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Rupert Cornwell: This is a gamble of massive effrontery to the voters, the politicians and even the generals
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Robert Fisk
So into the graveyard of Iraq, George Bush, commander-in-chief, is to send another 21,000 of his soldiers. The march of folly is to continue...
Published: 11 January 2007
There will be timetables, deadlines, benchmarks, goals for both America and its Iraqi satraps. But the war against terror can still be won. We shall prevail. Victory or death. And it shall be death.
President Bush's announcement early this morning tolled every bell. A billion dollars of extra aid for Iraq, a diary of future success as the Shia powers of Iraq still to be referred to as the "democratically elected government" march in lockstep with America's best men and women to restore order and strike fear into the hearts of al-Qa'ida. It will take time oh, yes, it will take years, at least three in the words of Washington's top commander in the field, General Raymond Odierno this week but the mission will be accomplished.
Mission accomplished. Wasn't that the refrain almost four years ago, on that lonely aircraft carrier off California, Bush striding the deck in his flying suit? And only a few months later, the President had a message for Osama bin Laden and the insurgents of Iraq. "Bring 'em on!" he shouted. And on they came. Few paid attention late last year when the Islamist leadership of this most ferocious of Arab rebellions proclaimed Bush a war criminal but asked him not to withdraw his troops. "We haven't yet killed enough of them," their videotaped statement announced.
Well, they will have their chance now. How ironic that it was the ghastly Saddam, dignified amid his lynch mob, who dared on the scaffold to tell the truth which Bush and Blair would not utter: that Iraq has become "hell" .
It is de rigueur, these days, to recall Vietnam, the false victories, the body counts, the torture and the murders but history is littered with powerful men who thought they could batter their way to victory against the odds. Napoleon comes to mind; not the emperor who retreated from Moscow, but the man who believed the wild guerrilleros of French-occupied Spain could be liquidated. He tortured them, he executed them, he propped up a local Spanish administration of what we would now call Quislings, al-Malikis to a man. He rightly accused his enemies Moore and Wellington of supporting the insurgents. And when faced with defeat, Napoleon took the personal decision "to relaunch the machine" and advanced to recapture Madrid, just as Bush intends to recapture Baghdad. Of course, it ended in disaster. And George Bush is no Napoleon Bonaparte.
No, I would turn to another, less flamboyant, far more modern politician for prophecy, an American who understood, just before the 2003 launch of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, what would happen to the arrogance of power. For their relevance this morning, the words of the conservative politician Pat Buchanan deserve to be written in marble:
"We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the 'On to Berlin' bravado with which French poilus and British tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neoconservatives predict ... For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world ...
"The one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon... We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before."
But George Bush dare not see these armies of the past, their ghosts as palpable as the phantoms of the 3,000 Americans let us forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis already done to death in this obscene war, and those future spirits of the dead still living amid the 20,000 men and women whom Bush is now sending to Iraq. In Baghdad, they will move into both Sunni and Shia "insurgent strongholds" as opposed to just the Sunni variety which they vainly invested in the autumn because this time, and again I quote General Odierno, it is crucial the security plan be " evenhanded". This time, he said, "we have to have a believable approach, of going after Sunni and Shia extremists".
But a "believable approach" is what Bush does not have. The days of even-handed oppression disappeared in the aftermath of invasion.
"Democracy" should have been introduced at the start not delayed until the Shias threatened to join the insurgency if Paul Bremer, America's second proconsul, did not hold elections just as the American military should have prevented the anarchy of April 2003. The killing of 14 Sunni civilians by US paratroopers at Fallujah that spring set the seal on the insurgency. Yes, Syria and Iran could help George Bush. But Tehran was part of his toytown "Axis of Evil", Damascus a mere satellite. They were to be future prey, once Project Iraq proved successful. Then there came the shame of our torture, our murders, the mass ethnic cleansing in the land we said we had liberated.
And so more US troops must die, sacrificed for those who have already died. We cannot betray those who have been killed. It is a lie, of course. Every desperate man keeps gambling, preferably with other men's lives.
But the Bushes and Blairs have experienced war through television and Hollywood; this is both their illusion and their shield.
Historians will one day ask if the West did not plunge into its Middle East catastrophe so blithely because not one member of any Western government except Colin Powell, and he has shuffled off stage ever fought in a war. The Churchills have gone, used as a wardrobe for a prime minister who lied to his people and a president who, given the chance to fight for his country, felt his Vietnam mission was to defend the skies over Texas.
But still he talks of victory, as ignorant of the past as he is of the future.
Pat Buchanan ended his prophecy with imperishable words: "The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
The Bush plan, and the question of withdrawal
What Bush says
20,000 troops increase
Mistake of not sending sufficient troops must be rectified. Troops stabilise Baghdad and reinforce Anbar province, on condition that Iraqis take on Shia militias
$1bn reconstruction aid
Fresh funds will help create jobs and stimulate economy to show Iraqis there can be a peace dividend, and friendly Middle East states should help out too
Pullout
US commitment to Iraq is not open-ended but no timetable for troop withdrawal, even though US troops are expected to hand control to Iraqis by November
What Congress says
20,000 troops increase
Troop build-up is a mistake. House expected to vote on increase, Senate legislation forces Bush to seek congressional approval but neither move could block troop deployment
$1bn reconstruction aid
Don't throw good money after bad. US has squandered billions since the invasion and Democrats plan investigation. Millions of dollars 'overpaid' by Pentagon to Iraq contractors
Pullout
Bush has not learnt the lesson of November's mid-term elections which gave Democrats control of the House and Senate on the platform of a phased withdrawal from Iraq
What Baker says
20,000 troops increase
Up to 20,000 military trainers and troops embedded into and supporting Iraqi army, while combat troops drawn down to avoid increase in total numbers
$1bn reconstruction aid
US economic assistance should be boosted to $5bn per year. US should take anti-corruption measures by posting oil contracts on the internet for outside scrutiny
Pullout
All US combat troops not needed for force protection should be out of Iraq by the first quarter of 2008
Likely outcome
20,000 troops increase
Escalation of conflict
Money will be wasted, with official corruption in Iraq said to drain $7bn a year
Pullout
Troop surge could disguise 'cut and run' depending on the circumstances in both Iraq and America
Showing posts with label Fisk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fisk. Show all posts
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Robert Fisk: Banality and barefaced lies
Robert Fisk
Here in America, I stare at the land in which I live and see a landscape I do not recognise
Published: 23 December 2006
I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?
