Five months later, then, and images have resolved themselves into stories, ignorance into more complicated ignorance. The winners of the election are yet to form a government, and seem unlikely to in the very near future. A service driver laughed when I asked what he thought of the delay and said “Nobody cares! We have no power. Iran, US, they play a game with us. If they form the cabinet, it makes no difference.” This unpleasant gridlock is yet another tableau in the extraordinary gallery of uncertainty, insecurity and vacuum that make up Lebanon's political track record. I read and I listen and I wonder. My Maronite children’s book enclave is not politically minded, though I can imagine it shaken to fury like an otherwise docile hive of bees. “I hate politics” is the most common refrain, reminding the eager Masters graduate to put her Fisk on the back burner and go along with life as it is lived, and to learn that living with war and nepotism and a fascinating array of dangerous neighbours can just as well induce passivity as engagement. There are plenty of political fireworks to be had – not to have involvement demanded of you is a refuge as well as a dangerous invitation to apathy. It is also a reminder to look around you with eyes that are able to hold things precious, away from the evidence of grinding venality and flashpoints of violence that are all too easily had, it seems, in all places and at all times.
What, then, of those elections? Ignorance, distillation, synopsis and error, but here it is.
To one side of Lebanon is the sea, and beyond it the promise of power and protection. The promise of the Vatican, of Paris, the call of a cooler civilization. To the other side, mountains and valleys and deserts wheel away under the sky to differently powerful neighbours and their visions. Both bring their ideologies, their demands, their conflicts. Both have their peoples, their enemies, their adherents within Lebanon. This is far more than just a political simplification, though it is that too. For centuries the mountain Maronites have sought protection from France, the Druze their own warlike strongholds, the Sunni and Shia on the plains the support of stronger states further East. In between flounder the persecuted Armenians, the Greek Orthodox, the vestigial Jews, and so on. Even those who hate politics and who are able to live reasonably safe from its demands live their lives defined by the particular strain of Lebanon that they grew up in. There are families in the North who speak and read French better than Arabic, and who do not consider themselves Arabs. There are villages in the Chouf whose gates are painted Hezbollah yellow and welcome the visitor in peace – flanked by pillars in the shape of Katyusha rockets. There is my boss, who has a private zoo, and there are 30,000 Palestinians still here fifty years later, without rights or land or a state. There are many Lebanons, their leaders equally self-serving, their comparatively liberal coexistence – or lack of it – across a patch of land half the size of Wales part of the magic and the madness that makes up a nation.
When former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was killed in February 2005 and the Lebanese rose up in protest against their Syrian occupiers, they did not do it as one nation. The dividing lines were not dead under Syrian control, to reassert themselves after its retreat. They were the encompassing warp and weft of the story, that shaped the war, the Syrian departure, and that are the form, still, of politics in the aftermath. The dates of the anti-Syrian, pro-independence, pro-Western protection 2005 protests have given their name to the March 14 coalition running in the 2009 elections, led by Hariri's son Saad. The pro-Syrian forces also marched, their vision one of Lebanon as part of the larger Arab project. They are largely marshalled by Hezbollah, with their strong support from Iran, and they are the March 8 coalition today.
In between independence and elections, the 2006 war against Israel was a military and psychological success for Hezbollah, but also brought domestic accusations that they inflicted a traumatic and unnecessary conflict on Lebanon, and the long-term mistrust of their Iranian supporters who did not benefit directly from a war which revealed the extent of their military empowerment of Hezbollah, something they would have preferred to keep quiet until such a time as they had more to gain from its implementation. Hezbollah today remains militarily far stronger than any other force in Lebanon, including the national army, and have a strong support base in the South and other areas (not just Shia) where they provide excellent social services and development work that the government cannot, and as such broadening their appeal beyond mere ideology.
