by Nir Rosen
“In parallel with this trend is the narrower state-sponsored Sunni sectarian model, which is social and political in nature, is closely interwoven with ruling establishments and personalities, may or may not overlap with the Salafi trend in some cases, but is ultimately a reaction to what is perceived as a growing Shiite threat, as distilled from Arab rulers’ discourse and the media. Unlike the Al Qaeda paradigm, though, it cannot compete ideologically with Shiite resistance, nor does it seek to. The Sunni revival is a product of insurgent/ jihadist/antiestablishment forces as well as proestablishment forces. In both cases, a revival is taking place insofar as Sunni Islam is seen as being the most effective tool for mobilizing support and achieving objectives.”
Mohsen believed that what mainstream Sunni leaders were doing was taking the racist discourse of anti-Shiite extremists (like Zarqawi) and inflating it into a mainstream discourse among Sunni masses. Saad Ghorayeb, on the other hand, insisted that Sunni Arab regimes had appropriated this discourse not so much from Salafis but from the United States, whose leaders and pundits spoke of those who are loyal to Iran and of a Shiite crescent.
Lebanon, in particular, had seen a spectacular revival of Sunni identity and a reshaping of traditional Sunni attitudes since 2005. Order in Lebanon had been maintained by Syrian political and military domination, now referred to as an occupation by opponents of Syria. The Syrians had first intervened in Lebanon in 1976 at the request of the Lebanese president to support right-wing militias against a coalition of leftists and Palestinians who threatened to overturn the Maronite Christian-dominated order. In 1987 they returned, this time in support of Sunnis who had grown tired of the militia wars being fought between the Shiite and the Druze minorities. Both times the Syrian intervention met with American, Israeli, and Saudi approval: first the Syrians marketed themselves as opponents of the coalition between the Palestinian resistance groups and leftists, and the second time they took advantage of American fear of Hizballah, going so far as to attack the Shiite militia.
The Syrian era ended in February 2005, when Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated, and since then a major divide has emerged between Sunnis and Shiites in Lebanon, with the Christians who had once dominated the country increasingly losing their political significance and becoming marginalized. Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943. Christians and Muslims divided powers and apportioned positions based on sectarian identity, with Maronite Christians benefiting from a six-to-five ratio and Sunni Muslims dominating their Shiite coreligionists. In a sense Lebanon has never had a government but rather a power-sharing arrangement. At first the system of distributing political posts according to sect was merely based on custom. The 1991 Taif Accords, which ended the civil war, enshrined this system while granting a larger proportion to Muslims, allocating seats in Parliament on a one-to-one ratio. The president remained a Maronite Christian, with powers reduced in relation to the Sunni prime minister and the Shiite speaker of the Parliament. The Taif Accords were meant to establish a transitional period that would end with the abolition of political sectarianism, but this never happened. Instead the system became more entrenched, and the Lebanese became more connected to their sectarian institutions. Saudi money and the Syrian military presence in Lebanon helped guarantee that the accords held. While other militias were disbanded, Hizballah was allowed to maintain its armed struggle against the Israeli occupation.
Taif also helped bring to premiership Hariri, a Lebanese Sunni who made his billions working with the Saudi royal family and who used force and bribery to bring the rival factions together in the Saudi resort city after which the accords were named. He had a history of spreading his wealth, granting scholarships to thousands of students, and corrupting the Syrian overlords in Lebanon, who often seemed like they worked for him. Before the rise of Hariri many of Lebanon’s Sunni political and religious leaders had been murdered. Hariri was an ally of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, and was installed as prime minister in 1992 by Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad.
Though he is widely credited with reconstructing much of Lebanon, it was the Lebanese who shouldered much of the burden, and under his reign the national debt increased from one and a half billion dollars to eighteen billion dollars. Beginning in 2000, Hariri also contributed to the increase in sectarianism, campaigning more openly on a platform of Sunni power.