I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights".
Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship...". A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".
Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour - Egypt - secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho!) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furore among Jews" with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli government".
Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in The New York Times (of course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States".
But well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel as well as the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter's book is now a best-seller - and applause here, by the way, for the great American public that bought the book instead of believing Mr Foxman.
But in this context, why, I wonder, didn't The New York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers in the United States mention Israel's cosy relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention in his book? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn't Israel have a fruitful and deep military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa - one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid - paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate on Carter's book.
At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report - which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways in which George Bush can run away from this disaster without too much blood on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the green zone of Baghdad - dream zone would be a more accurate title - there are a few worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it's written in the same tired semantics of right-wing think tanks - the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - full of "porous" borders and admonitions that "time is running out".
The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the "experts" consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many of them are pillars of the Brookings Institution and there is Thomas Freedman of The New York Times.
But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the great and the good who dragged the United States into this catastrophe. General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning, but we are not losing". Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not winning, but we are not losing". Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense pool by asserting: "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token (sic), I'm not sure we're winning." At which point, Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - "we're not winning, we're not losing". Pity about the Iraqis.
I pondered this madness during a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that's when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It's a draw!
Monday, December 11, 2006
Robert Fisk: Revolution in the air as Lebanon's rift widens
Robert Fisk
Published: 11 December 2006
With Fouad Siniora's cabinet hiding in the Grand Serail behind acres of razor wire and thousands of troops - a veritable "green zone" in the heart of Beirut - the largely Shia Muslim opposition, assisted by their Christian allies, brought up to two million supporters into the centre of the city yesterday to declare the forthcoming creation of a second Lebanese administration. A "transitional" government is what ex-general Michel Aoun called it, while Naeem Qassem, Hizbollah's deputy chairman, spoke ominously of the mass demonstrations as "the separatist day".
So, is the Hizbollah militia, which withstood Israel's disastrous bombardment of Lebanon last summer, really planning a coup on behalf of its Iranian and Syrian backers, as Mr Siniora suspects? Or are Mr Siniora and his cabinet colleagues - Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze - working on behalf of the Americans and Israelis, as Hizbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, proclaims?
Already, Mr Siniora's administration is being referred to in the American press as Lebanon's "US-backed government", the virtual kiss of death for any Arab leader these days, while Mr Aoun's split with his fellow Christians could prove fatal to him. Only because of his weird alliance with the Hizbollah can the latter claim that their opposition represents Christians as well as Muslims. True to the ironies of Lebanese politics, it was the same former general Aoun who fought a "war of independence" with Hizbollah's Syrian friends in 1990, a conflict which he lost at the cost of 1,000 lives.
But even supporters of Mr Siniora's administration were taken aback by the vast numbers of Lebanese that Hizbollah could mobilise yesterday, men and women who in many cases came from the villages and urban slums which suffered near-total destruction in this summer's war.
Their speakers played the role of representatives of the poor - "the people of the street" is how one foolish Sunni prelate called them on Friday - who had no time for the privileged classes or feudal pretentions of the government's supporters: Amin Gemayel, father of the murdered industry minister, Nayla Moawad, widow of a murdered Lebanese president, Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri, and Walid Jumblatt, son of the murdered Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt.
If Lebanon's politics and history were not so tragic, there would be an element of Gilbert and Sullivan about all this. Mr Siniora, now regularly visited by America's busy little ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, was told by one of Mr Feltman's predecessors only a few years ago that his multiple re-entry visa to the United States was invalid because he, Mr Siniora, was believed to have donated money to a charity associated with - yes - the Hizbollah. And there was more than a hint of sarcasm yesterday when Mr Qassem announced that Mr Siniora worked for the Americans and the Israelis.
"Death to America - Death to Israel," he roared and, of course, the mass of demonstrators repeated this tired rhetoric. To the Arab nations which supported Mr Siniora's government, Mr Qassem had a simple message: "We are in the hearts of the Sunnis of the Arab world - not you!"
And the danger for Mr Siniora is that Mr Qassem's conviction is probably correct. Indeed, there was a hint of revolution in the air yesterday as the poor and the village youths and the people of the Beirut slums converged on Martyrs' Square where Hariri's tomb was cordoned off. Leila Tueni, the daughter of another of Lebanon's murdered political leaders, the journalist Jibran Tueni (like all the victims, anti-Syrian), stated in a hall only a few hundred yards from the protests that the real reason why Mr Nasrallah wanted to overthrow Mr Siniora's government, from which all Shia ministers have resigned, was to prevent it giving its approval to the UN tribunal intended to try Hariri's killers, whom Ms Tueni and the rest of Mr Siniora's supporters believe to include some of Syria's senior intelligence apparatchiks.
But something even more dangerous was getting loose yesterday. The sheer size of the crowds apparently permitted Mr Qassem and Mr Aoun to demand a different - or a rival - government. But it was not Shias but Mr Siniora's supporters who won the last elections in Lebanon. If that election result were no longer valid, what did this say about the Hizbollah's respect for electoral politics and Lebanon's constitution?
