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.

'tis the Season...

... of political instability; people are leaving the country with no plans to come back. On a trip to the bank and the laundromat (together no more than 5 blocks away from my house), I came across no less than 4 cars for sale.

And if you think there is any other explanation for the onset of this car-sale-season, consider this one... (Translation, by Walid: "Jaajaa is out, Aoun is back, Sanioura has become greedy, Lahoud is staying, I am leaving, and the car is for sale." - the 4 mentioned are Lebanese politicians.)

Gebeurt er eigenlijk nog wat?

Het lijkt misschien alsof er niet veel gebeurt in Libanon dezer dagen – zolang dit land het internationale nieuws niet haalt, is het makkelijk te vergeten dat er wel degelijk iets aan de hand is. Zelfs als je hier woont (en je verre houdt van kranten en tv), zou je zonder moeite kunnen denken dat er geen vuiltje aan de lucht is, dat het allemaal zo’n vaart niet zal lopen. Maar er is wel degelijk vanalles gaande. Sinds 23 September is de periode van de presidentsverkiezingen begonnen; een periode van twee maanden waarin de leden van de overheid, het ene deel gesteund/gestuurd door de VS/Europa, het andere deel door Syrië/Iran, een nieuwe president moeten kiezen, iemand die de huidige, nog door Syrië ‘aangestelde’ (en onverholen de Syrische belangen dienende) president moet opvolgen. Dat dit niet van een leien dakje gaat, moge duidelijk wezen. Wat volgt is een poging de situatie uit te leggen, met bijbehorende achtergrondinformatie.

Van belang is de uiterst ondemocratische verdeling van machtsposities: er zijn in Libanon 18 officiëel erkende sektes (religieuze stromingen) en de verschillende politieke posities zijn in ingedeeld op basis van deze religieuze opdeling van de bevolking. Alleen Maronitische christenen hebben het recht tot president verkozen te worden; alleen een Soennitische moslim kan premier worden, en alleen een Sji’ietische moslim kan de post van ‘speaker of the house’ (voorzitter van de kamer) bekleden.

Deze verdeling is tot stand gekomen onder toeziend oog van de toenmalige kolonisator Frankrijk, en is gebaseerd op een volkstelling uit 1932: omdat de Maronieten de grootste bevolkingsgroep waren (en de lievelingetjes van la douce France), kregen zij de belangrijkste positie toegewezen. Dat sindsdien de samenstelling van de bevolking aanzienlijk veranderd is, is publiek geheim – het is algemeen bekend dat in een huidige census de Soennieten en de Sji’ieten veruit als grootste bevolkingsgroep naar voren zou komen; welke van de twee de grootste is, hangt af van je gesprekspartner: Soennieten beweren uiteraard dat zij de meerderheid binnen de meerderheid zijn, Sji’ieten claimen die status ook.

Sinds 1932 is er echter geen census meer geweest, en je kunt je wel voorstellen dat dat zij die nu het pluche bezetten er alles aan doen een nieuwe census (en dus een eventuele herziening van de machtsverdeling) tegen te gaan. En daar ligt nu (een deel van) het probleem: na de oorlog van zomer 2006 besloot het overgrote deel van de Sji’ietische volksvertegenwoordiging (met name de afgevaardigden van Hezbollah en Amal, samen met hun Maronitische bondgenoot Aoun (die een groot deel – misschien zelfs de helft – van ‘s lands Christenen vertegenwoordigt)) dat het tijd was voor een ‘Overheid van Nationale Eenheid’, waarin hun alliantie minstens één-derde van de regering zou moeten vormen. Het waren ten slotte de Sji’ieten die het ergst onder de oorlog hadden geleden, en de Sji’ieten die het land hadden verdedigd tegen de Israelische aanvallen, was hun redenering. Nog nadeinend op de golven van hun ‘Goddelijke Overwinning’ demonstreerden ze door een tentenkamp op te zetten in Downtown, waar het overgrote gedeelte van de regeringsgebouwen te vinden is. Tegelijkertijd traden hun ministers af.

