Tripoli sliding into lawlessness

[Originally posted at NOW]

Rami Nasser and his friend had been slightly apprehensive about riding their motorbikes through Tripoli late last month, but it had been three weeks since the last bout of armed clashes had subsided, and a local friend assured them the situation was calm. As they were soon to discover, however, the definition of “calm” in Tripoli can be flexible.

“We were on our way to see a friend in Minyara [north of Tripoli] around noon,” Nasser told NOW. “When we entered Tripoli, we kept to the main roads. Everything looked very normal; the streets were full of people. Then, just a hundred meters or so after passing the Abu Ali Roundabout, on which the army had heavily deployed, we suddenly saw about five young guys blocking the road in front of us, shouting at us to stop.

“They started pushing our bikes and then one put a gun to my friend’s head, so he got off the bike and handed him the keys. At this point we thought it was a robbery. The five turned into over 20 within less than a minute. I thought about just slamming on the gas and trying to get away, but then one took out a handgun, cocked it, put his finger on the trigger and held it right to my face. So I got off and gave him the key too.

“Then, after we took our helmets off, a man looking like a sheikh – with the Salafist beard and shaven moustache – walked up and looked at our faces and told the guys, ‘No, no, it’s not them, let them go.’ So they gave us back our keys, and as we turned around, one shouted, ‘You should thank your god nothing happened to you. Go!’”

Abandoning the Minyara plan, Nasser and his friend made for a nearby army base to report what happened. They received a mostly indifferent response. “They didn’t care. They told us, ‘Good thing you made it out unharmed; they could have taken the bikes, they could have shot you,’” said Nasser.

“When they tried to write a report, they realized they didn’t have a pen, and they had to buy one from a nearby supermarket. And while they did this they told us to park our bikes inside their barracks, in case the guys came to check if we were talking to the army. It was really ironic, because we were with the army and they were afraid of them, not vice versa.”

To this day, Nasser has heard nothing back from the army regarding the report, and still doesn’t know why he and his friend were held up by the gunmen, though an army intelligence officer at the time suggested they were looking for two people on motorbikes who had recently “done something” against them.

Nor were the army the only ones to shrug at what happened. Ordinary pedestrians, some of whom had stopped to watch as the gunmen closed around the bikers, simply carried on with their days once Nasser and his friend fled the scene.

“It was as if it were a totally normal, everyday thing to put guns in people’s faces,” he told NOW.

Indeed, such occurrences do appear to be increasingly typical of the city that Tripoli has become – heavily weaponized, largely lawless, and violently divided along political and sectarian lines. Local resident Mustafa Ramadan told NOW that the notorious antagonism between the Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen neighborhoods has only made things worse.

For example, “A few weeks ago, a young man was walking through Tabbaneh, and someone decided he was a fighter from Jabal Mohsen who had killed Sunnis in the recent clashes,” said Ramadan. “So right then and there, in broad daylight, he pulled out a handgun, shot the guy dead and ran away. A few hours later, they discovered it was the wrong man.

“You can get killed nowadays just for looking like people.”

Why has it become like this? According to former Tripoli MP Mosbah al-Ahdab of the Tajaddod Movement, the problem is that the gunmen are politically covered. “The security institutions are more protective of fighters than civilians,” he told NOW. “You know, someone like me, if I request permits for my own protection from the Lebanese army, I have problems getting them. But they throw them right and left to all those fighters.”

Moreover, “The only money that comes into Tripoli is for buying weapons, on both sides, to create insecurity and to create an atmosphere that has nothing to do with the traditions and social fabric of Tripoli. This is an agenda that is regional; it has nothing to do with the state of Lebanon.”

Therefore, the solution, says Ahdab, is “to have a big decision coming from the government to say no more weapons and to protect civilians, rather than giving instructions to the security institutions to protect fighters.

“But if there is no political decision, nothing can be done, and unfortunately there has not been one. A blind eye is being turned to what’s going on.”

Some of the above names have been changed for security reasons.

Still think the Queen is irrelevant?