And the growing Shia-Sunni divisions here mirror, in faint, pale but frightening form, the tragedy of the two sects in Mesopot-amia. Shias have twice attacked the Beirut Sunni suburb of Tarek al-Jdeide, a Shia has been murdered and turned into an opposition "martyr", and the mufti of the Sunni Qoreitem mosque is reported as attacking the historic Shia imams, Ali and Hussein.
Mr Jumblatt has now called for students at the Lebanese University to study at home after a brawl on campus between Shia and Sunni undergraduates. "This university is for all Lebanese," Mr Jumblatt insisted. But is Lebanon?
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Robert Fisk: A French colonial legacy of despair
Robert Fisk
They wanted Lebanon's 'independence' - but they wanted it in France's favour
Published: 25 November 2006
I couldn't help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George's Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will - will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? - try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have felt jealous. "President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon's sovereignty," he proclaimed. "France is determined ... now more than ever (to) defend Lebanon's sovereignty and independence." Now I'm not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender "on earth" - funny, isn't it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard - and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I'd certainly want to tread carefully around France's interest in Lebanon's "independence".
I hasten to add that - compared to the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra - Chirac's dealings with France's former colonies and mandates are positively Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites - France's favourite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel - and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a minority which may now number 29 per cent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon's "independence" - but they wanted it to be in France's favour.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority - the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this - the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek. From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities were too small to sustain - and created a new Ulster whose six counties ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.
The other Lebanese problem - which the people of Northern Ireland will immediately spot - is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way - I suspect - as the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946 - and apply it to Iraq. To live in such a way, Hourani wrote:
"is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. ... It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one's own. It reveals itself in lostness, cynicism and despair."
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them. Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon - Shias at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq - Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous "Sunni triangle" though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.
The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts were green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine, dry sherry. But we do not draw these maps of our own British or American cities. I could draw a map of Bradford's ethnic districts - but we would never print it. I could draw a black-white ethnic map of Washington - but the Washington Post would never dream of publishing it.
And thus we divide the "other", while assiduously denying the "other" in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the "democracy" to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the people - in every sense of the word - at the "bottom". And the French are going to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains "independent".
Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and its banlieues?
I couldn't help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George's Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will - will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? - try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have felt jealous. "President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon's sovereignty," he proclaimed. "France is determined ... now more than ever (to) defend Lebanon's sovereignty and independence." Now I'm not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender "on earth" - funny, isn't it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard - and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I'd certainly want to tread carefully around France's interest in Lebanon's "independence".
I hasten to add that - compared to the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra - Chirac's dealings with France's former colonies and mandates are positively Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites - France's favourite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel - and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a minority which may now number 29 per cent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon's "independence" - but they wanted it to be in France's favour.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority - the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this - the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek. From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities were too small to sustain - and created a new Ulster whose six counties ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.
The other Lebanese problem - which the people of Northern Ireland will immediately spot - is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way - I suspect - as the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946 - and apply it to Iraq. To live in such a way, Hourani wrote:
"is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. ... It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one's own. It reveals itself in lostness, cynicism and despair."
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them. Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon - Shias at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq - Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous "Sunni triangle" though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.
The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts were green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine, dry sherry. But we do not draw these maps of our own British or American cities. I could draw a map of Bradford's ethnic districts - but we would never print it. I could draw a black-white ethnic map of Washington - but the Washington Post would never dream of publishing it.
And thus we divide the "other", while assiduously denying the "other" in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the "democracy" to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the people - in every sense of the word - at the "bottom". And the French are going to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains "independent".
Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and its banlieues?
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2013319.ece
They wanted Lebanon's 'independence' - but they wanted it in France's favour
Published: 25 November 2006
I couldn't help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George's Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will - will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? - try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have felt jealous. "President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon's sovereignty," he proclaimed. "France is determined ... now more than ever (to) defend Lebanon's sovereignty and independence." Now I'm not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender "on earth" - funny, isn't it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard - and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I'd certainly want to tread carefully around France's interest in Lebanon's "independence".
I hasten to add that - compared to the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra - Chirac's dealings with France's former colonies and mandates are positively Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites - France's favourite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel - and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a minority which may now number 29 per cent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon's "independence" - but they wanted it to be in France's favour.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority - the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this - the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek. From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities were too small to sustain - and created a new Ulster whose six counties ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.
The other Lebanese problem - which the people of Northern Ireland will immediately spot - is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way - I suspect - as the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946 - and apply it to Iraq. To live in such a way, Hourani wrote:
"is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. ... It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one's own. It reveals itself in lostness, cynicism and despair."
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them. Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon - Shias at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq - Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous "Sunni triangle" though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.
The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts were green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine, dry sherry. But we do not draw these maps of our own British or American cities. I could draw a map of Bradford's ethnic districts - but we would never print it. I could draw a black-white ethnic map of Washington - but the Washington Post would never dream of publishing it.
And thus we divide the "other", while assiduously denying the "other" in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the "democracy" to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the people - in every sense of the word - at the "bottom". And the French are going to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains "independent".
Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and its banlieues?
I couldn't help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George's Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will - will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? - try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have felt jealous. "President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon's sovereignty," he proclaimed. "France is determined ... now more than ever (to) defend Lebanon's sovereignty and independence." Now I'm not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender "on earth" - funny, isn't it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard - and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I'd certainly want to tread carefully around France's interest in Lebanon's "independence".
I hasten to add that - compared to the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra - Chirac's dealings with France's former colonies and mandates are positively Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites - France's favourite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel - and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a minority which may now number 29 per cent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon's "independence" - but they wanted it to be in France's favour.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority - the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this - the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek. From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities were too small to sustain - and created a new Ulster whose six counties ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.
