Lebanon

Despite its relatively small size, Lebanon has historically played a significant role in the Middle East. Nevertheless its current role is ambiguous as long as there is a reasonable doubt as to whether it is in a process of disintegration or of returning to its prominent role.

The election of Michel Sleiman in 2008 was a positive sign and developments continue to be positive despite the rash of recent assassinations, which I discussed under my discussion of Syria but which don’t necessarily have only to do with Syria. The inherent instability in the current situation derives from an unstable history that commentators such as Condoleezza Rice and governments such as the US Bush administration and Israel’s have shown an interest in perpetuating. The most violent period in recent times embraced in some sense by such people was the civil war lasting from 1975 or 1976 to around 1990. A real understanding of the causes of the instability may contribute to resolution of many of the issues independently of the self-interested analyses outside the country or may in fact contribute to the disintegration of Lebanon as a state.

Geographically, Lebanon consists of the dichotomy of a somewhat rural and mountainous region and the remainder of the country including the coastal cities with their hinterlands and the southern valley region, which might best be termed Syria-Palestine.

Lebanon has been a distinct state since around 1920. Maronite Christians played a large role in this distinction coming about, having been concentrated in the Mount Lebanon area since the 16th Century. Together with the French, they proposed the formation of the “Greater Lebanon” which developed at first under the French Mandatory authorities. Ideologues sought to establish a Lebanese sense of nationality referring to the civilisations of the area included that of the coastal Phoenician trader and merchant settlements and their Canaanite cousins as well as the local Persian, Greek, Roman-Byzantine and Hellenistic (c. 400 BCE to 400 CE) forms.

It was ironic that those who promoted this coastal, mercantile and sea going identity tended to be the Maronite mountain dwellers. The other irony was that only the first two cultures were actually indigenous and the other groups didn’t even engage in major colonisation over the ‘Lebanese’ region they rather ruled over at various times. This ‘historical heritage’ was rather retro-fitted to contemporary Maronite aspirations than historically real and even at this time the Maronites were only a bare majority (if that) of the population of what then became Lebanon.

From the beginning of the history of Christianity, various forms of it (and not just the Maronite form now in communion with the Catholic Church of Rome) and Islamic rule (from 641 CE) have had major impacts on the region now called Lebanon. The Antiochene Patriarch over the region was formally associated with the Eastern Roman Empire centred at Constantinople/Byzantium before the early Islamic conquests of the 7th Century as one of the five patriarchs of the early church (the others being based at Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Jerusalem). The local church was divided, however, between (at least) Melkites (named for the Arabic for king as it was the local ruler’s religion), Monophysites and Maronites. The Melkite church later (in the 16th Century) further divided itself into the original followers of the Eastern (Orthodox) rite and the newer group supportive of a Roman rite such as the one already adopted by the Maronites.

The Maronites were the earliest movement of the Roman Catholic rite (inspired by a 5th Century monk, Mar (Saint) Maroun, hence their name, but actually begun as a rural monastic movement in the 7th Century called Bayt (House) Maroun). Inspired by divisions between the bishops of rural and urban regions, the Maronites actually first named their own Patriarch of Antioch in around 600 CE while the movement was in its infancy. Antioch is now part of southern Turkey, as I’ve mentioned, and the Maronite patriarch now resides in Lebanon (most of the other four current Patriarchs of Antioch now reside in Damascus as mentioned before under Syria).

While the Maronites were originally more geographically spread, they finally came to be associated especially with the Mount Lebanon area. Under the Ottomans, they certainly came to be the majority in that small region and Maronite dynasties occasionally formally ruled locally in the Ottoman period. Alternatively, Druze dynasties were also permitted to rule occasionally in the local region. This Ottoman form of apportioning office to the two groups seems to have crystallised an oppositional style of identity politics in Lebanon based on religion from an early period that has persisted until today with the aid of continual reinforcement in external decisions concerning Lebanon.

