrian director Najdat Anzour. A group of fighters from the Resistance (the name of their party is never specified) is smuggled into an old house in an occupied village, from where they attack an Israeli convoy that is patrolling the road below Beaufort Castle. We knew the movie was coming because we happened to be in Beaufort Castle on the day they were training for the special effects, and we expected quite a bit of it because they had flown in a stunt-team from the USA – and those people know how to make dead bodies fly around, after all.

We were not disappointed in the flying bodies department. There was plenty of blood, explosions, burning soldiers and throwing of handgrenades. The fighting scenes, preceded by lots of crawling around in the bushes to get to the desired destination unseen, were supported by upliftingly ballistic music known from the promotional videos of Hezbollah on Al Manar TV.

The acting, however, was worse than a Mexican soap-opera. On top of that, there was a second storyline about a girl whose nagging mother suffers from cancer and cannot get the right medication because of the occupation, and the girl is harassed by a member of the South Lebanese Army who doesn’t care that she’s already married – he wants her, and he and his evil grin just pretend that her wounded husband doesn’t exist.

The girl is obviously added to show human dilemma: she discovers the group of Resistance fighters hiding in her (grand)parents’ abandoned house, but they trust her and let her go when she promises she won’t tell anybody. The girl is torn; if she tells the Israelis about her find, she can get money to help her mother! Or get the SLA-guy to stop harassing her! It’s so hard to decide what to do! But she doesn’t rat on the Resistance fighters, and is rewarded for her loyalty by the fact that the evil SLA-guy is among those who die in the attack on the convoy, and the Resistance transfers her mother to a beautiful hospital where she suddenly stops nagging.

They added one more scene – in the end, she offers the Resistance the key to the house, a not so subtle invocation of the Palestinian symbolism of carrying with them the keys to their old houses as the last proof that the places were really theirs, and here she voluntarily gives it to the Resistance… a fitting ending to a beautiful piece of propaganda ideological movie. Go see it if you have a chance.