Het tentenkamp is er nu al bijna een jaar en is inmiddels bijna leeg, het openbare leven in Downtown (normaal gesproken ook een upscale winkel- en horeca gebied) ligt al die tijd al op z’n gat, en de oppositie is nog maar weinig dichterbij de vervulling van haar eisen gekomen. Daarom is deze presidentsverkiezing zo belangrijk: het is zowel een inzet in de onderhandelingen als de uitkomst ervan. Hoe zit dat nu precies?

Volgens de constitutie moet, om een nieuwe president te kiezen, in de eerste verkiezingsronde twee-derde van het parlement aanwezig zijn. Door het her en der opblazen van ministers en parlementsleden in het afgelopen jaar haalt de zittende regering die twee-derde meerderheid niet, en zal ze dus de (afgetreden) parlementsleden van de oppositie erbij moeten halen om tot een besluit te komen.

In de tweede ronde, echter, is slechts een ‘simpele meerderheid’ nodig (50%+1), en die heeft de regering (voorlopig) nog wel. Waar ze nu dus op zinnen, is een manier om de eerste ronde over te slaan en direct naar de tweede verkiezingsronde te gaan, en zodoende hun kandidaat aan de macht te helpen (dat ze het onderling niet eens kunnen worden over wie van hun meer dan 8 kandidaten het zou moeten worden, is niet echt bevorderlijk voor hun onderhandelingspositie, maar dat terzijde). De oppositie, ondertussen, blijft hameren op het feit dat zij nodig zijn voor de twee-derde meerderheid, en de regering dus met hen moet onderhandelen over een ‘consensus-kandidaat’. Iemand waar beide kanten het mee eens zijn, terwijl ze op dit moment zelfs weigeren met elkaar te praten. Tja.

De oppositie heeft aangeboden om in ruil voor een consensus-kandidaat het tentenkamp uit Downtown te verwijderen en hun eis voor een één-derde vertegenwoordiging in de regering (wat hen, tot grote schrik van de zittende regering en haar Westerse handlangers, een veto-recht zou opleveren) te laten vallen. Een president is immers flink wat waard! Die kan dan altijd nog het één of ander aanpassen in de machtsverhoudingen, zal de redenering wel zijn.

Zoals ik zei, de verkiezingsperiode is op 23 september ingegaan, maar de eerste bijeenkomst werd direct uitgesteld tot 23 oktober, omdat wel duidelijk werd dat de zittende regering en de oppositie elkaar liever afschieten dan de hand schudden, en men nog niet klaar was voor overleg. 23 oktober kwam en ging weer voorbij, en de vergadering werd uitgesteld tot 12 november (dit overigens onder leiding van de Sji’ietische spreker van het huis, die dondersgoed weet dat mocht een eerste ronde plaatsvinden zonder resultaat, de kansen van de oppositie compleet verkeken zijn, want dan kan de zittende regering de nieuwe president kiezen met de 50%+1 meerderheid).

De termijn van de huidige president loopt af op 23 november. Niemand verwacht enige vooruitgang in de onderhandelingen tot vlak vóór die tijd, want de belangrijkste troeven worden voor het laatst bewaard. Mocht het niet lukken een kandidaat te vinden die voor beide partijen aanvaardbaar is, dan ligt het scenario al klaar: twee overheden, waarvan één de zittende en één gevormd door de oppositie (en mogelijk een gewapende strijd tussen beide, zoals dat ook gebeurde in de laatste jaren van de burgeroorlog in 1989-1990).

Nou is het praktisch gezien al zo dat de regering voor de bevolking van het ene deel van het land zorgt en de oppositie voor die van het andere, maar dat is onderwerp voor een volgende bericht...

He who cast the first stone probably didn’t

The following is an article I found last year in the International Herald Tribune, written by Daniel Gilbert. At the time (24 July 2006), the war between Israel and Lebanon/Hezbollah had only been going on for a week, and the discussion in the international community seemed to focus mainly on the 'disproportonality' of Israel's attack. As a psychologist, Gilbert has a couple of very interesting insights on how people react to each other, and his sources are interesting psychological researches into how people rationalize their own and other's actions and reactions. I am copying his text here in its full length, because I would like to share his insights with you and the article itself is well-written en worth the read:

Long before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread, my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother's lap and my brother and I had what we called "the wayback" all to ourselves.