[Originally posted at NOW]

Perhaps the most common counter-argument heard, whenever we British republicans lament that our state is still officially headed by an unelected and unaccountable tribe of painfully mediocre Protestants, is that the royal family no longer wields any “real” power in the 21st century. Just yesterday I attended a discussion with a Harvard professor of government, who at one point asked whether theocracy was necessarily incompatible with the kind of economic success historically enjoyed by the UK. When I pointed out that the UK was and still is a theocracy - the Queen being the leader not only of the state and the army but of the Church of England too - I was met with a round of polite chuckles. Everyone “knew” I must have been joking.

Yet I don’t find anything especially amusing about today’s landmark revelations, which were only exhumed from official secrecy after a court order fiercely resisted by the Cabinet Office, that since 1962 Buckingham Palace has been invited to turn down at least 39 bills – invitations that it has occasionally accepted, including on such non-trivial decisions as whether to go to war.

Nor is it just the Queen. Her son Charles, who talks to plants and says science is bad for the “soul”, has been offered personal veto power over 20 pieces of legislation, an arrangement described by constitutional lawyers as a “nuclear deterrent”.

These are seriously damning disclosures. Legal scholar John Kirkhope put it mildly in saying, “There has been an implication that [the royals’] prerogative powers are quaint and sweet but actually there is real influence and real power”.

Real influence and power, that is, granted to someone whose sole qualification is being the eldest son (or, if there are no boys, daughter) of the “correct” Protestant clan. What could be more brazenly barbaric, more irrational, and more embarrassingly undemocratic?

Why Lebanon's economy fails: Interview with Harvard Prof. James A. Robinson

[Originally posted at NOW]

What makes one country richer than another? How is it that some states, despite having ample natural resources and hard-working populations, lag behind others without such benefits? Are politics, culture, religion or geography to blame? And how can a dysfunctional economy reverse its fortunes?

In the sleek, sea-view Hamra offices of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) on Monday morning, these were among the questions addressed by James A. Robinson, the David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University and recent co-author of “Why Nations Fail." NOW took part in a roundtable discussion with Robinson led by LCPS Director Sami Atallah, after which the below follow-up questions were asked.

The core argument of “Why Nations Fail,” says Robinson, is that it is political institutions above all that determine economic prosperity. He cites the examples of post-apartheid South Africa, and the US vis-à-vis Latin America, to dismiss cultural and geographic explanations, respectively. Though he confesses he is “not an expert on the Middle East,” he believes his findings on Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are universally valid, rejecting the idea that Islam or anything particular about Arab culture are of relevance. Wherever you look around the world, he says, “Politics are the crucial thing that determines economic growth.”

Specifically, Robinson distinguishes between “inclusive” political systems, which incentivize and reward a broad section of society for their productivity, and “extractive” ones, which divert economic gains toward an elite minority. Before the British Industrial Revolution, he says, all governments were extractive, and average incomes varied little from country to country. Ever since then, average incomes have both increased significantly and become significantly more unequal across countries, with inclusive systems at the top and extractive ones dragging behind. The key to achieving prosperity, therefore, is “the transition from extractive to inclusive institutions.”

Within the region, he cites Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria as classic examples of extractive systems. That they have both faced a popular challenge, he says, makes him “much more optimistic about the Middle East than before,” though he is concerned about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s attempts to concentrate power too narrowly among themselves at the expense of broader inclusivity.

As for Lebanon, he calls it a “fascinating” and perhaps unprecedented example. “For 2,000 years no one managed to dominate Lebanon.

“There’s no useful European model for comparison.”

NOW: You recently co-wrote an article enumerating ten ways that states fail. Lebanon’s problems seem closest to your Colombia and Somalia examples; i.e., a weak, almost absent central state and little law and order. How can these be tackled?

Prof. James A. Robinson: That’s a very hard question. If you think historically about how states are formed, it usually involves one group in society managing to effectively dominate the others. Which usually means, as in the English case, it’s part coercion and part buying people off. After the War of the Roses, Henry VII had so weakened the aristocracy that he demilitarized them and created a monopoly on violence. And then he bought them off by incorporating them into the state.

Does that model work here? It’s hard to think of the Maronites, or the Shiites, or whoever, creating a coercive monopoly over the other groups, disarming them and going down the British road. But there’s no reason that every country has to go down that road.