Hariri was killed by a massive car bomb. His supporters as well as opponents of Syria established a loose coalition in the wake of his assassination that blamed the Syrians for the murder, demanded the formation of an international tribunal to investigate it, and called for the withdrawal of Syrian forces and influence in Lebanon. The coalition was named for the March 14 demonstration in which Hariri’s supporters called for the Syrian withdrawal. The March 14 coalition also became the main vehicle for the Bush administration’s agenda in Lebanon and was closely associated with Saudi Arabia through the Future Movement, led by Hariri’s son and heir, Saad, who even has a Saudi passport. Most of the March 14 coalition was composed of politicians who had been former supporters and allies of the Syrian regime. One of the most famous chants of March 14 demonstrators was “We want revenge!” That revenge was often taken on poor Syrians who worked as laborers or sold bread on the street. Many of them were beaten or stabbed, and the tents they lived in were burned down in the name of March 14.
Saad al-Hariri was not prepared and had not wanted to inherit his father’s mantle. Without his father’s achievements to build a popular base he relied on Sunni communal solidarity. Lebanon’s Sunnis allied with their historic enemies, the Christians, against the country they had historically identified with more than their own, Syria.
FADIL SHALLAQ was a close associate of Rafiq al-Hariri from 1978 until 2002, heading construction and charitable projects for him, advising him, and finally serving as editor in chief of Hariri’s Future newspaper. Following the 2006 war with Israel, Shallaq, a Sunni, publicly broke with his former allies, objecting to the sectarian and pro-American turn the movement was taking. He did not view the former Syrian presence in Lebanon as an occupation. “When the Syrians were here, I don’t know who controlled who, the Lebanese or the Syrians,” he said. “Hariri thought the Syrian presence helped Lebanon,” he told me. “I worked with him for twenty-five years.” Shallaq rejected the Future Movement’s claims that Hariri had been anti-Syrian and argued that the Israelis were more likely to have killed Hariri than the Syrians. Shallaq also rejected the reincarnation of Hariri as a Sunni symbol. “Hariri was a Sunni believer,” he admits. “He hated my atheism, but he was originally an Arab nationalist, he believed in building the state. He was a Lebanese nationalist, but he was never sectarian. Sunni sectarianism started after Hariri’s death. Sectarianism is not given, it’s manufactured. Sunnis were reshaped, reconstituted, reprogrammed after 2005, and became a despicable entity. You needed a corpse. Without the corpse you could not have reprogrammed their identity. Then you had a campaign of propaganda. It was well financed.” Shallaq blamed a coalition of neocons and Lebanese allies such as Walid Fares, a former Lebanese Christian militiaman associated with the American right. He says they funded the creation of the Future Movement and the sectarian and anti-Syrian direction it took.
“How could a whole community change like this?” he asked. “Before the Sunni community was traditional, Islamic, Arab nationalist, a little bit to the left, with very definite anti-Israeli attitudes about the Palestinian cause. They had strong feelings about the Syrians, but this wave of hate of Hizballah was created. It’s new.”
Shallaq was worried about new Sunni militias being created by the Future Movement. “There is a not-so-secret militia and security organization. People are being trained in Jordan; others are trained here by former military men.” Still others were trained by Christian militiamen belonging to the Lebanese forces, he said. “They are being prepared for civil war. We are in the middle of a civil war now, or civil conflict. You have to distinguish what happened in 1975 and what
is happening now. We won’t have the paradigm of 1975 repeated. We have a civil war without generalized violence. Sectarian feelings are at a maximum point. Militias, arms, preparations, violence—all the elements of civil war. But will it erupt? And have a green line? I think we will have fighting house to house, building to building.”