In the wayback, we'd lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually we'd fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases.

"But he hit me first," one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, "But he hit me harder."

It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, "He hit me first" provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral - unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.

After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words - like "retaliation" and "retribution" and "revenge" - whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.

That's why participants in every one of the globe's intractable conflicts - from Ireland to the Middle East - offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: Something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people's actions as the causes of what came later.

In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner's statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner's statements.

What seems like a grossly self- serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people's actions but not our own.

Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves - but that the opposite will be true of other people's reasons and other people's punches.

Examples aren't hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it's hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side's identical claim as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd- numbered punch that preceded it.

Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel's right to respond, but rather, its "disproportionate use of force." It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard.

Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer's fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer's finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer's finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer's finger. And so on.

The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other's fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other's touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating.

Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others - and to start trusting others themselves - there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of "Stumbling on Happiness."

Will they, or will they not?

It’s not like Lebanon doesn’t have enough problems of its own (problematic presidential elections and a faltering economy only the most obvious of them) to also worry about what is going on in the wider region. It’s just that whatever happens in the wider region will inevitably have consequences for the country. It is thus that a move like president Bush’s, declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, is slightly worrying. In itself, of course, it doesn’t mean that the United States will attack Iran. Yet this declaration will be very convenient if/when they do attack, because then no ‘martial law’ or ‘human rights treaty’ will be applicable to any Iranian soldiers captured by the United States, and they can be locked away for years without a process as is happening now in Guantanamo Bay, but this time without criticism of any foreign governments or human rights organizations – after all, they would lawfully be labeled as ‘terrorists’, not as ‘prisoners of war’ to whom rules and rights apply.

And there are other things happening in the States that are slightly worrying because of the possible consequences in the region. Once again it is not a remark like that of the French minister of foreign affairs, who flat out stated that ‘we have to prepare for the worst’ in regards to Iran (although words like these have a big impact here, where people know all too well what it is to be in a war and how little it can take to start one, and these kinds of threats are taken very seriously here – judging by the amount of phone calls I received right after the news where the French minister’s words were broadcast to urge me not to visit Iran as was my plan at the time). What is worrying are the much more ingenious ways in which Iran is depicted not only as evil, with its ‘undemocratic, fanatical (Islamic) regime’, but as indistinguishable from the ‘terrorists’ who attacked the United States on their own soil, on 11 September 2001.

Right after the attacks on the World Trade Centre, Osama Bin Laden was the big bad boy and Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Afghanistan with him. The country was invaded by the American army and its allies (the Dutch, unfortunately, among them), in the name of punishing those responsible for the crime. Yet a year later, in his speech to commemorate what happened on that fateful day in 2001, president Bush spoke of the attacks that “brought grief to [his] country”, but not even once did he mention the name of Osama Bin Laden. He did, however, speak of evil, of Saddam Hussein (whom he mentioned 8 times) and the Iraqi regime (brought up 15 times in his speech)*. This speech was just one of many with which he managed to slowly but surely blur the distinction between those who committed the crime of September 11 (or who, in American eyes, supported them), and generally unwanted Middle Eastern regimes, and was later followed by the invasion of Iraq.

Just a few weeks ago, Iranian president Ahmedinejad visited New York City (I’m still wondering how he managed to get a visa, because the application form clearly states that ‘being or having been part of a terrorist organization will probably influence the outcome of the visa-process’ or something similar, but that aside), where he was told he would not be allowed to visit Ground Zero, the site of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Supposedly, this was because his safety couldn’t be guaranteed. Yet in light of the above, it would not be farfetched to think that apparently, the accusations of ‘providing arms to Iraqi insurgents’ are not providing a big enough aura of evil to the Iranian regime, and thus a new, unspoken but very present, link between September 11 and an unwanted Middle Eastern regime is being made. What the consequences of the making of this connection will be, we can only wait and see, but the past does not bode well for the future.

* Source: Robert Fisk: The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2006)