It seems here they’ve been trying to find a constitutional solution to the problem, but the difficulty is that no group wants to create an effective central state because they’re just too scared that it’ll be dominated or captured by other groups. And so you’re in this perpetual flux, whereby those who know power is changing to their benefit have no incentive to hand it over, while those who know it’s changing to their disadvantage don’t want that to be formally acknowledged.

How do you stabilize that situation? I don’t think the British model is relevant for thinking about Lebanon. Maybe the current system does offer some advantages. After all, Lebanon’s communities have been coexisting for over 1,000 years. In some ways it seems to be outside interference that exacerbates the problems. If everybody just left Lebanon alone, I think it would be much better off.

NOW: It’s interesting you mention demilitarization, because as you may know, at the end of the Lebanese civil war, every militia agreed to disarm with the exception of Hezbollah, whose arsenal today is substantial. What effect does that have?

Robinson: Well I think that’s probably a very bad thing, because then there is no equality of arms. You would hope to have no arms at all, of course, but an equality of arms is at least better than asymmetry, which then raises the fears of all the other groups and leads to them arming in turn.

NOW: You’ve also written recently on Israel and Palestine. Why are Israelis so much better off than Palestinians?

Robinson: Israelis are so much better off because they’ve imported so many resources; education, human capital, technology and so forth. They also have highly inclusive institutions, while Palestinian ones tend to be more extractive. At the same time, Israel has throttled Gaza, where there’s no movement of labor and highly limited trade. And they’ve done the same, to a lesser extent, in the West Bank.

A feud in the corridors of Sunni power

[Originally posted at NOW]

A long-brewing feud in the corridors of Sunni power took a turn for the worse this week, in spite of mediation efforts undertaken Monday by the community’s premier representatives, with a group of Future Movement MPs describing Grand Mufti Sheikh Muhammad Rashid Qabbani as a “dictator” and “tyrant” in a statement Wednesday.

The controversy was first triggered by Qabbani’s call last year for elections in the Higher Islamic Council, the clerical body in charge of Dar al-Fatwa, the Sunnis’ officially established religious authority. The call was rejected by 21 of the 32 members of the council reported to be loyal to the Future Movement, ostensibly on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. The Mufti has dismissed this claim, accusing the 21 members of “working on dividing the Muslim [community] for political reasons.”

Elections, if they were to occur, could impact not only the Sunni community, but all Lebanese. The council’s role is not limited to Sunni religious affairs, such as issuing fatwas and managing the awqaf [financial assets] – it also holds considerable sway over national parliamentary decisions, according to lawyer Nabil al-Halabi. For example, a 2011 draft law that sought to criminalize domestic violence was blocked by Dar al-Fatwa on the grounds that it “violat[ed] Islamic law.”

From a strictly legal perspective, it appears both sides in the current dispute have grounds to argue their cases. On the one hand, the Mufti is correct in saying that the current term of the council members has expired, according to lawyer and council member Muhammad al-Mrad. Indeed, the term expired in 2009, but has been extended by decree every year since then due to agreement among members that extraordinary circumstances in the country made the holding of elections undesirable.

By the same token, however, Mrad told NOW that elections cannot be held without the consent of all council members. “It is not possible to call for elections without referring to the council. The council is the authority that decides whether the extraordinary circumstances are still present. Any call for elections by the Mufti must be based on a council decision that these circumstances are over.”

According to Halabi, the Mufti argues in turn that since the council’s term has ended, it has become a “caretaker” one, which does not have the legal authority to reject his call for elections.

However, protocol was also violated in other ways, according to Mrad. “Article 12, Item 2 of the 1955 decree stipulates that the electoral check lists must be published in the first month of every year. The Mufti cannot call for elections” since this has not been done.

In any case, beneath the legal dispute lies deepening political antagonism that may be the key driving force of the rift. Over the past year, the Mufti and the Future Movement have waged a public war of words over a number of issues, with Future accusing the Mufti of favoring their March 8 opponents, and the Mufti in turn accusing them of “slandering” him, “disregarding [his] dignity” and trying to “take away [his] powers.”

