Qifa Nabki | A Lebanese Political Blog

On October 11th, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar published a story by Omar Nashabe entitled “STL’s Cassese: Resignation Likely Sign of Infighting, Not Ill Health.”  In the piece, Nashabe (who is the paper’s judicial affairs editor) claimed that the previous day’s resignation of Antonio Cassese from the presidency of the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) was “likely prompted by a power struggle between prosecutor Daniel Bellemare and STL judges,” and not by health issues, as Cassese had originally said.

As we all know by now, Mr. Cassese passed away last night, after a long battle with cancer.

But I’m sure that Nashabe was right, and that Cassese’s resignation had nothing to do with failing health.

I’m sure that Nashabe’s single source, an unnamed “New York based UN official” was absolutely correct about the reasons motivating Cassese to step down and Ban Ki-Moon’s decision to cover up the mess with a false excuse. Sounds like iron-clad reporting to me.

I’ve generally found Omar Nashabe’s commentary on the STL to be smart and well-argued, but this piece exposes one of the primary weaknesses of the Lebanese press, namely its questionable reporting standards. Al-Akhbar should be much better than this, and usually is. Take a look at my friend Marwan Taher’s excellent story on the prosecution’s reliance on telecommunications evidence. He lays out a very convincing argument against the credibility of this evidence, but is still intellectually honest enough to point out that Hizbullah’s counter-narrative (that they were framed by Israel) is just not convincing, as far as the actual mechanics are concerned.

I’m not disputing the possibility that Cassese clashed with Bellemare, or that the long string of resignations at the STL does not betoken a climate of mistrust or acrimony among its central players.

But when a guy says he’s quitting for health reasons, you need more than one anonymous source to prove he’s lying.

Otherwise, if he dies on you twelve days later, you look very silly and your credibility is shot to hell.

Lebanon's various electoral maps (courtesy of IFES, see report below)

The Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) has published an excellent primer on Tunisia’s upcoming elections. It is succinct, well-written, and will bring you up to speed on all of the most important players, issues, and questions in about twenty minutes. I highly recommend checking it out (download the PDF here).

Speaking of elections, Lebanon’s Interior Minister Marwan Charbel unveiled a new electoral draft law a couple of days ago. It contains several positive elements, such as a 30% gender quota, pre-printed ballots, and an open-list proportional representation system, but disappoints in other ways — several small districts, no independent supervisory commission.

The big debate over the law will focus on the question of how many electoral districts to include. Unless the districts are large, proportional representation will not generate the major benefit that its advocates ascribe to it, namely a diverse representation of political parties. For some background reading on the subject of electoral districting in Lebanon, here is another excellent primer, this one by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (whose work we have highlighted on many occasions).

Thoughts on electoral reform issues are welcome in the comment section.

Two years ago, several people who had never met and, in certain cases, did not even know each others’ real names, launched an online experiment called OneMideast.org.

The group consisted of ten Israelis and ten Arabs from a variety of professional backgrounds: academics, journalists, businesspeople, and various others. They had little in common apart from an interest in Middle Eastern politics, and a habit of spending hours on the Internet discussing current affairs with other political junkies on various Mideast-themed blogs. One of the most stimulating venues for such discussion was Syria Comment, a daily newsletter on Syrian politics authored by Joshua Landis, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Oklahoma.

The combination of anonymity, politics, and a crowd of amateur pundits does not usually produce ideal conditions for respectful and reasoned debate, as anyone who has visited the comment section of an online publication can attest. However, Syria Comment seemed to be different. It had its share of “trolls”, to be sure, but it also had something else: a core group of several dozen regular readers who spent hours each day discussing the latest news out of Damascus, Beirut, Washington, and Tel Aviv.

These readers—largely expatriate Syrians living in the West, but also many Israelis, Europeans, Americans, and other Arabs—espoused a wide spectrum of political views. There were Baathists and Syrian nationalists; leftists and pan-Arabists; American Zionists and Israeli anti-Zionists; pro-Western critics of the Assad regime; sectarian apologists of all stripes; Salafists; technocrats and neo-liberal capitalists living abroad; and many others. Whatever the topic of any given day—Syrian fiscal policy, democratic reform, the war in Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood—the mix of clashing perspectives made for vigorous and often enlightening debates.

It was at Syria Comment that I got my start as a blogger. Joshua graciously invited me to write my own posts about Lebanese affairs for his blog, even when they ran counter to his own politics or dabbled in pre-Qnion-esque satire. I have no doubt that much of Qifa Nabki’s early exposure during the build-up to the Lebanese elections in 2009 was due to Joshua’s endorsement and support.