The other Lebanese problem - which the people of Northern Ireland will immediately spot - is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way - I suspect - as the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946 - and apply it to Iraq. To live in such a way, Hourani wrote:
"is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. ... It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one's own. It reveals itself in lostness, cynicism and despair."
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them. Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon - Shias at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq - Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous "Sunni triangle" though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.
The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts were green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine, dry sherry. But we do not draw these maps of our own British or American cities. I could draw a map of Bradford's ethnic districts - but we would never print it. I could draw a black-white ethnic map of Washington - but the Washington Post would never dream of publishing it.
And thus we divide the "other", while assiduously denying the "other" in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the "democracy" to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the people - in every sense of the word - at the "bottom". And the French are going to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains "independent".
Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and its banlieues?
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2013319.ece
Friday, November 24, 2006
Robert Fisk: Dragons of Lebanon's past emerge for Gemayel funeral
Robert Fisk
Published: 24 November 2006
Amin Gemayel wept and swooned in front of us. The tens of thousands of Christians and Muslims burst into applause before the improvised stage. Gemayel - a foppish man with little charisma when he was President of Lebanon - held up his right hand and suddenly became a symbol of nobility, still swaying on his feet, his left arm supported by the tall, far younger figure of Saad Hariri. Only two days earlier, Gemayel's MP son, Pierre, had been blasted to death by gunmen in Beirut; his body still lay in the Cathedral of St George a few metres from where we were standing. But nothing became Gemayel like his courage yesterday as he told the vast mass of Lebanese in front of him that, yes, there would be a second revolution in this country which would end only when the pro-Syrian President had been removed.
The knightly St George gave his name to the great Italianate basilica - yes, he is supposed to have slain the dragon in Beirut - but Amin Gemayel's bravery was one of the few moments of humanity on this brightly sunny, politically overcast, disturbing day. For alas, the dragons that move through the dark underworld of Lebanon's politics are still alive. One of them, the gaunt and murderous old militia leader Samir Geagea - he spent 14 years in an underground prison for blowing up a church - talked ominously of Lebanon's enemies, international and domestic. "They wanted a confrontation - so be it," he shouted.
The terrible pain of Lebanon's body politic was all too evident in the figures silhouetted in the evening light alongside the bullet-proof box from which Gemayel spoke. Gemayel himself had lost his son and, in 1982, his president-elect brother Bashir, whose baby daughter was slaughtered in a bomb explosion during the civil war.
There was Marwan Hamade, almost killed by a car bomb explosion in October 2004, and Saad Hariri, whose father Rafik's murder - in an even bigger car bomb explosion in Beirut last year - set off the first "revolution" which brought democracy to Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops. And there was Walid Jumblatt, the eloquent, nihilist Druze leader, whose father Kemal was murdered by armed men in March of 1977. And Nayla Moawad, whose president-husband, Rene, was blown to atoms by a bomb in November of 1989.
They all stood together on the sad little podium, Pierre's broken body in the basilica behind them, Rafik's burned corpse in the flowered grave beside them.
But yesterday's funeral bore some of the attributes of the Roman games, partly, I suspect, because the informality of Islam has, over the years, brushed off on the Christian Maronite Church.
Old political enemies embraced each other beside priests and sweating paramilitary police while the huge crowds applauded and roared their approval of Messrs Jumblatt and Hariri and, especially, Dr Geagea, but booed with derision Ali Hassan Khalil of the Shia Amal party and a sinister Christian ex-militiaman who once hurled his equally Christian civil war prisoners into the Mediterranean with concrete tied to their legs. They were, of course, alive at the time.
Like everything Lebanese - to misquote Evelyn Waugh - the day's pageantry was very impressive, but went on far too long. We had to listen to church music, church bells, Islamic chants, the music of Majida el-Roumi (the new Fairouz) and the tinny band of the Internal Security Forces as it whump-aad its way through the Lebanese national anthem against the thump of army helicopters. There were forests of flags, happily more Lebanese than militia-oriented and thousands and thousands of Lebanese troops, reservists, gendarmerie, riot police, interior ministry goons, traffic cops and ISF men.
All these, needless to say, to safeguard the lives of that most endangered of species, Lebanon's surviving politicians, from - so most of the crowd assumed - the assassins of Damascus.
In fact, when the bodies of Gemayel and his bodyguard, Samir Chartouni, were removed from the cathedral for burial, there were another hundred heavily armed security men standing around the coffins. If only, I couldn't help asking myself, they had been as enthusiastic to protect the occupants of the caskets when they were alive.
May Chidiac, the Christian journalist who is a harsh critic of Syria's hegemony of Lebanon and lost a leg and a hand in the bombing of her own car last year, bravely gave the crowd a blond, Academy Awards smile.
Watching the great and the good enter the basilica was a bit like spotting the stars. Grey-haired Dory Chamoun, whose militia-leader brother, Dany, was assassinated in 1990, along with his wife, Ingrid, and two of their children, Tariq and Julian. Boutros Harb and Nasib Lahoud (no relation to the hated President) and Charles Rizk, all of whom would like - heaven knows why - to be president of Lebanon when Emile Lahoud either finishes his term in the Baabda palace or is turfed out by the anger of these crowds.
"To Baabda, to Baabda," they shrieked. A march on Baabda is often threatened, not least by Dr Geagea, who does not seem to associate it with the march on Rome. But it is Lahoud who is now regarded as the unconstitutional ruler of Lebanon.
Posters demanded his dismissal - a demand made ever more harshly by Hariri and Jumblatt since Gemayel's murder - and one eloquent banner even addressed the President. "Oh Caesar of Baabda," it proclaimed, "get the hell out!" Less of a Caesar, I would have said, than an attendant lord of Damascus.
