Testing ground

Lebanon has long acted as a regional laboratory, and will do so again in the aftermath of Annapolis, writes Hassan Nafaa*

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The situation in Lebanon has the whole region on tenterhooks. At midnight on 23 November President Emile Lahoud's term ended. There was no one to hand over the presidential mantle to because Lebanon's factions had not yet reached agreement on a candidate. Thus Lebanon entered a new phase in its mounting crisis. It has become a country without a president, without a functioning parliament and run by a government accused of illegitimacy since Shia ministers withdrew. It is a country in total political paralysis.

In the hope of sparing his country the perils of a political vacuum, Lahoud took advantage of his last hours in office to charge the Lebanese army, which still enjoys the respect of all parties, with the task of protecting national security. As a result of this order, all security agencies, including those under the Ministry of Interior, are now under the command of the army. Lahoud justified his decision on the grounds that the Lebanese crisis has entered an exceptional phase which calls for exceptional measures. However, the Lebanese government, which paid virtually no attention to Lahoud while he was in office, refuses to recognise the validity of this decision and now acts as though the powers of the president have passed to it by default. This cabinet, which lost five ministers who represented a large portion of the Lebanese population, feels that it, alone, is entitled to speak and act in the name of the executive on the grounds that it was brought into power by a parliamentary majority.

On the surface, the Lebanese crisis appears to be a constitutional or legal one. But that is only on the surface. Indeed, each side has rallied constitutional provisions and legal arguments to uphold its case. When pro-government forces claim the extension of Lahoud's term in office is illegitimate because it was a product of Syrian intervention and took place under the Syrian occupation, the opposition counters that there are precedents. Other presidents had their terms extended under the same conditions and the extensions were approved by large parliamentary majorities which included political forces that later objected to Lahoud's extension. When the government of Fouad Al-Siniora maintains that it is the sole legitimate governing body because it derives its mandate from a popularly elected parliamentary majority, the opposition responds that the parliamentary majority the government boasts of was the fruit of an electoral coalition that no longer exists and the product of an electoral law that all agree no longer reflects political, social and demographic realities. The opposition further argues that no government in Lebanon can rest its legitimacy on a parliamentary majority alone. Any government must be representative of Lebanon's major sects, which the current government can no longer claim since the resignation of Shia ministers almost a year ago.

The Lebanese crisis is not a constitutional one; it is one of consensus or, more accurately, the lack thereof. The major sects must be represented in government in accordance with a charter that takes precedence even over the constitution. Lebanon is ruled by consensus, not by constitution. This consensus has broken down and crisis will be impossible to solve until it is revived.

This is not Lebanon's first crisis and won't be its last. The country has had far more severe crises, so severe that it had to call in international and regional peacekeeping forces. It had a 15-year long civil war. But the current crisis is different in at least two respects: the nature and extent of foreign involvement and the shape of the current balance of domestic forces.

As a general rule Lebanese crises have been sparked by internal problems of which regional and international parties rushed to take advantage. Today the reverse is true. It is clear that developments and parties outside Lebanon are the prime instigators of domestic discord. Whereas in the past the balance of domestic powers was relatively fluid, today one domestic force, Hizbullah, stands out as capable of settling a military confrontation, should one break out. Indeed, this very factor may well serve as a deterrent against the outbreak of another civil war -- that is unless regional and international powers set their minds on eliminating Hizbullah.

Lebanon remains, as it has always been, the Arab world in miniature. It mirrors all its strengths and weaknesses, and all its contradictions. It has often been used as a laboratory for testing ways to manage these contradictions. Because the Lebanese form of government, as former prime minister Salim Al-Hoss described it, offers "a lot of freedom and a little democracy without translating its liberties into effective democratic practice", it comes as little surprise that Lebanon which successfully resisted Israel, a feat that has long defied the most powerful Arab nation, found itself unable to protect itself against that other Lebanon, with its sectarian feudalism and conniving self-serving politicians who will do anything to protect their fiefdoms and advance personal interests, even at the expense of national ones.