Over the past several months, for obvious reasons, Syria Comment’s readership has exploded. After a valiant effort of daily updates containing anything and everything about Syria in the English and Arabic language press, YouTube, Facebook, the blogosphere, Twitter, etc., Joshua decided to turn over the maintenance of the site to two of his lieutenants (and good friends of mine), Ehsani and Alex. I woke up this morning to find that Ehsani (who has a real job as a banker in Manhattan) is also buckling under the pressure and will be taking a break from Syria Comment. This leaves Alex, who runs his own business in Montreal, to keep the site going.

As Mustapha notes over at Beirut Spring, many will gleefully read this latest development as a sign that Syria Comment is folding along with its supposed Baathist patrons in Damascus, which is silly nonsense. While I often disagree with Joshua on political issues, the accusation that his site is nothing but a mouthpiece for the Assad regime is a hollow critique, and one that misses the greatest virtue of Syria Comment, namely the role it plays as a forum for debate among Syria-watchers.

I recall, for example, the oddly disembodied camaraderie that emerged between many of the regular discussants at Syria Comment during the post-Hariri assassination years. We rarely seemed to reach a consensus on any issue, but if there was one thing that we all seemed to appreciate, it was the idea that sustained dialogue had a way of undermining deeply-held convictions and reconciling seemingly incompatible positions. The presence of a community—of strangers, perhaps, but a community nonetheless—made it possible to explore the multiple facets of a contentious subject over a series of days or even weeks, with the record of these interactions being preserved within the archive of the blog, a kind of collective memory of the conversation itself.

I’m no stranger to the challenges of trying to maintain an online forum without shirking one’s professional duties and family responsibilities, so I sympathize with both Joshua and Ehsani. However, I just want to say that if Syria Comment does indeed disappear — at this moment when it is needed most — we will have lost something very valuable indeed.

A journalist called me yesterday afternoon for a comment on the recent news that Mitt Romney had appointed Walid Phares to his foreign policy team. As is well known, Phares was a member of the Lebanese Forces’ Executive Committee during the Lebanese Civil War, and the news of his appointment provoked a few expressions of surprise and dismay among DC-based Mideast policy wonks.

After getting off the phone, I did a quick search through the news archives and turned up a 1995 article in the Jerusalem Report, describing an initiative launched by Walid Phares in the mid-90s called the Leadership Committee for a Free Middle East. The committee brought together “top officials of the Zionist Organization of America, the Jewish Action Alliance, Americans for a Safe Israel and Likud America, along with groups claiming to represent Lebanese Maronites, Egyptian Copts, Iraqi Assyrians and South Sudanese Christians.” Here’s the part to read:

The groups have natural common interests, said Manfred Lehman, a member of the ZOA’s national executive and an organizer of the coalition. Christians in the Middle East are often persecuted by Muslim governments, he said, and are threatened by Islamic fundamentalism.

The initiative for the committee came from Walid Phares, the Maronite founder of the World Lebanese Organization. “For us, the conflict in the Middle East is not Arab against Israeli, but Arab against non-Arab,” he said, arguing that the Maronites, and most other Mideast Christian groups, are not ethnic Arabs, but descendants of Christian peoples who lived in the region before the Muslim Arab conquest in the seventh century.

Phares’s own history points to further motives behind the new coalition. A former official with the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia, he fled to the United States in 1990 after Syrian troops crushed the last Christian resistance in Beirut. His group has branches in several countries and in Israel’s security zone in South Lebanon, which he says is “for us the last free enclave for Lebanese Christians.”

The Leadership Committee for a Free Middle East seems to have had a short-lived history, but the few hits that Google turns up include this little gem from Manfred Lehmann’s website

We had a nice minyan for all Shabbat services, including a Sefer Torah from a neighborhood synagogue. I did not attend any of the Shabbat sessions, but was told that the most sensational presentations was rendered by Professor Walid Phares, head of the World Lebanese Organization, who co-chairs with me the Leadership Committee for a free Middle East. He showed how the Moslem Arabs in the Middle East are invaders, conquerors and occupiers of land that was owned by the original Christian populations — the Copts in Egypt, the Maronites and Phoenicians in Lebanon, the Assyrian/Chaldeans in Iraq, etc… They all look upon Israel — the only country that regained its historical land — as their own only hope to regain their own political and religious independence. He also explained something absolutely fundamental. The main reason the Arabs hate Israel is that they fear exactly this re-awakening of the original inhabitants of the lands they have usurped. While Israel exists, the Arabs must fear that the original populations will make a comeback and evict the Moslems from the lands conquered by them. Hence the close love by these Christians for Israel and their feeling of total interdependence. Eighteen million Christians are affected by this situation — the most important and powerful group of allies Israel has, which until now it has ignored and neglected!