Geagea was chilling in his denunciations. "We will not accept that this government shall be changed for a government of murderers and criminals," he shouted. And since it is Sayed Hassan Nasrallah of the Shia Hizbollah who has been abusing the Siniora cabinet as the government of "the US ambassador" - and since it is the Shia ministers who have withdrawn from this same cabinet - one could conclude, could one not, that Dr Geagea's "murderers and criminals" were Shia.
Indeed, dwelling on his bloody wartime sins, most of which were amnestied, one has to reflect why Geagea's lads blew up the congregation of the Church of Our Lady of Deliverance in 1994; the court said that he wanted to persuade Christians that Hizbollah had committed the crime.
Funny how these things come back to us. Oddly, Pierre Gemayel's murder has had exactly the same effect on Christians and Sunni Muslims; it has persuaded many of them that the Hizbollah, on Syria's behalf, committed the crime. A distressing thought.
Reaction from the Middle Eastern press
Al-Safir (Lebanon)
'It looks as if the assassination of Pierre Gemayel marks the start of a premeditated series of crimes. It also appears that a new bloody stage has started in Lebanon's modern history'
Al-Quds (pan-Arab)
'Those who planned and carried out this assassination were targeting Syria as much as they were targeting Lebanon. Indeed, they were also targeting the entire Arab region. Syria is the one that is most harmed by this repugnant crime'
Al-Mustaqbal (Lebanon)
'What kind of future awaits Lebanon in the presence of parties like Hizbollah and its allies, that promise the Lebanese a greater Tehran if it captures power, and a lesser Baghdad if it fails in this?'
Jomhuri-Ye Eslami (Iran)
'Undoubtedly this assassination was planned and carried out by the Zionist regime because the Zionists stand to gain the most from it'
Al-Ba'th (Syria)
'The new Middle East is a US-Israeli project... Political assassinations... and killings pave the way for sedition. This sedition leads to chaos, and it is chaos which allows the realisation of the project'
Milliyet (Turkey)
'The biggest danger is that the various groups in society will be dragged into civil war'
Al-Arab Al-Alamiyah (pan-Arab)
"It appears Lebanon is pre-ordained to stay a nation of tears. The assassination... has extinguished the glimmer of hope'
Amin Gemayel wept and swooned in front of us. The tens of thousands of Christians and Muslims burst into applause before the improvised stage. Gemayel - a foppish man with little charisma when he was President of Lebanon - held up his right hand and suddenly became a symbol of nobility, still swaying on his feet, his left arm supported by the tall, far younger figure of Saad Hariri. Only two days earlier, Gemayel's MP son, Pierre, had been blasted to death by gunmen in Beirut; his body still lay in the Cathedral of St George a few metres from where we were standing. But nothing became Gemayel like his courage yesterday as he told the vast mass of Lebanese in front of him that, yes, there would be a second revolution in this country which would end only when the pro-Syrian President had been removed.
The knightly St George gave his name to the great Italianate basilica - yes, he is supposed to have slain the dragon in Beirut - but Amin Gemayel's bravery was one of the few moments of humanity on this brightly sunny, politically overcast, disturbing day. For alas, the dragons that move through the dark underworld of Lebanon's politics are still alive. One of them, the gaunt and murderous old militia leader Samir Geagea - he spent 14 years in an underground prison for blowing up a church - talked ominously of Lebanon's enemies, international and domestic. "They wanted a confrontation - so be it," he shouted.
The terrible pain of Lebanon's body politic was all too evident in the figures silhouetted in the evening light alongside the bullet-proof box from which Gemayel spoke. Gemayel himself had lost his son and, in 1982, his president-elect brother Bashir, whose baby daughter was slaughtered in a bomb explosion during the civil war.
There was Marwan Hamade, almost killed by a car bomb explosion in October 2004, and Saad Hariri, whose father Rafik's murder - in an even bigger car bomb explosion in Beirut last year - set off the first "revolution" which brought democracy to Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops. And there was Walid Jumblatt, the eloquent, nihilist Druze leader, whose father Kemal was murdered by armed men in March of 1977. And Nayla Moawad, whose president-husband, Rene, was blown to atoms by a bomb in November of 1989.
They all stood together on the sad little podium, Pierre's broken body in the basilica behind them, Rafik's burned corpse in the flowered grave beside them.
But yesterday's funeral bore some of the attributes of the Roman games, partly, I suspect, because the informality of Islam has, over the years, brushed off on the Christian Maronite Church.
Old political enemies embraced each other beside priests and sweating paramilitary police while the huge crowds applauded and roared their approval of Messrs Jumblatt and Hariri and, especially, Dr Geagea, but booed with derision Ali Hassan Khalil of the Shia Amal party and a sinister Christian ex-militiaman who once hurled his equally Christian civil war prisoners into the Mediterranean with concrete tied to their legs. They were, of course, alive at the time.
Like everything Lebanese - to misquote Evelyn Waugh - the day's pageantry was very impressive, but went on far too long. We had to listen to church music, church bells, Islamic chants, the music of Majida el-Roumi (the new Fairouz) and the tinny band of the Internal Security Forces as it whump-aad its way through the Lebanese national anthem against the thump of army helicopters. There were forests of flags, happily more Lebanese than militia-oriented and thousands and thousands of Lebanese troops, reservists, gendarmerie, riot police, interior ministry goons, traffic cops and ISF men.
All these, needless to say, to safeguard the lives of that most endangered of species, Lebanon's surviving politicians, from - so most of the crowd assumed - the assassins of Damascus.
In fact, when the bodies of Gemayel and his bodyguard, Samir Chartouni, were removed from the cathedral for burial, there were another hundred heavily armed security men standing around the coffins. If only, I couldn't help asking myself, they had been as enthusiastic to protect the occupants of the caskets when they were alive.
May Chidiac, the Christian journalist who is a harsh critic of Syria's hegemony of Lebanon and lost a leg and a hand in the bombing of her own car last year, bravely gave the crowd a blond, Academy Awards smile.
