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The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel

Page 28

by Michael Totten


  He was released almost at once after the Syrians were thrown out in 2005, and he happily reunited with his wife, Sethrida, who was herself elected to parliament as the head of the party in the election that June.

  I stepped out of the van and into the rain, squinting as the wind blew water into my eyes.

  “Bonjour,” said one of the guards, using a greeting common among Lebanese Christians.

  “Hello,” I said, both to return the greeting and to let him know which language I spoke.

  German shepherds sniffed me and my colleagues for explosives while the men with guns patted us down. Our hosts would not even send a car until after we had been cleared. They knew, of course, that Western journalists weren’t a threat to them or to Geagea, but if they started relaxing their security posture under certain conditions, somebody might eventually figure out a way through. Geagea’s men couldn’t let their guard down for even one second, not after so many assassinations and car bombs had nearly decimated the March 14 bloc in parliament.

  I had spent enough time in the Middle East by that point that the region and its logic had changed me. Most people I knew back in the States, especially in my hometown in the Pacific Northwest, would have felt a little unnerved being frisked by men wielding rifles who were not the legal authorities. I actually felt better around men with guns than I did around unarmed civilians, as long as those men were politically friendly.

  In the 1970s, many Lebanese liberals, intellectuals, and other sensitive types who hate war ended up supporting or even joining militias. Political violence has been the norm in the Middle East as long as humans have lived there, and the Lebanese state was far too weak to protect its citizens from it. Men and women had to look out for themselves or take shelter behind those willing to commit violence for them. Western civilians would eventually do the same if the police effectively ceased to exist and their neighborhoods turned into war zones.

  Each major sectarian community fielded at least one militia during the war. Because they might be killed for what was printed next to “religion” on their identity cards, almost everyone eventually had to go to their corner, and their corner was chosen for them at birth.

  I hated Lebanon’s sectarianism and wished to be above it all as a foreigner, but I couldn’t change it, nor could I entirely opt out of it. I had friends from every sect in the country, but because I was baptized Catholic as a child, the Maronites were “my people” whether I liked it or not, even though I am not religious. That’s how they saw me, anyway, and it guaranteed my protection when I traveled among them.

  An official Lebanese Forces van approached from the road above. The guards opened the swing gate. My colleagues and I piled into the back.

  My friend and colleague Lee Smith sat on my left. We met in 2005 shortly after he moved from Cairo to Beirut. He relocated to the Middle East after al Qaeda’s assault on his hometown of New York City, hoping to figure out what on earth compelled more than a dozen well-educated people to kill themselves and almost 3,000 others by flying hijacked jetliners into our buildings. Like me, he was swept up in the euphoria of the Beirut Spring and thought 2005 was a terrific time to be an American in the Middle East.

  It was a great time to be an American in the Middle East. He ended up as a sort of refugee in Syria, however, when the Israelis invaded in 2006 during their failed attempt to crush or cripple Hezbollah. He then moved on to Jerusalem, where he began wrapping up years of research and experience that went into his brilliant but bleak book The Strong Horse.1

  To my right sat Jonathan Foreman, reporter at large for an outstanding new magazine in Britain called Standpoint. This was his first trip to the Levant. He would learn the hard way how Lebanon had changed since Hezbollah’s armed assault on the capital, when he and I were attacked in Beirut by some of the most dangerous people in the entire country. But I’m getting ahead of the story. First we had our meeting with a former militia commander.

  The Lebanese Forces headquarters had an expansive, even spectacular, view of the Mediterranean from so high above sea level that it enjoyed its own microclimate. It was colder in winter but above the suffocating summer humidity. The structure itself looked more like a concrete compound or even a bunker than an office, but it was new and had a bit of style—as much as such buildings can be said to have any style. It looked vaguely futuristic and could have even worked as a set in a science-fiction movie. Sparta might have constructed something like that if it had twenty-first-century building materials and money to blow.