As events unfold in Lebanon we must fear not just for that country but for the entire region. To justify the persistence of government bias on the grounds of constitutional legitimacy is a grave mistake. Constitutional legitimacy is something that is embodied in an entire political order, of which the cabinet is only a part which should work in harmony with other parts, notably the presidency and the legislature. It is useful to recall, here, that over the past year the Siniora government undertook several actions that respected legal scholars regard as flagrant breaches of the constitution. It refused to fill the vacancies in the Constitutional Council, thus obstructing the functioning of this authority which has the power to overturn laws passed by the government that it deems unconstitutional. It assumed the authority to sign an agreement with the UN over forming an international tribunal to investigate the assassination of Rafik Al-Hariri in spite of the provision of constitutional Article 52, which empowers the president of the republic to negotiate and sign international treaties in collaboration with the prime minister. Thirdly, it convened important cabinet sessions in the absence of representatives of the largest religious community in the country, the Shias, an act that conflicts with paragraph five of constitutional article 65 which posits interdenominational consensus as the foundation of the Lebanese political order.

These, and other actions, suggest that the Lebanese government, which now claims the right to combine its powers with those of the president, intends to impose its will, single- handedly, on a country in a potentially explosive state of political imbalance. Not only was this government brought into power under an electoral law that all agree must be amended, it no longer reflects the mood and balances that existed when it came into power. That this government has refused to hold elections in the twelve months since the withdrawal of Shia ministers is an implicit acknowledgement that the "historic" parliamentary majority upon which it rests its claim to stay in power is now history.

The mounting polarisation in Lebanon is not sectarian in nature, however much some parties in Lebanon and elsewhere want to push it in that direction. The camp "loyal" to the Siniora government includes Lebanese Muslims, but not all Muslims, and Lebanese Christians, but not all Christians. The opposition, which includes Hizbullah, Amal and the national movement led by Michel Aoun, also includes other national and Arab national movements and represents most of the Shia and significant sectors of the Muslim and Christian populations. Whereas the Siniora camp accuses the opposition of having precipitated the crisis by obstructing an international investigation into the assassination of Hariri and thus of working on behalf of Syria which is alleged to have carried out the assassination, the opposing camp holds that the government takes its orders from the American ambassador to Lebanon and that the Siniora cabinet has been reduced to a puppet in the service of American and Israeli schemes for the region.

Such charges underline how the Lebanese crisis is integrally connected with the region's other crises, notably those in Iraq and Palestine, and how it plays out will be, to a large measure, contingent on developments on those two fronts. Most immediately, the results of the Annapolis "meeting" will have a profound and direct impact on the Lebanese situation.

By the time Al-Ahram Weekly reaches the newsstands that conference will probably have met and adjourned. But even writing in advance it is possible to draw a number of conclusions. First, that so many Arab parties have decided to go to Annapolis reflects the extent and nature of the American pressure that has been exerted on them. Clearly, their decisions to attend were based more on a desire to avoid the inevitable blame for the failure of the conference than on a belief that the conference will succeed, or are even worth the effort. Secondly, the concrete conditions for achieving a significant breakthrough in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict simply do not exist. The reason for this is very simple: the US and Israeli positions on final status issues have not changed one iota. Until they do, is not even a glimmer of an acceptable just solution. Thirdly, since the US administration cannot allow the conference to end in a resounding failure, it will do its utmost to project a success of some sort. Most likely, it will churn out some smoke in the form of rhetoric to the effect that the conference succeeded in setting into motion a peace process that will never be derailed again.

The Palestinian Authority may be keen on playing a game of this sort, given that it has no other cards in its hand beyond entering into a negotiating process it believes will support its position against Hamas. However, this does not apply to Syria, which will accept no less than the resumption of negotiations over the Golan Heights at the point they left off seven years ago. One cannot help but to wonder, in this regard, whether Israel is ready for such talks or whether it is merely holding out a lure in order to draw Damascus away from Tehran as part of preparations for a military assault against Iran. Certainly, whether or not Israel agrees to recommence negotiations on the Golan Heights is a major test of the seriousness of its desire to resolve the Middle East conflict. If Israel does demonstrate such seriousness, its decision will reflect itself immediately on the situation in Lebanon. On the one hand, it will make Syria more willing to work to reduce the level of tensions in Lebanon. On the other, it will put Syrian-Iranian relations to the test. If these relations pass that test, this will also work in favour of reconciliation in Lebanon. The US and Israel appear bent on isolating Syria from Iran and any resumption of Israeli- Syrian negotiations will spark Syrian-Iranian tensions. These, in turn, will inevitably play out in Lebanon.

It is still too early to predict how the aftermath of Annapolis will impact on Lebanon. That it will is beyond a doubt.

* The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.