“Undoubtedly, there are political problems such as [the Mufti’s] receiving a Hezbollah delegation [and] the Iranian and Syrian ambassadors,” Halabi told NOW. “Some consider this a dangerous sign that the Mufti may take the council to another path that does not serve the interests of the Sunni sect.” Indeed, in their statement Wednesday, Future MPs accused the Mufti of “serving [Iran] and [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad’s regime.”

The Mufti dismisses these allegations as “lies”, saying, “I am not one to be on one side and move to another like politicians.”

Others, including Mrad, believe the Mufti is maneuvering to extend his own term for the rest of his life. “I think there are personal calculations for the Mufti. His insistence on holding elections [aims] to provide a certain majority in the council, in order to extend his term for life. The law gives him the right to choose 8 members and there is someone who promised to provide him a majority,” that “someone” being “well-known parties that are controlling all issues,” likely a reference to Hezbollah and/or Syria.

The Mufti denies this too, saying via a Dar al-Fatwa statement that he would leave the institution when his term ends on September 15, 2014, and “go back home […] [A]ny other talk is just rumors and fabrications.”

At present, PM Miqati is trying to push through a solution that would see the current council remain for two to three months, after which time the elections would be held. While Qabbani has accepted the proposal subject to minor adjustments, it remains to be seen whether it will satisfy the Future Movement.

Amani Hamad contributed reporting.

[Video] Ex-NOW journalist films Syrian refugee documentary

[Originally posted at NOW]

In what we at NOW are interpreting as evidence of the excellent mentorship she received during her tenure here, the young journalist and activist Luna Safwan has just released a brief but very fine documentary video on the Syrian refugees of Aarsal.

Over the course of six visits to the remote northeastern Beqaa town, Luna has interviewed dozens of the estimated 1,800 Syrian families seeking refuge there in hastily-built bare brick constructions (they cannot be described as “houses”). In the documentary, we meet the mayor of the town as well as a mother and wife who enumerates the daily battle for survival, but most memorable are the conversations with the children, who, despite recounting the horrific violence that led them to flee Syria, speak cheerily of their hopes of becoming doctors and pharmacists when they grow up. Indeed, at times, the footage is reminiscent of Mai Masri’s classic ‘Children of Shatila’.

Incidentally, the documentary could hardly have come at a ‘better’ time, as there has never been a more perilous period for Syrian refugees in Lebanon than right now. Luna did her filming on December 29th. Since that date, a deadly storm has buried almost all of Lebanon in freezing floods and snow, claiming at least four lives. One shudders to think how Luna’s interviewees are faring today, but to give us an idea, NOW’s Raphael Thelen will be filing a report from his own trip to Aarsal within the next few days.

A new (sort of) twist in Saqrgate

[Originally posted at NOW]

In a new development that isn’t quite as interesting as it might at first sound, former General Security chief Jamil as-Sayyid has given Lebanon’s general prosecutor a CD purporting to contain four audio recordings of phone calls between MP Oqab Saqr and an “armed group in Syria”.

Saqr, you will recall, was in December the subject of a high-profile ‘exposé’ by OTV and Al Akhbar, who published calls between him and the Free Syrian Army in which he appeared to be negotiating the provision of arms at the behest of former PM Saad Hariri. In a somewhat grandiose press conference, Saqr retorted that the media outlets had tampered with the tapes, revealing what he said were the complete recordings, showing he had in fact been negotiating humanitarian aid.

OTV replied that he in turn had doctored the evidence, by which point few people knew who to believe – though in an oddly underreported development, an independent British company called Audio Forensic Services commissioned by al-Jadeed TV (not exactly known for pro-Hariri leanings) to investigate the tapes played by Saqr at his Istanbul press conference found them to be authentic, i.e., not edited. Saqr and Hariri subsequently launched a lawsuit against OTV and Al Akhbar for defamation and inciting sectarianism.

That was as much as was known yesterday. Do Sayyid’s new recordings change anything? Not really. Even assuming they’re genuine, they implicate Saqr only in negotiations to transfer funds and communication equipment to the rebels – not weapons. And that Sayyid freely admits their source is Syrian state television does not exactly recommend their credibility. Whether or not Saqr is in fact arming the rebels (and whether or not it would be such a bad thing if he were), as far as hard evidence is concerned, there remains considerable room for reasonable doubt.