  Square-jawed security men at the door confiscated my cell phone and camera, and they traded my digital voice recorder for a pencil and paper. I normally tape interviews so I can quote my subjects precisely, but this time I’d have to furiously scribble down notes. Some of the guards were built like weight lifters, and their rifles looked new. They were polite enough, as people in the Middle East usually are, but at the same time, they were the types you would not want to mess with unless you had a small army.

  A young woman escorted me and my colleagues to a modern conference room without windows. Somebody had prepared coffee and sandwiches for us in advance. The Lebanese Forces leader sat alone at the head of the table and introduced himself. His bald head and mustache made him look vaguely like a police officer.

  “I was a medical student at the American University of Beirut when the war suddenly erupted,” he said. “I tried to continue studying medicine, but was stuck at the campus in Hamra, a Muslim area. So I had to stay at the university in the dorm and eat in the cafeteria.”

  Poor Hamra, my old neighborhood. Hezbollah’s invasion in May brought it right back to 1975.

  “I took night classes and couldn’t go home,” Geagea continued. “Just to get up the coast to Jounieh, you had to fly to Syria and then go the rest of the way by sea. It took twenty-four hours.”

  Jounieh was a thirty-minute drive from Hamra when there was no traffic.

  Joining a militia wasn’t something he ever imagined he’d do, but that was true of almost everyone who eventually did.

  “I went home to Bcharre,” he said, “and joined a citizen militia to fight Palestinian invaders in our towns. We called ourselves the Lebanese Christian Resistance. We were not a regular army. The population rallied around us, especially in the early years of the war.”

  You can’t fully understand Geagea without first understanding the roots of his movement and its civil war-era founder Bashir Gemayel.

  The idealistic yet ruthless Gemayel united a number of disparate Christian militias under his command and dubbed them the Lebanese Forces in the late 1970s. Their raison d’être was the same as so many others in the Middle East at that time: resistance. But the Lebanese Forces was not founded to resist Israel or the West. It was founded to resist Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and the Syrian soldiers sent to divide and conquer the country by Hafez al-Assad. And the Lebanese Forces, hard as it was to believe in 2009, waged their battle of resistance in a political and military alliance with the State of Israel.

  Gemayel was elected president in August of 1982, the same month the Israel Defense Forces vanquished the PLO from its stronghold in West Beirut. It was extraordinary that a Christian allied with Israel managed to land in the highest office in an Arabic-speaking country, but he did. The Israeli leadership was ecstatic. They thought peace with their northern neighbor was finally at hand, that their ground invasion and occupation of Lebanon was paying political dividends as well as security ones. They had not yet learned that their ability to transform Lebanese politics in their favor, either violently or diplomatically, was effectively nil.

  The election of Bashir Gemayel was, of course, controversial. Arafat and the PLO were banished to Tunisia, but local Sunni militias loyal to the Palestinian cause hadn’t gone anywhere. Syrian soldiers still occupied parts of the country. Israeli soldiers still occupied parts of the country, saying they’d stick around in Beirut at least until after Gemayel signed the peace treaty and estab
lished some kind of order.

  The president-elect gave a speech to supporters at the Kataeb Party headquarters in Achrafieh on the east side of Beirut shortly before he was to be sworn in. “To all those who don’t like the idea of me as president,” he said, according to Thomas Friedman’s account,2 “I say, they will get used to it.” Just a few minutes later, Habib Shartouni of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party blew him to pieces with a remote-controlled bomb planted in his sister’s apartment upstairs.

  Gemayel, before he was killed, was an ardent Lebanese nationalist. He once described his political mission as “ten thousand four hundred and fifty-two square kilometers,” the size of the country.

  But he was an ardent Lebanese nationalist at a time when Lebanese nationalism was still perceived by most Sunnis, Shias, and Druze as a Maronite project.