One of the people Shallaq blamed for the sectarian tension was his former colleague Ridwan al-Sayyid, a professor of Islamic Studies at the Lebanese University and speechwriter and adviser to Hariri and his successor for prime minister, Fouad Siniora. On May 3 I visited Sayyid in his apartment. Interestingly, he agreed with Shallaq on the basic narrative. “There was a repositioning in the Sunni community since 2005,” he said. “They were shocked by the killing of Hariri.” The Syrians had persecuted Sunnis because Sunnis were traditionally pro-Palestinian, pro-Egyptian, and anti-Baathist. “Hariri helped Sunnis come out of their material, educational, and political crisis, and he made peace with the Syrians so they would not persecute us. He was a symbol of flourishing Sunnism.” After Hariri’s killing, the new Sunni feelings were at first only anti-Syrian, but after the July 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon it became anti-Shiite as well. He blamed Hizballah and specifically Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah for calling Siniora an agent of the Americans and the Zionists. “Because of Hizballah, Sunnis feel in danger,” he said. Sunni tension increased after the mostly Shiite demonstrators descended upon the government and tried to force Siniora to step down. “Sunnis felt it was against Sunnis and not a political act that Shiites are trying to take the position of Sunnis, the position of the prime minister, which belongs to the Sunni confession, and that Hizballah was trying to destroy the Lebanese state and the Sunni role in the state,” Sayyid told me. “Sunnis felt they need to protect the state because the Christians vanished. There is no Christian entity anymore that can mediate between both or make a third party.”
Sayyid believed that Hizballah did not act independently but as a tool for Iran to pressure the West. He blamed the July 2006 war on Syria and Iran. “They want to defeat America in Lebanon,” he said. “It is a struggle with the U.S., and they waged war against Israel and found that the Lebanese state and Sunnis were on the other side. Sunnis felt that on their side there is Egypt and Saudi [Arabia], and on the other side the Shiites, Syria and Iran.” Unlike other Sunni partisans in his alliance, Sayyid did not believe that Hizballah actually wanted a civil war or even that its leaders wanted to impose a Shiite religious state on Lebanon. “But they want to continue the confrontation with Israel without considering the views of the other three million Lebanese,” he said. “Hizballah is here with weapons, and accumulating weapons, and they made war with Israel. The country feels threatened, and they don’t recognize state institutions—they have their own telephone lines, their own army, their own social networks.” Sayyid said he would support Hizballah in the event of another war with Israel. “If Israel wins a war with Hizballah, then Lebanon is destroyed and the Arabs are weakened. How can I, as an Arab, Lebanese, and Muslim, be against Hizballah? I can only say that your program is not good for the country and cannot bring success.” Sayyid was not optimistic for the immediate future. “From both sides, Israel and Iran, Hizballah, there is a situation where one will decide to attack. Israel can’t wait until Hizballah gets stronger. We cannot win a war against Israel. The Arab countries won’t make war with us, so Hizballah will make war alone, and the country will be destroyed.”
There were two groups of Salafis in Lebanon, he told me: peaceful ones and jihadists. But he feared that after the appearance of extreme Salafi jihadists the peaceful ones might side with the jihadists. Seyid admitted to me that Sunnis were being trained in Jordan but explained that it was only to work as security guards. Because of Sunni solidarity and the fear that all Shiites have weapons, there were new armed Sunni groups, he said. “Sunnis feel insecure, but it’s not a good idea,” he told me. “It’s not a good situation, but what can you do? The security forces can’t protect all those institutions, as the bombings show, so they have to have their own guards.”
Facing the Sunni-dominated March 14 coalition was the March 8 coalition, led by Hizballah and aligned with Syria and Iran. Named for the date of the demonstration at which Hizballah thanked the Syrians for supporting the resistance to Israel, the coalition grew to include Michel Aoun, the Christian former Lebanese army general who had spearheaded the fight against Syrian domination. Though Aoun’s anti-Syrian credentials were clear, even calling Hizballah pro-Syrian was misleading. The Syrians had fought Hizballah in the past and supported its rivals. It was only in the mid-1990s that they began to support Hizballah, while not allowing it to participate in Lebanese politics, and it was only after the Syrians left that Hizballah entered Lebanese electoral politics. Privately, Hizballah officials disparaged the Syrian system and expressed resentment of the Syrian presence in Lebanon. But their priority was the resistance, and they were grateful to the Syrians for supporting it. Other members of March 8 included lesser Sunni figures such as the late former Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood leader Fathi Yakan, who was sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
The July War and After
In July 2006 Hizballah soldiers captured two Israeli soldiers in a daring raid typical of the tit-for-tat exchanges that were limited to the border region. Hizballah was surprised when the Israelis responded with a massive onslaught, pounding Lebanon and destroying much of its infrastructure, killing about one thousand civilians while laying waste to southern Lebanon and the Shiite suburbs of Beirut. Standing up to the Israeli military might, less than 1,500 Hizballah soldiers lost about 150 of their men. It was the first time an Arab army had achieved a kill ratio on par with the Israelis. The war ended with the Israelis failing to achieve their stated goal of destroying Hizballah or pushing it north of the Litani River. For Hizballah and its supporters, thwarting Israeli goals was a victory—a divine victory, they said. Hizballah shot to popularity with the people, if not the regimes, around the Arab world.