The 2009 election was, then, an expression of complex local, regional and international interests, as ever in Lebanon. When March 14 achieved a substantial victory this June, sighs of relief were drawn in the West. But, what five months of negotiations and resignations and re-appointments and side-switching have amply pointed out is that elections are neither the beginning nor the end of the story, but only the most public stage – a burlesque of democracy, a distracting puppet show, a figleaf woven from smoke and mirrors – in a game of power that depends far more on the balance of external interests than on the wishes of the Lebanese people, insofar as they can be considered a cohesive people at all, with the chance to make decisions that will please and profit more than one group at a time. The labyrinthine complexity of Lebanese voting is not as important as the months of candidate list-fixing that preceded the election days, and the extraordinary sums that were lavished on supporters both domestic and diasporic. Whole planes’-worth of tickets were bought out by March 14 to get their numbers up through Lebanese citizens from France and elsewhere. Added to this, record-breakingly creative and ubiquitous domestic advertising made this the most expensive election in history, relative to Lebanon's size. But, the real business still began after the election. March 14's winning margin denied the opposition veto power in parliament, and so the dance began.
Five months later and the Lebanon’s “consensus democracy” (as opposed to a democracy which implies actual winners and losers according to the choices of the population at the polls) has made a gruesome dummy of the idea of the people’s choice, even more than the pre-election manoeuvring. A cabinet formula has been proposed of 15-10-5, with the greatest number of bloc seats going to March 14, the next to March 8, and the remainder to smaller parties. But if March 8 can swing their allies into enough seats, they will have de facto veto power. The latest dramas centre around Christian minister Michel Aoun, the former Lebanese army commander and opposition leader who was sent into exile when he attempted a “war of liberation” against the Syrian regime. In the fifth month of parliamentary negotiations, already compromised by his insistence that his son-in-law Gebran Bassil get to keep the valuable telecommunications portfolio,* he added another heavy gobbett of greed to the mix, demanding a sixth portfolio to add to the five he had already been assigned. Why not just sling him out, refuse the ridiculous pantomime? Because in order to maintain a strong presence in his post-exile Lebanon, Aoun chameleoned into the good books of Hezbollah, and as such has powerful friends. Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze and scion of their greatest family, known as “The Windmill” for his astonishing ability to whirl with the direction of the political wind, ran with March 14 but defected after the election and thus remains an unknown quantity. Which way will he vote over crucial issues in Parliament, who can count on his support? These are the lines of greed and power that Saad Hariri must tread as he attempts to form his cabinet, and his CV largely made up of managing one of his Dad's soap factories in Saudi Arabia.
Thus, the many Lebanons shoulder up against each other with equal bull-headedness, and the people over the sea and those across the deserts weigh up their options with more or less concern for the peoples whose lives their goals sweep into tragedy. Every week in Lebanon there is an incident – rockets into Israel, sectarian stabbing, Hezbollah detection of Israeli spy devices – that sets the media shuddering and humming and nervous chatters running from house to house. No-one forgets the smallness of the events that proved to be the forerunners of the civil war; today's spasms of fear are challenges to the national attempt to forget that the ingredients have not so much changed as shifted, that Lebanon is always only a few bad decisions away from war, that no one group controls this decision-making ability, and that the strongest parties in the mix are external.
What is certain, for now, is that nothing exists in Lebanese politics that cannot be manipulated, reneged upon, acquired, or u-turned around. The shadowy bulk of moody alligators slumber everywhere underneath the choppy waters of peace, barely bothering to conceal themselves. What is, perhaps, depressingly certain is that the new government, if it is formed and if it can keep the peace, has already lost its chance, if there ever was one, to work from a platform of democratic majority and domestic trust. Even further from reach recedes a strong sense of nationhood and independence in the face of Lebanon's ravenous neighbours and a nervous, skeptical (Western) international community who have Iran baying in their ears and whose eyes look very much askance at Hezbollah as an agent of Iranian interests.
A real peace in Lebanon – the millions of tourists, economic flourishes, hedonistic parties, all speak of its possibility. But the daily headlines, the soldiers with their AK-47s who you know have no power compared to externally-armed militias, the dull, aching reality of history, politics and region all speak otherwise. Iran, Syria, Iraq, Israel – everything that happens there is reported here with a terrible urgency. The UN meets to discuss Hezbollah and perspectives swing and turn in your head as you try to rationalise Ban Ki-moon's seemingly banal statements with what they might really mean here in local headlines and military action and the lives of your friends, who simply hate politics and want it to leave them alone. They have had enough bridges bombed already. For now, no-one seems to want a war, but there are never any guarantees. Especially not here.
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* Telecommunications being, naturally, coterminous with “control over spy networks”.
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