  “Let us proclaim that if Lebanon is not to be a Christian national homeland,” he said in a famous speech,3 “it will nonetheless remain a homeland for Christians. Above all a homeland for Christians, though one for others as well if they so choose a homeland to be protected and preserved, in which our churches may be rebuilt at the time and in the manner we desire. Yasser Arafat has transformed the church of Damur into a garage. We forgive him, and though they defiled, sullied, and pillaged the church of Damur, we will rebuild it. Had we been in Egypt or Syria, perhaps we would not even have had the right to rebuild a destroyed church. Our desire is to remain in the Middle East so that our church bells may ring out our joys and sorrows whenever we wish! We want to continue to christen, to celebrate our rites and traditions, our faith and our creed whenever we wish! We want to be able to assume and testify to our Christianity in the Middle East!”

  You might say the Lebanese Forces even appeared to be superficially similar to Hezbollah in some ways during its civil war period. Both were sectarian militias founded in the spirit of resistance against a hated foreign occupier, and both forged a military and political alliance with another foreign occupier. Hezbollah sided with the Iranians and the Syrians against the Israelis, while the Lebanese Forces sided with the Israelis against the Syrians and Palestinians. Both fought ruthlessly against rivals in their own communities.

  There were as many differences, though, as there were similarities. The Lebanese Forces never went through a theocratic phase, nor were they ever directly controlled by their foreign sponsor. They fought as hard against the Syrian occupation as Hezbollah fought against the Israelis, but they never denied Syria’s right to exist. They never vowed to destroy Syria, nor did they commit acts of terrorism in Syria or attack Syrian interests abroad as Hezbollah did to the Israelis. They also, unlike Hezbollah, turned over their weapons at the end of the war and transformed themselves into a nonviolent political party. The Taif Agreement that ended the war demanded no less, and the Lebanese Forces were one of its signatories.

  They upheld their end of the bargain even when the Syrians didn’t.

  “The first president after Taif was Rene Moawad,” Geagea said. “The Syrians killed him when he didn’t implement it the way they wanted after they began to erode the agreement. Syria was supposed to leave Beirut and Mount Lebanon in 1992 and leave all of Lebanon in 1995.”

  The Taif Agreement looked great on paper, though the Christians were despondent that many of the powers of the president—whose office was reserved for a Maronite—were transferred to the Sunni prime ministership. Damascus couldn’t control the Sunnis as easily as it could the Shias, but the Christians were even less pliable. A weak president served Syria’s interests, so Lebanon got a weak president. Even so, Moawad was assassinated after seventeen days in office.

  Much of the rest of the agreement was pretty good, though. The Syrian military was supposed to begin a phased withdrawal as Lebanese security forces came back on line and grew strong enough to keep peace themselves. All militias were to be disarmed. Perhaps most important of all, Lebanon was declared4 “a sovereign, free, and independent country and a final homeland for all its citizens.” There would be no more occupations, no more warlords, and no more loyalties to countries beyond Lebanon’s borders.

  Yet the Syrians wouldn’t leave, and Hafez al-Assad let Hezbollah hold onto its weapons, saying the Party of God was not a militia any longer but a resistance movement fighting Israeli occupation in the South Lebanon border area. No pressure was put on the Shias to abandon their loyalty to their Persian coreligionists ruling Iran. On the contrary. Hezbollah could claim fealty to Tehran as long as it also worked with Damascus, which was convenient enough since Syria and Iran were close allies anyway. So Lebanon was not sovereign. Lebanon was not free. Lebanon was not yet a final homeland for all its citizens.

  “The Syrian pretext,” Geagea said, “was that the Lebanese state was not ready to safeguard the security of the country. Whenever it was time for them to withdraw, we had security problems. Then the Lebanese puppet government asked Syria to stay, and the security problems went away. This happened over and over again.”

  Geagea and his men surrendered their weapons like they were supposed to, but they didn’t go along quietly with everything else the Syrians had in mind. They gave Ghazi Kanaan a serious headache, in fact. He was the chief of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon at the time, and he practically ran the country himself from his headquarters in Anjar through a network of bribed, cajoled, and bullied party heads and officials.