Watching the great and the good enter the basilica was a bit like spotting the stars. Grey-haired Dory Chamoun, whose militia-leader brother, Dany, was assassinated in 1990, along with his wife, Ingrid, and two of their children, Tariq and Julian. Boutros Harb and Nasib Lahoud (no relation to the hated President) and Charles Rizk, all of whom would like - heaven knows why - to be president of Lebanon when Emile Lahoud either finishes his term in the Baabda palace or is turfed out by the anger of these crowds.
"To Baabda, to Baabda," they shrieked. A march on Baabda is often threatened, not least by Dr Geagea, who does not seem to associate it with the march on Rome. But it is Lahoud who is now regarded as the unconstitutional ruler of Lebanon.
Posters demanded his dismissal - a demand made ever more harshly by Hariri and Jumblatt since Gemayel's murder - and one eloquent banner even addressed the President. "Oh Caesar of Baabda," it proclaimed, "get the hell out!" Less of a Caesar, I would have said, than an attendant lord of Damascus.
Geagea was chilling in his denunciations. "We will not accept that this government shall be changed for a government of murderers and criminals," he shouted. And since it is Sayed Hassan Nasrallah of the Shia Hizbollah who has been abusing the Siniora cabinet as the government of "the US ambassador" - and since it is the Shia ministers who have withdrawn from this same cabinet - one could conclude, could one not, that Dr Geagea's "murderers and criminals" were Shia.
Indeed, dwelling on his bloody wartime sins, most of which were amnestied, one has to reflect why Geagea's lads blew up the congregation of the Church of Our Lady of Deliverance in 1994; the court said that he wanted to persuade Christians that Hizbollah had committed the crime.
Funny how these things come back to us. Oddly, Pierre Gemayel's murder has had exactly the same effect on Christians and Sunni Muslims; it has persuaded many of them that the Hizbollah, on Syria's behalf, committed the crime. A distressing thought.
Reaction from the Middle Eastern press
Al-Safir (Lebanon)
'It looks as if the assassination of Pierre Gemayel marks the start of a premeditated series of crimes. It also appears that a new bloody stage has started in Lebanon's modern history'
Al-Quds (pan-Arab)
'Those who planned and carried out this assassination were targeting Syria as much as they were targeting Lebanon. Indeed, they were also targeting the entire Arab region. Syria is the one that is most harmed by this repugnant crime'
Al-Mustaqbal (Lebanon)
'What kind of future awaits Lebanon in the presence of parties like Hizbollah and its allies, that promise the Lebanese a greater Tehran if it captures power, and a lesser Baghdad if it fails in this?'
Jomhuri-Ye Eslami (Iran)
'Undoubtedly this assassination was planned and carried out by the Zionist regime because the Zionists stand to gain the most from it'
Al-Ba'th (Syria)
'The new Middle East is a US-Israeli project... Political assassinations... and killings pave the way for sedition. This sedition leads to chaos, and it is chaos which allows the realisation of the project'
Milliyet (Turkey)
'The biggest danger is that the various groups in society will be dragged into civil war'
Al-Arab Al-Alamiyah (pan-Arab)
"It appears Lebanon is pre-ordained to stay a nation of tears. The assassination... has extinguished the glimmer of hope'
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2010016.ece
Published: 24 November 2006
Amin Gemayel wept and swooned in front of us. The tens of thousands of Christians and Muslims burst into applause before the improvised stage. Gemayel - a foppish man with little charisma when he was President of Lebanon - held up his right hand and suddenly became a symbol of nobility, still swaying on his feet, his left arm supported by the tall, far younger figure of Saad Hariri. Only two days earlier, Gemayel's MP son, Pierre, had been blasted to death by gunmen in Beirut; his body still lay in the Cathedral of St George a few metres from where we were standing. But nothing became Gemayel like his courage yesterday as he told the vast mass of Lebanese in front of him that, yes, there would be a second revolution in this country which would end only when the pro-Syrian President had been removed.
The knightly St George gave his name to the great Italianate basilica - yes, he is supposed to have slain the dragon in Beirut - but Amin Gemayel's bravery was one of the few moments of humanity on this brightly sunny, politically overcast, disturbing day. For alas, the dragons that move through the dark underworld of Lebanon's politics are still alive. One of them, the gaunt and murderous old militia leader Samir Geagea - he spent 14 years in an underground prison for blowing up a church - talked ominously of Lebanon's enemies, international and domestic. "They wanted a confrontation - so be it," he shouted.
The terrible pain of Lebanon's body politic was all too evident in the figures silhouetted in the evening light alongside the bullet-proof box from which Gemayel spoke. Gemayel himself had lost his son and, in 1982, his president-elect brother Bashir, whose baby daughter was slaughtered in a bomb explosion during the civil war.
There was Marwan Hamade, almost killed by a car bomb explosion in October 2004, and Saad Hariri, whose father Rafik's murder - in an even bigger car bomb explosion in Beirut last year - set off the first "revolution" which brought democracy to Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops. And there was Walid Jumblatt, the eloquent, nihilist Druze leader, whose father Kemal was murdered by armed men in March of 1977. And Nayla Moawad, whose president-husband, Rene, was blown to atoms by a bomb in November of 1989.
They all stood together on the sad little podium, Pierre's broken body in the basilica behind them, Rafik's burned corpse in the flowered grave beside them.
But yesterday's funeral bore some of the attributes of the Roman games, partly, I suspect, because the informality of Islam has, over the years, brushed off on the Christian Maronite Church.
Old political enemies embraced each other beside priests and sweating paramilitary police while the huge crowds applauded and roared their approval of Messrs Jumblatt and Hariri and, especially, Dr Geagea, but booed with derision Ali Hassan Khalil of the Shia Amal party and a sinister Christian ex-militiaman who once hurled his equally Christian civil war prisoners into the Mediterranean with concrete tied to their legs. They were, of course, alive at the time.