What I find most interesting about the Phares story is, sadly, not the fact that Romney appointed him to his Mideast advisory committee, but rather how bizarrely out of sync Phares’s views are with mainstream Christian politics in Lebanon today.

The Lebanese Christians have a “close love” for Israel? They regard the Muslims as “invaders”? If Walid Phares ran for political office in Lebanon today, how good would his chances be, do you think? I’d put them somewhere in Antoine Lahad territory.

This is not to say that there aren’t Lebanese who share Phares’s oddball views about the ethnic origins of the Maronites and their secessionist aspirations, and some of them may even hold public office today. But these views are no longer part of the mainstream Christian discourse, just as Hassan Nasrallah’s calls for the creation of an Islamic state in the 1980s are now regarded as an embarrassment by the party (and were anyway disavowed by Nasrallah himself as early as 1995).

My point here is that while much is made of Lebanon being a divided society — as reflected in its confessional politics and civil conflicts — it is also true that over twenty years have passed since the end of the civil war, and whatever Lebanon is today, it is not what it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Certain things have changed, for better or worse.

The Maronite Patriarch’s defense of Hizbullah’s weapons is only the most recent example we could point to. Beshara al-Rai took a lot of heat from some Christians for his statements, but he also gained sympathy from many others who support the FPM’s alliance with Hizbullah. And speaking of which, who could have imagined such an alliance between the Aounists (whose views were not that different from those of other right-wing Christian parties) and Hizbullah, twenty years ago?

Yes, there is plenty of opportunism and cynicism in play. But let’s not brandish silly terms like “stagnation” and “feudalism” as a substitute for real engagement with Lebanon’s complexities. Our society remains divided, but the fact that the views of Hassan Nasrallah (circa 1985) and Walid Phares (circa 1995 and perhaps still today) are largely out of place in contemporary Lebanese political discourse is a reminder that divisiveness is not hard-wired into Lebanon’s society or its politics. To insist otherwise is, in my view, a symptom of intellectual laziness.

This post started out about Mitt Romney and has sort of morphed into a response to the friendly criticisms of my recent post about Lebanon and the Arab Revolutions. In that essay, I made the simple argument that the reason Lebanon has not witnessed massive popular protests as we’ve seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen has little to do with our “social divisiveness” or “political immaturity” and everything to do with the absence of authoritarian conditions and a single, hegemonic, universally reviled “regime”.

I also argued that Lebanese democracy activists have relatively fewer formidable challenges to contend with than their counterparts in countries where the remnants of a once-powerful regime are effectively dictating the course of events in the post-revolutionary period. This is not to say that Lebanese activists do not have their own cast of reactionary forces to face off with, but let’s be honest: there is a difference between Nabih Berri and Field Marshal Tantawi (who is targeting civil society groups with greater ruthlessness than Mubarak did).

The point of this argument is not to get into a pissing match about which Middle Eastern countries are more suited to democracy (especially given that different democratic models may work for different countries). Rather, my underlying point was the following:

If one is willing to make a case for cautious optimism regarding the possibilities of reform in countries like Egypt and Libya, then there’s no reason not to be similarly optimistic with a case like Lebanon.

Some of you remarked that Lebanon does not need a revolution of the streets, but rather a “revolution of thought”, a change in mindsets and orientations. I would suggest that such changes are already taking place gradually, under the surface, and we would be better served by recognizing them and trying to bolster them rather than sitting around and waiting for a “revolution of thought”.

Let me close by reiterating that this essay should not be read as a defense of the status quo. If there’s a purpose behind Qifa Nabki, it’s to think critically and aggressively about the problems of governance in Lebanon. Doing that effectively means, in part, being clear-eyed about the true nature of the challenges facing the country, the opportunities available for reform, and the resources that can be drawn upon to effect progressive change.

Okay, back to the dissertation… *sigh*

This blog began life three years ago with a “conspiracy chronicles” post that seems awfully relevant today. Four hundred posts later (we aim for concision) and with over 22,000 comments (our readers aim for prolixity), things remain interesting, so perhaps I won’t make good on my threat to shut it all down and retire to a life of greater productivity.

To celebrate QN’s toddlerhood, I thought I’d draw your attention to a noteworthy newborn, a blog about Egypt by a friend of mine living in Cairo. Margaret Litvin is a professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University, and the author of a new book about Arab readings of Hamlet (forthcoming from Princeton University Press next month). She’s in Egypt this fall with her husband and two kids, starting a new book project and blogging about Egyptian politics and culture on the side. I highly recommend you check out her blog, Send Down the Basket.

Those of you waiting for my follow-up post to the Arab revolutions debate we’ve been having, it’s on its way later today or tomorrow. Sharpen your knives.