The upshot was the Maronite idea of a Greater Lebanon beyond the Mount Lebanon area extending over the territory that became Lebanon constitutionally largely under confessional Maronite control. It is also part of the Maronite narrative today that many Maronites preferred at the time to concentrate on the independence of Mount Lebanon rather than on extending their control over further areas (where the majority were not Maronite). Maronite delegations proposed an independent Mount Lebanon to Faysal in the period before he was deposed as King at Damascus by the French. There was also naturally Sunni opposition to the idea as Sunnis had generally controlled the areas (now slated for Maronite control) for extended periods. The Druze and Greek Orthodox populations in the Mount Lebanon area were also generally opposed to the largely French-inspired Greater Lebanon.

Especially once the powers of Mount Lebanon extended their control to ‘Greater’ Lebanon, groups besides the Maronites and Druze became significant. Both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims and other Christian groups were constitutionally included in the confessional power structure of the expanded polity. Today Hassan Nasrullah of the main Shi’a party, Hizbullah, and other local Muslims, having become inured to the idea of a separate Lebanon, still require that it include them with justice in proportion to their changed relative proportion there demographically. As the fertility rate of especially Shi’a Muslims has evidently been higher than that of Maronite Christians (who have also had a higher emigration rate), the Lebanese ‘solution’ has been to cease the conduct of regular censuses (the last was conducted in 1930 under the mandatory authorities when the Maronites were still a (bare) majority in ‘Greater’ Lebanon.

Formally, seventeen sects are ironically celebrated in the Lebanese constitutional morass that has produced and continues to produce both significant political tension and military mayhem in recent times. Nevertheless, cooperation across confessional lines over the last century has also been a feature of the system and this has not often been noticed by the Western media, cooperation being apparently less newsworthy or less in keeping with a certain dialogue being promoted.

The three notable periods of difficulty, however, were the three main civil war eras – one in the 19th and two in the 20th Century. The Druze and Maronites especially have actually generally lived relatively peacefully together in the Mount Lebanon region since the 11th Century with a fair degree of intermarriage among the patrician families. Today we have access to histories of the region produced from the 16th Century by both Druze and Maronite historians and can nevertheless recognise the slight confessional biases of the authors from those times on. Ottoman Turkish policy in the region was to promote the idea of sharing between the two groups but it is open to question what this Turkish idea meant: sharing as in a meal when a dish is placed in the centre of the table for common consumption or as in when a cake is divided to be separately consumed. There is a separate word in Arabic for each of these forms of sharing but the second form has perhaps unfortunately been the preferred form of ‘sharing’ in Lebanon over its recent history.

The first of the modern struggles in Mount Lebanon was at first precipitated by the power vacuum that followed the withdrawal of Muhammad ‘Ali from the area in 1840. The Druze/Maronite strife which followed was ‘settled’ by a sharing arrangement determined under Ottoman auspices. The strife was essentially tribal (and in particular based in the conflicting interests of ambitious aspirant ruling families) rather than based purely on religion. ‘Ali’s rule had been especially favourable to the Christian families after a long period of relative Druze dominance and the settlement of qa’imaqamiyyatan division was the Ottoman replacement. The result of the failure of this system was the more infamous civil war of 1861 after which the area was made a single Mutasarrifiyya under a non-Lebanese Christian Mutasarrif and the indirect control of the Wali of Damascus.

Europeans were interested by this time in both taking sides in such conflicts and interfering directly in Ottoman affairs if possible (and did). Despite European armies and missionaries, however, the half century between this civil war and the time of the First World War was relatively peaceful. During that latter war, however, the French and British saw their chance and agreed basically to divide the Middle East between them in the infamous and then at least semi-secret Sykes-Picot agreement.