Like everything Lebanese - to misquote Evelyn Waugh - the day's pageantry was very impressive, but went on far too long. We had to listen to church music, church bells, Islamic chants, the music of Majida el-Roumi (the new Fairouz) and the tinny band of the Internal Security Forces as it whump-aad its way through the Lebanese national anthem against the thump of army helicopters. There were forests of flags, happily more Lebanese than militia-oriented and thousands and thousands of Lebanese troops, reservists, gendarmerie, riot police, interior ministry goons, traffic cops and ISF men.
All these, needless to say, to safeguard the lives of that most endangered of species, Lebanon's surviving politicians, from - so most of the crowd assumed - the assassins of Damascus.
In fact, when the bodies of Gemayel and his bodyguard, Samir Chartouni, were removed from the cathedral for burial, there were another hundred heavily armed security men standing around the coffins. If only, I couldn't help asking myself, they had been as enthusiastic to protect the occupants of the caskets when they were alive.
May Chidiac, the Christian journalist who is a harsh critic of Syria's hegemony of Lebanon and lost a leg and a hand in the bombing of her own car last year, bravely gave the crowd a blond, Academy Awards smile.
Watching the great and the good enter the basilica was a bit like spotting the stars. Grey-haired Dory Chamoun, whose militia-leader brother, Dany, was assassinated in 1990, along with his wife, Ingrid, and two of their children, Tariq and Julian. Boutros Harb and Nasib Lahoud (no relation to the hated President) and Charles Rizk, all of whom would like - heaven knows why - to be president of Lebanon when Emile Lahoud either finishes his term in the Baabda palace or is turfed out by the anger of these crowds.
"To Baabda, to Baabda," they shrieked. A march on Baabda is often threatened, not least by Dr Geagea, who does not seem to associate it with the march on Rome. But it is Lahoud who is now regarded as the unconstitutional ruler of Lebanon.
Posters demanded his dismissal - a demand made ever more harshly by Hariri and Jumblatt since Gemayel's murder - and one eloquent banner even addressed the President. "Oh Caesar of Baabda," it proclaimed, "get the hell out!" Less of a Caesar, I would have said, than an attendant lord of Damascus.
Geagea was chilling in his denunciations. "We will not accept that this government shall be changed for a government of murderers and criminals," he shouted. And since it is Sayed Hassan Nasrallah of the Shia Hizbollah who has been abusing the Siniora cabinet as the government of "the US ambassador" - and since it is the Shia ministers who have withdrawn from this same cabinet - one could conclude, could one not, that Dr Geagea's "murderers and criminals" were Shia.
Indeed, dwelling on his bloody wartime sins, most of which were amnestied, one has to reflect why Geagea's lads blew up the congregation of the Church of Our Lady of Deliverance in 1994; the court said that he wanted to persuade Christians that Hizbollah had committed the crime.
Funny how these things come back to us. Oddly, Pierre Gemayel's murder has had exactly the same effect on Christians and Sunni Muslims; it has persuaded many of them that the Hizbollah, on Syria's behalf, committed the crime. A distressing thought.
Reaction from the Middle Eastern press
Al-Safir (Lebanon)
'It looks as if the assassination of Pierre Gemayel marks the start of a premeditated series of crimes. It also appears that a new bloody stage has started in Lebanon's modern history'
Al-Quds (pan-Arab)
'Those who planned and carried out this assassination were targeting Syria as much as they were targeting Lebanon. Indeed, they were also targeting the entire Arab region. Syria is the one that is most harmed by this repugnant crime'
Al-Mustaqbal (Lebanon)
'What kind of future awaits Lebanon in the presence of parties like Hizbollah and its allies, that promise the Lebanese a greater Tehran if it captures power, and a lesser Baghdad if it fails in this?'
Jomhuri-Ye Eslami (Iran)
'Undoubtedly this assassination was planned and carried out by the Zionist regime because the Zionists stand to gain the most from it'
Al-Ba'th (Syria)
'The new Middle East is a US-Israeli project... Political assassinations... and killings pave the way for sedition. This sedition leads to chaos, and it is chaos which allows the realisation of the project'
Milliyet (Turkey)
'The biggest danger is that the various groups in society will be dragged into civil war'
Al-Arab Al-Alamiyah (pan-Arab)
"It appears Lebanon is pre-ordained to stay a nation of tears. The assassination... has extinguished the glimmer of hope'
Amin Gemayel wept and swooned in front of us. The tens of thousands of Christians and Muslims burst into applause before the improvised stage. Gemayel - a foppish man with little charisma when he was President of Lebanon - held up his right hand and suddenly became a symbol of nobility, still swaying on his feet, his left arm supported by the tall, far younger figure of Saad Hariri. Only two days earlier, Gemayel's MP son, Pierre, had been blasted to death by gunmen in Beirut; his body still lay in the Cathedral of St George a few metres from where we were standing. But nothing became Gemayel like his courage yesterday as he told the vast mass of Lebanese in front of him that, yes, there would be a second revolution in this country which would end only when the pro-Syrian President had been removed.
The knightly St George gave his name to the great Italianate basilica - yes, he is supposed to have slain the dragon in Beirut - but Amin Gemayel's bravery was one of the few moments of humanity on this brightly sunny, politically overcast, disturbing day. For alas, the dragons that move through the dark underworld of Lebanon's politics are still alive. One of them, the gaunt and murderous old militia leader Samir Geagea - he spent 14 years in an underground prison for blowing up a church - talked ominously of Lebanon's enemies, international and domestic. "They wanted a confrontation - so be it," he shouted.
