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El Blog!, Touppi's Super Eleet Blog.
Tuomas Toivonen
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Fri, 09 May 2008
Having been very busy the last couple of days I completely missed the events in Beirut until checking my blog feeds late last night. Call me naive, but I had not expected events to come to this. Perhaps I had been lulled at thinking the never ending crisis to elect a president would simply continue. And that the Hariri tribunal would somehow be a positive force in breaking the gridlock. Naturally that was not to be.
Nevertheless the latest events simply feel very surreal. I am ashamed to admit, but part of the charm of Beirut for me has always been its tumultuous past. Having the odd derelict building and having walls pockmarked by bullets is romantic in a way, but only if you can believe that its what has been and that now it is different, that the future (no pun intended) is bright. When I visited Lebanon after the July 2006 war a lot of that "charm" wasn't there anymore: the war had become real. And even more now reading that yesterday Hamra Street had become one of the battle lines with Hariri militia on one side and the HA and Amal on the other. With my regular haunt, the Hotel Mayflower, a couple of blocks on the then-Hariri side of Hamra Street, I had hard time believing the events. This morning, of course, the news reports were that the HA have overrun West Beirut and that, according to some reports, they are taking control of many government offices.
What I find even more unreal is the speed at which Beirutis in the contested areas adapted to old habits of survival during urban warfare. Bloggers wrote about discussing the militia movements and locations of snipers on Facebook's chat. A lot of the blog posts reminded me of Jean Said Makdisi's book "Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir". Not as dramatic as e.g. the siege of West Beirut in 1982, but it is one thing to read a book about events twenty five years in the past and then reading about similar events being blogged more or less as they happen.
Hopefully there is a way out of the crisis. Not that I see one though. The HA have effected a Gaza in West Beirut and have little interest in seeing it reversed now that it is fait accompli. Rather their interest is to leverage the new status quo to elect a president and institute a government on their terms. Effectively this is a huge win for the Syrian regime and overall I would have to think a fatal blow for the tribunal. Assad couldn't break Lebanon over Hariri Sr. and Jumblatt's heads, but with the HA he is doing exactly that with Beirut and Hariri Jr. At the moment it seems that the LF and Phalange are reluctant to step in and help their March 14 compatriots. And the HA are doing what they can to not provoke them. Aoun, of course, is most pleased. No, I really can't see a way out. Every escalation since the July 2006 war has pushed up the ante in the HA's favor. Ans they've kept at it steadily. Ultimately it is Lebanon as a proxy in regional conflicts all over again.