Although Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the war and its devastation as the “birth pangs of the new Middle East,” it deepened the chasm between the March 14 and March 8 camps, as well as that between Sunnis and Shiites. Hizballah and its allies accused their opponents of collaborating with the Israelis and Americans. March 14 politicians blamed Hizballah for the destruction that had not only ruined the summer tourist season but the economy and infrastructure. If Hizballah accused them of serving Israel and America, they accused Hizballah of serving an Iranian agenda.
Concerned that the Lebanese government, dominated by the March 14 coalition, was attempting to achieve diplomatically and politically what Israel had failed to do militarily (emasculate Hizballah and remove its weapons), the Shiite members of the government resigned. In November the March 8 coalition asserted that the government was no longer legitimate, since without the Shiites it was in violation of the sectarian division of power. Hizballah sought a national unity government in which it would have a greater share of power. But it was not asking for a larger share of the political pie for the Shiite community beyond the 21 percent of parliamentary and cabinet seats the Shiites were allocated by the Constitution. Instead it wanted a greater share for its non-Shiite allies in the opposition, which collectively represented at least half the Lebanese population. Hizballah wanted a veto-wielding one-third of the cabinet seats so that it and its allies could maintain their influence over “strategic” issues, protecting the resistance, maintaining Lebanon’s “Arabism” and centrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and preventing Lebanon from falling under American and Israeli hegemony.
In December 2006 Hizballah and its allies in the March 8 coalition initiated demonstrations, and a “sit-in” turned into a tent city in downtown Beirut, an area that symbolized Hariri’s costly reconstruction of Beirut and also the seat of the Lebanese government. For Sunnis, this infringement on their territory was perceived as a Shiite “occupation” that had broken the Sunni sense of ownership over
this Sunni oasis. In January the opposition called for strikes and civil disobedience. In clashes between Sunnis and Shiites in Beirut, seven were killed and at least 150 were injured. All sides were surprised by the explosion of violent hatred and pulled their forces back. Saudi Arabia and Iran quickly came to the negotiating table. Neither side wanted things to get out of control. Their power was based on the potential for war, not war itself, on playing brinksmanship without being drawn in. During the clashes the army refused to interfere and attack civilians. At the time the army was condemned by March 14 politicians for being insufficiently repressive.
All this was taking place in a region anxious over the civil war in Iraq, in which Sunnis felt threatened by Shiite militias that had profited from the American occupation. King Abdullah of Jordan had warned of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Lebanon to the Gulf. President Mubarak of Egypt had accused Shiite Arabs of being fifth columnists for Iran. In an unprecedented move, America’s Sunni Arab clients in the region, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, had gone so far as to issue formal statements condemning Hizballah, which suggested they were siding with Israel. While the Sunni regimes used the Shiite threat to galvanize their population, nobody wanted an actual conflict between Arab states and Iran. The tense quiet in Lebanon over the next few months was punctuated by bombs and assassinations. But everybody was waiting for what was to come. Saudi Arabia decided that Lebanon was its project, the place in the region where it would confront Iran. But Lebanon was also an Iranian project, and both countries invested large amounts of money and political capital in support of their allies. Unlike Iraq, where their proxies also competed for power, Lebanon was less costly and the consequences less severe. Much as it had in Iraq, Gaza, and Somalia, the United States appeared determined to provoke a civil war in Lebanon. In the conflict over the cabinet seats and over selecting a new president, the Americans were pressuring their proxies not to compromise with Hizballah and its allies, increasing the tension and seemingly denying Shiites the right to participate in the government.