The terrible pain of Lebanon's body politic was all too evident in the figures silhouetted in the evening light alongside the bullet-proof box from which Gemayel spoke. Gemayel himself had lost his son and, in 1982, his president-elect brother Bashir, whose baby daughter was slaughtered in a bomb explosion during the civil war.
There was Marwan Hamade, almost killed by a car bomb explosion in October 2004, and Saad Hariri, whose father Rafik's murder - in an even bigger car bomb explosion in Beirut last year - set off the first "revolution" which brought democracy to Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops. And there was Walid Jumblatt, the eloquent, nihilist Druze leader, whose father Kemal was murdered by armed men in March of 1977. And Nayla Moawad, whose president-husband, Rene, was blown to atoms by a bomb in November of 1989.
They all stood together on the sad little podium, Pierre's broken body in the basilica behind them, Rafik's burned corpse in the flowered grave beside them.
But yesterday's funeral bore some of the attributes of the Roman games, partly, I suspect, because the informality of Islam has, over the years, brushed off on the Christian Maronite Church.
Old political enemies embraced each other beside priests and sweating paramilitary police while the huge crowds applauded and roared their approval of Messrs Jumblatt and Hariri and, especially, Dr Geagea, but booed with derision Ali Hassan Khalil of the Shia Amal party and a sinister Christian ex-militiaman who once hurled his equally Christian civil war prisoners into the Mediterranean with concrete tied to their legs. They were, of course, alive at the time.
Like everything Lebanese - to misquote Evelyn Waugh - the day's pageantry was very impressive, but went on far too long. We had to listen to church music, church bells, Islamic chants, the music of Majida el-Roumi (the new Fairouz) and the tinny band of the Internal Security Forces as it whump-aad its way through the Lebanese national anthem against the thump of army helicopters. There were forests of flags, happily more Lebanese than militia-oriented and thousands and thousands of Lebanese troops, reservists, gendarmerie, riot police, interior ministry goons, traffic cops and ISF men.
All these, needless to say, to safeguard the lives of that most endangered of species, Lebanon's surviving politicians, from - so most of the crowd assumed - the assassins of Damascus.
In fact, when the bodies of Gemayel and his bodyguard, Samir Chartouni, were removed from the cathedral for burial, there were another hundred heavily armed security men standing around the coffins. If only, I couldn't help asking myself, they had been as enthusiastic to protect the occupants of the caskets when they were alive.
May Chidiac, the Christian journalist who is a harsh critic of Syria's hegemony of Lebanon and lost a leg and a hand in the bombing of her own car last year, bravely gave the crowd a blond, Academy Awards smile.
Watching the great and the good enter the basilica was a bit like spotting the stars. Grey-haired Dory Chamoun, whose militia-leader brother, Dany, was assassinated in 1990, along with his wife, Ingrid, and two of their children, Tariq and Julian. Boutros Harb and Nasib Lahoud (no relation to the hated President) and Charles Rizk, all of whom would like - heaven knows why - to be president of Lebanon when Emile Lahoud either finishes his term in the Baabda palace or is turfed out by the anger of these crowds.
"To Baabda, to Baabda," they shrieked. A march on Baabda is often threatened, not least by Dr Geagea, who does not seem to associate it with the march on Rome. But it is Lahoud who is now regarded as the unconstitutional ruler of Lebanon.
Posters demanded his dismissal - a demand made ever more harshly by Hariri and Jumblatt since Gemayel's murder - and one eloquent banner even addressed the President. "Oh Caesar of Baabda," it proclaimed, "get the hell out!" Less of a Caesar, I would have said, than an attendant lord of Damascus.
Geagea was chilling in his denunciations. "We will not accept that this government shall be changed for a government of murderers and criminals," he shouted. And since it is Sayed Hassan Nasrallah of the Shia Hizbollah who has been abusing the Siniora cabinet as the government of "the US ambassador" - and since it is the Shia ministers who have withdrawn from this same cabinet - one could conclude, could one not, that Dr Geagea's "murderers and criminals" were Shia.
Indeed, dwelling on his bloody wartime sins, most of which were amnestied, one has to reflect why Geagea's lads blew up the congregation of the Church of Our Lady of Deliverance in 1994; the court said that he wanted to persuade Christians that Hizbollah had committed the crime.
Funny how these things come back to us. Oddly, Pierre Gemayel's murder has had exactly the same effect on Christians and Sunni Muslims; it has persuaded many of them that the Hizbollah, on Syria's behalf, committed the crime. A distressing thought.
Reaction from the Middle Eastern press
Al-Safir (Lebanon)
'It looks as if the assassination of Pierre Gemayel marks the start of a premeditated series of crimes. It also appears that a new bloody stage has started in Lebanon's modern history'
Al-Quds (pan-Arab)
'Those who planned and carried out this assassination were targeting Syria as much as they were targeting Lebanon. Indeed, they were also targeting the entire Arab region. Syria is the one that is most harmed by this repugnant crime'
Al-Mustaqbal (Lebanon)
'What kind of future awaits Lebanon in the presence of parties like Hizbollah and its allies, that promise the Lebanese a greater Tehran if it captures power, and a lesser Baghdad if it fails in this?'
Jomhuri-Ye Eslami (Iran)
'Undoubtedly this assassination was planned and carried out by the Zionist regime because the Zionists stand to gain the most from it'
Al-Ba'th (Syria)
'The new Middle East is a US-Israeli project... Political assassinations... and killings pave the way for sedition. This sedition leads to chaos, and it is chaos which allows the realisation of the project'
Milliyet (Turkey)
'The biggest danger is that the various groups in society will be dragged into civil war'
Al-Arab Al-Alamiyah (pan-Arab)
"It appears Lebanon is pre-ordained to stay a nation of tears. The assassination... has extinguished the glimmer of hope'
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2010016.ece
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