Previous posts on this topic: ‘The Saqrpunch’

British Christians: Assad's accidental friends

[Originally posted at NOW]

While Bashar al-Assad’s Western apologists have traditionally hailed from circles described (or at any rate self-described) as leftist, in recent weeks a new clique of apparatchiks has surfaced from a rather different quarter – the cobwebbed upper crust of British Christian conservatism. A series of reports for such august right-of-center publications as The Telegraph and The Spectator have combined shoddy journalism with vulgar appeals to the tribal emotions of their reactionary Christian readership to dangerously distort the narrative of recent events on the ground in Syria.

Take, for instance, Mary Wakefield’s dispatch from Lebanon for the Spectator in October. Wakefield drives to the border town of al-Qaa to interview Christian refugees from nearby Syrian towns, who recount lurid stories of mass atrocities committed by the Sunni rebels, including one execution with a syringe of diesel by a man muttering, “Die slowly, you Christian dog” (a quote appropriated by Wakefield for her title).

What Wakefield barely mentions, and doesn’t elaborate on, is that these interviews were conducted in the presence of one Dr Bassam El-Hachem, an academic and “big hitter in Lebanon’s FPM party”. As anyone who follows Lebanese politics knows, the FPM is the largest component of the incumbent pro-Damascus March 8 cabinet; a party whose leader has repeatedly described Syria as the most democratic country in the Middle East. And as anyone who has interviewed Syrian refugees knows, they would not dream of expressing pro-opposition sentiment in the presence of a senior party member of one of Assad’s major allies. (So consuming is their fear of the regime that I once saw a group refuse to give their names to UNHCR.)

Later, Wakefield pays a visit to the Melkite Archbishop John Darwish in Zahle (or, as she writes it, “Zhaleh”), who expounds on the rebel “jihadists” and their role in the Israeli conspiracy to partition Syria. More on him later.

Then came Terry Waite’s catastrophic effort in the Telegraph last month, in which he embarked on what he called a “mission of peace” to Hizbullah, his captors for five years during the civil war. He almost exactly emulates Wakefield’s itinerary: first the long drive to al-Qaa “to see for myself the plight of the many Christian refugees”, and then the chat with Archbishop Darwish in Zahle (which Waite proves capable of spelling).

Intriguingly, we learn that Darwish is a “strong backer” of the 2006 Memorandum of Understanding between the FPM and Hizbullah, described gushingly by Waite as “one of the most remarkable developments in Lebanon in recent years […] Christian[s] and Muslims working together for a united Lebanon”. The potential implications of this on Darwish’s opinions of the Syrian conflict are left unexplored by Waite, but it’s not difficult to see how he reaches the conclusion that the Arab Spring “has now been hijacked by extreme jihadists”.

This sentiment continued yesterday in a Guardian piece by Rupert Shortt, religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement whose latest book is titled ‘Christianophobia’. Taking a very dim view of the Arab Spring in general (apparently it has “given way to a Christian winter”), he asserts that Syrian rebels “want all traces of Christian life to be erased”, citing the murder of a priest in Qatana that, we are led to believe, was carried out by Sunni Islamists.

In fact, nothing is known about Father Fadi Haddad’s killers. The regime blamed “terrorists”; the opposition blamed the regime. Like so many of Syria’s “disappeared”, we may never find out the truth. Yet Shortt takes the regime line at face value and portrays the atrocity as typical rebel conduct.

Implicit in all of this is a grotesque form of sectarianism, which sees Christian Syrian refugees as more worthy of sympathy than their vastly more numerous Sunni counterparts (you don’t have to drive all the way to al-Qaa to meet a Syrian refugee). In turn, it insidiously breathes life into the false narrative of Assad as “protector” of the minorities (just as he’s the “protector” of the Palestinians, when he isn’t air-striking their camps) and the last bastion against an Islamist tsunami. This is both an intellectual disservice to readers and a moral insult to those risking death for a freer Syria.