Lebanon’s lesson: the government is no place for sects

Mohamad Bazzi

• Last Updated: November 05. 2009 7:12PM UAE / November 5. 2009 3:12PM GMT

Nearly five months after parliamentary elections, Lebanon is still without a government. The pro-western coalition that won is floundering in the morass of Lebanon’s peculiar sectarian politics, and the country is once again drifting toward crisis.

What is wrong with Lebanon and why is it so hard for elected politicians to form a government?

After the June 7 elections, a simplistic narrative emerged in the West: because Hizbollah and its allies were defeated at the polls, the Shiite militant group would lose some of its lustre and a pro-US political coalition would rule Lebanon. In fact, Hizbollah remains the dominant military and political force: it holds the key to both domestic and external stability, and its actions will determine whether there is another war with Israel, or if Lebanon will once again be wracked by internal conflict. The current political vacuum gives Hizbollah free rein to continue its military build-up in southern Lebanon.

Saad Hariri, the Sunni leader and US-backed prime minister-designate, has been unable to form a cabinet. Shortly after the election the Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt defected from the winning coalition to the Hizbollah camp. Michel Aoun, the Maronite Christian leader allied to Hizbollah, is demanding that his party retain control of the telecommunications ministry, which has the power to tap phone lines.

But this political manoeuvring is only a symptom of a much deeper problem: an antiquated power-sharing system adopted six decades ago.

Political deadlock in Lebanon can quickly deteriorate into sectarian violence. The last impasse over a government went on for 18 months. During that time, Lebanon was without a president for six months and the parliamentary vote to choose one was postponed 19 times. The stalemate was finally broken in May 2008, when Hizbollah ignited the worst internal fighting since the end of the civil war. When the prime minister, Fouad Siniora, outlawed Hizbollah’s underground fibre-optic communication network and dismissed a Hizbollah-affiliated security chief at Beirut airport, the militia dispatched hundreds of heavily armed fighters into the largely Sunni areas of West Beirut. They quickly routed Sunni militiamen, seized their political offices and shut down media outlets owned by Mr Hariri.

Each Lebanese faction accuses the other of serving external masters, and Lebanon is indeed part of the proxy war in the region; Iran and Syria (which support Hizbollah and its allies) are pitted against the US and Saudi Arabia (which back a coalition of Sunni and Christian parties).

But while external players have a hand in the latest political paralysis, they do not deserve all the blame. The Syrian president, Bashar Assad, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia recently reconciled in Damascus, but that did not break the impasse in Lebanon. For the most part, the Lebanese brought it on themselves – and they need to find a political settlement of their own. Otherwise the Sunni-Shiite rift in Lebanon, fuelled by years of sectarian bloodletting in Iraq, may explode.

Lebanon’s problems are rooted in a 1943 power-sharing agreement when the country won its independence from French colonial rule. The system was designed to keep a balance among 18 sects, dividing power between a Maronite Christian president, a Sunni prime minister and a Shiite speaker of parliament. The system was enshrined under the National Pact, an unwritten agreement among Lebanese leaders. Seats in parliament were divided on a 6-to-5 ratio of Christians to Muslims, and that partitioning was extended to the lowest rungs of government.

The division was based on a 1932 census that showed Maronites as the majority. By the 1960s, Muslims began to outnumber Christians and demanded a change in the balance of power. When civil war broke out in 1975, the political imbalance helped to drive the major sects to form their own militias. Because of the confessional system, political institutions never had a chance to develop and the country remained dependent on its powerful clans and feudal landlords. The zaeem, or confessional leader, who usually inherited rule from his father, became paramount during the war.

As the war waned in 1989, Lebanon’s political class convened in the Saudi city of Taif to salvage the sectarian system. Brokered by Saudi Arabia and Syria, the resulting Taif Accord restructured the National Pact by taking some power away from the Maronites. Parliament was expanded to 128 members, divided equally between Christians and Muslims.

Taif also called for all militias to disarm – except Hizbollah, whose military branch was labelled a “national resistance” against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. All factions in Lebanon constantly affirm that they will abide by Taif, elevating the document to the status of a Magna Carta. Yet few acknowledge that the agreement also called for eventually abolishing the sectarian system, although it specified no time frame for doing so.

Even if the two factions resolve the latest stalemate and reach a compromise on a new government, another political crisis is sure to emerge unless Lebanon’s leaders – and its people – tackle the root causes of the country’s instability. Eventually, the Lebanese will have to decide what kind of country they want: one built on sectarian gerrymandering, or a more democratic way of sharing power.

Mohamad Bazzi is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a journalism professor at New York University