  “The Lebanese Forces,” he once said,5 “are like a germ that must be eliminated.”

  So Geagea was arrested on trumped-up charges, and he spent more than a decade by himself in a cell beneath the Ministry of Defense, not to be released until after the Syrians had been evicted.

  “After eleven years in solitary confinement,” he told me, “how can a person emerge the same? The first year I realized that this would be deep and long lasting. I had to adapt. I couldn’t assume anybody would ever let me out. Six square meters was the whole world. I had to build a life there.”

  And build a life there he did. What else could he do? They wouldn’t even let him read newspapers, let alone communicate with his supporters outside. His wife, Sethrida, could visit, but the two never had any privacy, and they weren’t allowed to talk about politics.

  “Since I was a child,” he said, “I was interested in saints and hermits and the mystical life, so I returned to that road. The guards didn’t allow me any communication, but they did let me read theology and philosophy books, which suited me well. Bit by bit I built a small world inside. My biggest difficulty was when they took me from my cell to the hospital or to the court. It bothered me. It took me out of my spiritual world. I studied Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist mystics. I went around the whole world. It took me seven years.”

  I had ideas about Geagea before I met him, ideas that I had picked up from media reports over the years; from history books; from broad-minded Lebanese Christians discomforted by his earlier behavior and instinctively opposed to militias; from some of his own party’s past bloody deeds that I was uneasy with for my own reasons; and even, to a lesser extent, from what his enemies said about him. I found myself softening a bit as he talked, though. The doctor-turned-warlord seemed to have metamorphosed yet again. It could have all been a put-on, of course, but at the same time, eleven years in solitary confinement had to have some kind of effect on a person.

  “This was the major event of my life,” he said. “I went into another dimension which is much more vivid than anything that goes on in this one. When they say everything is known to God, it’s not bullshit. All our unconsciousness are linked together. Whatever goes on in this dimension is related to what happens in that one. I suddenly became very concerned about what I would do if they liberated me. I was safe inside myself. I had hundreds of books in my six square meters.”

  The Syrians still loathed him, of course, and Hezbollah feared him. He opposed the Iranian-led Resistance Bloc a bit less stridently than Walid Jumblatt, but unlike Jumblatt, he had done so consistently without ever hav
ing let up. Jumblatt had been pressured into appeasement before, and he might be pressured again. Everyone knew Geagea could not be. He would rather go back to prison or face a firing squad.

  “I could have fled with my wife before I was arrested,” he said. “It was my personal choice to stay and risk prison. I am of the warrior archetype, and we do not flee. We confront. I would not have felt at ease with myself if I fled the country.”

  I could understand why Hezbollah and the Syrians thought this man could be a serious problem for them. His reputation might even have influenced their decision to leave Christian areas alone when they rampaged through Beirut the previous May. It was hard to say.

  It was also hard to say, though, what he and his party could actually do to stop Hezbollah if they tried. Unlike Saad Hariri and Hassan Nasrallah, Geagea had no foreign allies. No one would come to the rescue of the Lebanese Forces. Everyone in the country had access to light weapons, but Geagea’s men no longer had anything that could be called an arsenal with a straight face. There wasn’t a chance any country in the world would sponsor them as a proxy, not even the United States, especially now that George W. Bush was no longer in office.

  Not even the Israelis were looking for allies in Lebanon. They wouldn’t have found any if they tried. Geagea might not survive twenty-four hours if his party again reached out to Jerusalem. His ability to resist the resistance was severely proscribed.

  He wasn’t as downbeat as he could have been.

  “I am not confident about the future in the short run,” he said, “but the Syrian and Iranian regimes are ultimately doomed.”

  He had to be right about that much, at least. No dictatorship lasts forever. Westerners know this instinctively, as we replaced our own autocracies over time with democracies. Middle Easterners know it instinctively, too, though for slightly different reasons. In that part of the world, all rulers fall to another in the end, even if they are replaced by rulers who are no better.

 

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