The French Mandate following the First World War, of which Lebanon was a part, was the result of that agreement and the Allied defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The French were fond of the idea of le Grand Liban and thus extended the territory of Mount Lebanon to incorporate other parts of what is now Lebanon. This new entity was also promised independence in 1920 but true independence was first seriously proposed on the French side in 1943 and finally achieved in 1946 under the auspices of the Free French victors of the Second World War.

In the years that intervened between the promise and the reality a partly unwritten and arguably partly self-contradictory ‘national charter’ and ‘national pact’ became the sectarian Lebanese constitution which has not been actually superseded and which effectively provided for, in order of precedence and political power, a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister and a Shi’a speaker of the parliament. The Druze tended to be given the senior military offices and Defence Department positions. Various ministries also tended to be made provinces of specific ethnic and religious groups by constitutional convention.

The sectarian and intra-sect rivalries inherently brought into sharp relief by such an arrangement of patrician families regardless of the feelings at the grassroots were reminiscent of the problems of the previous ‘sharing’ arrangement of the Qa’imaqamiyyatan era. In the period immediately following the final constitutional negotiations in the 1940s, the Sunni grassroots, for example, preferred a Druze leader to their own leadership, which had brokered the final constitutional arrangements.

‘Balancing’ of power in this way proved a precarious business. Even within sects, disunity was a product of this system, only mitigated by sectarian enmities that saw the sects unite under certain patrician families at certain times. The changed demographic system alone deals out problems for any system so welded to such a demographic basis for sharing power. The unwillingness to conduct a census for nearly a century is indicative of the difficulties foreseen to be inherent in regularly conducting such tests of the status quo ante system. It is believed, for example, that the Shi’a, who have been allocated the least important of the three major political offices, are now rightly aggrieved as they now form the majority of Lebanese.

The second modern civil war occurred in 1958. It was comparatively minor, over issues of national identity and followed by the rule of a former general, General Shihab, and reforms. The background to the conflict was the Cold War, the takeover of neighbouring Syria by Nasser in 1958 and Nasserism more generally. The tradition of a former general’s rule and reforms ending a period of strife now appears entrenched in Lebanon having occurred at least twice since. General Sleiman’s recent presidency was arguably in that tradition although reforms have perhaps been relatively slight. Certainly the announcement of his presidency appears to have calmed a recent period of Lebanese strife following the central bombings and violence in the north.

The third modern civil war began in 1975 or 1976 and lasted until 1990. The war was complicated also by Israeli invasions: in 1978 (when the South Lebanese Army was formed under Begin) and in 1982 (when Sharon as Israeli Defence Minister famously gave cover to massacres by a Christian militia group as he sought PLO operatives). The US also had some somewhat unwelcome but possibly stabilising involvement in Lebanon in the period.

All of these wars had similar causes: social justice and equitable ‘sharing’ was sought in each case. Despite withdrawing from each of its first two sorties into central Lebanon (during the third war), Israel remained in Southern Lebanon and finally retreated from all but the disputed Shebaa Farms region in the year 2000 once the cost of the attempt at continued occupation (and re-occupation of central Lebanon) was realised. Israel’s attempted return to (at least) the south in 2006 was also a failure. Thus Israel is regarded by many as having been effectively forced from Lebanon by the Lebanese on three or four occasions in around twenty years without appreciable assistance from any actual Lebanese government force.

Hizbollah was the force that ultimately made the cost of occupation (of the south especially) too great for Israel (although other resistance forces preceded it) and its current leader, Hassan Nasrallah, remains active in Lebanese politics. Today’s parliamentary blocs are complex because of all these internal and external ruptures and convoluted religious, political, ethnic, tribal, local and family histories and loyalties. There are two basic blocs, however. Michel Aoun has been aligned with Hizbollah, Amal and the Communists. Incidentally, the Communists are made up mainly of Shi’a, probably because of the unfairly lowly constitutional position of that majority ethno-religious group. The Future Bloc is made up of the son of Rafiq al-Hariri, Siniora, Christians, Druze and some Sunni Muslims.