February 14

Valentine's day in Beyrouth. Red balloons mushroom poisonously from the door of every florist's, and furry red teddy bears cluster in malevolent heart-clasping covens on the lintels of novelty shops. But there is strong competition for billboard dominance across the country, even against the brisk Valentine's trade in perfume and holidays, in this land with its unbridled adoration for kitsch and romance. Whirled about with the colours of Lebanon, the smiling monobrowed face of assassinated ex-President Rafik Hariri, shown in memorial black and white, gazes down at the land he tried to lead from thousands of giant posters across the country. Whatever his manifest faults, he sought to make Lebanon prosper, and believed in making a stand for its independence against Syria, an enterprise that probably led directly to his death by a thousand kilos of TNT on 14 February 2005. Outrage at the killing was the straw that broke the camel's back of Lebanon's post-war tolerance of an outside regime for the sake of peace. The Cedar Revolution grew out of this outrage, with hundreds of thousands gathering on the streets in an unprecedented show of Middle Eastern people power to demand the end of Syrian dominance, the departure of its mukhabarat spy networks, and the establishment of an international tribunal to investigate the murder of Hariri. The movement today is represented by the March 14 coalition in government.* Pro-Syrian supporters marched as well (today the March 8 coalition, largely defined by its orientation around Hezbollah), but in the end Lebanon got its sovereignty, at least on the surface, and without the use of military force, that its state could anyway never have marshalled against far more powerful Syria and its allies.

In the weeks leading up to the fifth anniversary of the assassination, Hariri's legacy has been fully Lebanized. The tribunal is pathetically stalled, Hariri Junior (now Prime Minister, though without much glory) has just got back from a fence-building trip to Damascus, and instead of a people's movement the party-sponsored billboards advertise the time and place of the gathering with corporate efficiency. Electronic advertisement screens in Martyr's Square layer the business entrepreneur Hariri's face with advertisements for imported luxury goods with a truly Lebanese flair for following an idea to its extremes: Bennetton, YSL, Hariri. H&M, La Senza, Hariri. The Revolution.

As well as Hariri on his own, there are also thousands of posters in the same colours of six “martyred” politicians, who have all in death lent their support to the visions of their successors. There is something terribly comical about the ranks of besuited self-importance and patrician expressions – look how many of our leaders we have killed! This means something that we can be proud of, that we should support! In the evenings after dark, you can walk the flyover joining Achrafieh with Hamra and look down on the Centre Ville, all in darkness but for Hariri's mosque and his face floodlit at ten different prime vantage points across several miles, glowing with incomprehensible significance, clean points of light that stand out from the shadowy city. Somehow, it doesn't feel real.

Zoukian expressions of apathy (I would NEVER go! Why would I? Why do you waste your time with politics? People just go there to have a day out. You can watch it on TV!) are not surprising, but more thoughtful responses can be found elsewhere. A friends who happens to be a Sunni Muslim reacts with horror to the idea that she might go. I don't believe in what they're doing, and I wouldn't want to increase the numbers. Brought up in Manchester, she hates the idea that people expect her to be a March 14 supporter simply because Hariri was a Sunni. After a Time Out interview, a gentle book club member shakes his head at cars full of pre-anniversary Future Movement supporters roaring past, blue flags with white stars fluttering from their windows (Rafik Hariri's party). You talk about a people's movement, but this is something united for a common goal – in Lebanon, it can never be. For a while maybe you have the idea of it, but in the end, people here have strong religious beliefs, and they will return to them. The strength of these beliefs is apparent in the reactions of yet others to news of the demonstration, even when they too marched in 2005. Oh, are they still doing that? It's all the right-wing Christians now.

The day before the demonstration, I walk through Martyr's Square. Podiums and loudspeakers and security, and tottering ranks of innumerable white chairs. This is a political rally, not an independence movement. Hariri's tomb is buzzing with important-looking figures and has a whole new layer of flower-ringed portraits of ever more preposterous size and impossibly saccharine colour schemes. For some reason, there is also a contingent of Armenian scouts with trombones and neckerchiefs and flags marked 1887. I walk away full of familiar half-comprehension; this is the untidy jigsaw of the landscape of Beyrouth, and I too am part of it, pale and diffident and confused but trying to understand, without much conviction that understanding is worthy or achievable.

So perhaps the Hariri phenomenon was something different, and perhaps it ended up a lot the same in the end, in its absorption into all Lebanon's other problems. But it was Hariri who occupied my MSc thesis, and it is through the prism of those months of reading that I learned to look at Lebanon. So on February 14, post-revolutionary lack of ardour notwithstanding, I shake off my Sunday morning hangover and emerge into the uncomfortable sunshine to roads in Zouk heaving with Lebanese Forces** cavalcades. The roads ululate with the tune the party's supporters hammer out on their car horns – perhaps I have been reading too much Fisk, but when I hear it all I can think of is bigotry and murder, and my skin crawls. As the bus take me towards town, the autostrade is lined with picnicking families hung about with LF flags. Everything is jammed and closed from Dora onwards, so I walk to Beyrouth down the main road, rather than my usual route through Bourj Hammoud. The sandwich-sellers are here from Trablous in the Muslim North, bearded men with metal carts where they grill sesame flatbreads with halloum under striped umbrellas. The roads are quiet with hundreds of people walking, and I am left in comparative peace, almost the only foreigner I see. What there are many of, however, are young Phalangists. The Kataeb party (“Phalange” in Arabic) is a prominent member of the March 14 alliance, and their leader Amine Gemayel will speak at the rally today. He is the brother of assassinated Bashir Gemayel, whose killing in 1982 triggered the Sabra & Chatila massacres in Beyrouth’s Palestinian camps. Old Pierre Gemayel, their father, based his party's vision on admiration for Hitler’s brownshirts as observed during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. This was only an aesthetic preference, they argue today. Their Wikipedia page states that they were only Nazis when absolutely necessary. As I walk past people my age carrying flags with the triangular Kataeb cedar logo, I realise how little understand these movements, and how little it will ever be in my power to. I am not a flag-carrier, or a strong believer, and the young Phalangists just make me feel ill and tired.

I enter Martyr’s square by the entrance next to the Kataeb headquarters, hung with a thirty-foot photo of the latest Gemayel to meet an unpleasant end – Pierre Amine in 2006. The square is heaving, and people wander to and fro or sit about in the sun smoking narghile, babies on their knees. Phones cut out and it takes me nearly an hour to locate Dina. People are sitting on top of traffic lights, on billboards, swinging from tall wire fences. Voices roar from the loudspeakers and I catch the predictable words – Syria, Lebanon, Lebanon is Arab, Lebanon is one, Hariri, Hariri, Hariri. Translations I read later don’t add much. I can see the big names via the screens as they speak – Amine Gemayel, Fouad Siniora, Saad Hariri, Samir Gea’Gea – the bread and butter of my understanding, but I can’t locate their figures beyond the crowds.

Dina and I take it all in for a while. A good 80% of the several thousand people in the square seem to be there as Lebanese Forces or Kataeb supporters, while the rest carry Future Movement or Lebanese national flags. Five years after the event and with March 14 at least superficially in power, the total absence of a March 8 presence shows how cruelly and fundamentally Lebanon is still divided. Each movement becomes a cariacature of itself, and while the leaders grit their teeth and shake hands for the time being, the motley barely-ex-militias that make up the coalitions harden and recruit and continue as they ever have, defining themselves by their religion as they choose, and as the state still divides and classifies them.

We stupidly try and cross the square at its busiest point, and get hemmed in by people cramming against the VIP area barriers. It is unpleasantly hot, and I suddenly realise that Dina and I have been encircled by a group of men, who stare straight ahead and close shoulders while their hands grasp at us. I turn and shout and they look all innocent. Desperate elbows and aggressive pushing are required to let us walk away, and I do not have the words or the presence of mind to express my disgust – and anyway, to whom? The male Lebanese security guards? We should have known better.

Edging through the crowds, I look up and see airy flocks of helium balloons in the Lebanese colours, floating away on the wind. Through a clearer patch of square, a fat young man in military fatigues runs, grasping the pole of a vast Lebanese Forces flag that has been altered for the preferences of his sub-faction – it is black, with a skull incorporated into the design. It ripples dramatically in his wake, and he seems aware of the arresting image he makes.

Later, we go to Hamra for coffee and computers and then dinner, in a world away where American students talk about how they saw the rally on TV. In the days after, the media that I can follow is indifferent in its assessment of the day, and all the published photos seem to have caught only pockets of demonstrators waving or wearing straightforward Lebanese flags and carrying posters of Hariri. I saw only unpleasant far-right parties and a message of independence broken and distorted – but then, I was not there in 2005. Why are people not more afraid for Lebanon – am I still too new, or are they jaded and comforted by the recent comparative peace? Is my perspective skewed because of the area where I live and the patterns I think I see? Or are Beyrouthian journalists equally compromised by their cosmopolitan lifestyles in easygoing Hamra? Perhaps I am reading too much into things, or perhaps they are neglecting internal conflicts while the external threats lie temporarily low. I still don’t know enough, it’s too big, too complicated, though also nothing to the import of other countries in the Middle East. Where do you start, when do you give up, and how can we ever speak of these things with any confidence?

* The original Cedar Revolution protests took place a month after Hariri's death; February 14 as a memorial day and associated independence movement came in 2006. March 14 is made up of assorted parties, mainly Christian and Sunni Muslim, but predictably the membership and rhetoric chops and changes according to the regional and domestic situation.

** A right-wing, largely Maronite Christian party, whose headquarters are just up the road from Librarie du Liban. Like most groups in Lebanon, they have a deeply unpleasant civil war history, and the leaders from that era still hold the positions of power. Their flag is a cedar tree in a circle in the Lebanese colours, and their cross a simple double outline with sharp points.