💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › crimethinc-lebanon-a-revolution-against-sectarianism.gm… captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:38:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Lebanon: A Revolution against Sectarianism Author: CrimethInc. Date: November 13, 2019 Language: en Topics: Lebanon, sectarianism, uprising Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2019/11/13/lebanon-a-revolution-against-sectarianism-chronicling-the-first-month-of-the-uprising#fn:1 Notes: Report courtesy of Joey Ayoub, writer.
Since October 17, Lebanon has experienced countrywide demonstrations
that have toppled the prime minister and transformed Lebanese society.
These demonstrations are part of a global wave of uprisings including
Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Haiti, Sudan, Iraq, Hong Kong, and Catalunya,
in which the exploited and oppressed are challenging the legitimacy of
their rulers. In Lebanon, a sectarian power-sharing arrangement dating
from the end of the civil war has created a permanent ruling class of
warlords who use patronage networks to maintain power by winning
elections—confirming our thesis that politics is war by other means. In
this thorough account of the events of the past month, an on-the-ground
participant describes the Lebanese uprising in detail, exploring how it
has undermined patriarchal structures and transcended religious
divisions to bring people together against the ruling class.
For the people of Lebanon, the week of October 17, 2019 was among the
most eventful in recent memory.
On the night of October 13–14, wildfires ravaged Lebanon and parts of
Syria. We lost up to 3,000,000 trees (1200 hectares) in a country of
10,500 square kilometers (4035 square miles), nearly doubling the annual
average of tree loss in just 48 hours. The government’s response was
disastrous. Lebanon had only three helicopters, donated by civilians who
pitched in, that were just sitting at the airport because they had
fallen into disuse as the government had not maintained them. Although
the government had allocated money for maintenance, it had
“disappeared,” as so many funds do in Lebanon, into the hands of the
sectarian upper class. The fires were eventually put out by a
combination of volunteer civil servants (civil defense hasn’t been paid
in decades) including people from the Palestinian refugee camps, random
volunteers, aircraft sent by Jordan, Cyprus, and Greece and, luckily
enough, rain. It could have turned out much, much worse.
Not satisfied with their own incompetence, Lebanese politicians started
scapegoating Syrians, spreading rumors that Syrians were starting the
fires and moving into abandoned Lebanese homes (Syrians are apparently
fireproof). Some of them, like Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) politician
Mario Aoun, complained that the fires were only affecting Christian
areas, ignoring the fact that the Shouf region, where much of the fires
happened, is actually a Druze-majority area. (See the Lebanese Politics
podcast, episode 59.)
Rather than addressing the repercussions of the fires and preventing the
next ones, the state exacerbated the situation. On October 17, the state
approved a bill that would tax internet-based phone calls via services
like WhatsApp. They framed this as an attempt to bring in additional
revenue in order to unlock over $11 billion worth of “aid” promised at
the CEDRE conference in Paris:
“The World Bank Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa
Ferid Belhaj said that if Lebanon wanted to see any CEDRE money soon, it
needs to get serious about implementing reforms.”
These “reforms” were essentially measures further punishing the
bottom-tier economic majority while excepting the top minority.
Lebanon had already experienced a series of economic crises tied to
corruption and national debt—the vast majority of which (approximately
90%) is owed to local banks and the central bank—resulting in several
bank runs, fuel shortages, and strikes. Nearly $90 billion is
concentrated in only 24,000 bank accounts in Lebanon, which is to say,
something between 6000 and 8000 account holders in Lebanon have over
eight times the amount of money that the government is hoping to
“unlock” with CEDRE. Although many media outlets focused on the
so-called “Whatsapp tax,” it was actually the combination of all of
these factors and many more that inspired outrage.
On the night of October 17, thousands took to the streets of Lebanon,
including Beirut, Tyre, Baalbek, Nabatiyeh, Saida, and many other places
in spontaneous protests. The protests were so overwhelming that the
state cancelled the tax immediately. That night, a woman named Malak
Alaywe Herz kicked the armed bodyguard of a politician; the video went
viral and, as in Sudan, a woman became a revolutionary icon. By October
18, parts of downtown Beirut were on fire and large parts of the country
were completely shut down by roadblocks, many of which involved burning
tires.
I had joined the protests in Beirut by then and have been going nearly
every day since. As an organizer of the 2015 protests, who grew up in
Lebanon and who has been writing about it since 2012, I could see right
away that these protests were going to be different. I wasn’t the only
one taken over by that rarest of all feelings: hope. On the contrary, it
was everywhere. In this account, I will try to explain why these
protests have already created irreversible changes in the country,
changes that the ruling warlord-oligarch elites are struggling to
reverse.
It’s useful to think of the ongoing uprising as having both reformist
and revolutionary dimensions. It is an uprising against injustice and
corruption and a revolution against sectarianism.
The reformist dimension takes the form of protests against corruption.
One common demand, expressed in the chant kellon yaani kellon (“all of
them means all of them”), is for the government to resign. On October
20, four ministers associated with the Lebanese Forces (LF), a party led
by former warlord Samir Geagea, resigned; since then, the LF has been
trying, rather unsuccessfully, to ride the wave of the protests. The
first major victory was Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s resignation on
Tuesday, October 29, effectively collapsing the government as we had
known it—although, as of this writing, he is still caretaker prime
minister.
There are no unified demands coming from the streets; in many ways,
there is resistance to formulating a list of demands. That said, there
are several popular demands, mostly calling for the end of corruption
and sectarian politics, which are rightly seen as intertwined. We see
these in the street interviews conducted by TV stations, on social
media, and between protesters themselves. As Kareem Chehayeb and Abby
Sewell wrote, in addition to the government’s resignation, two common
demands have been for “early parliamentary elections with a new
electoral law for elections that are not based on sectarian
proportionality” and “for an independent investigation into stolen and
misappropriated public funds.” That last one was succinctly summarized
by a man from Arsal: “There is no war. This is about money. You stole
the money, return the money.”
The protests are anti-sectarian in many different ways. They transcend
what we might think of as left/right divides and even include
traditional supporters of sectarian political parties. This anger is
nearly three decades in the making; the inter-generational traumas are
even older. Since the end of the civil war, Lebanon’s transnational
warlord-oligarch class has perfected the rules of the game. The state
serves as a vessel through which this class can do business with itself
and with primarily Gulf, Iranian, and Western elites; clientalist
networks maintain structures of power benefitting this class, keeping
segments of the population dependent on them; public infrastructures
have been left to rot while rapid privatization limits freedom of
movement between regions and regularly paralyzes the whole country; and,
more recently, the fear of violence spilling over from Syria have been
regularly evoked, three decades after the country’s own civil war, to
impose helplessness on the people of Lebanon.
Long story short: while trying to recover from 15 years of civil war,
residents of Lebanon have spent the past three decades navigating life
in a country whose affairs they have had very little say over. An
implosion was inevitable, but the way it has happened is challenging the
more cynical interpretations of Lebanese political life, including those
of the Lebanese themselves.
When the civil war ended under the “tutelage” (read: occupation) of the
Syrian regime, the powers that be scrambled to create a semblance of
politics in order to promote the message that the 1990s would be the
decade of reconstruction. In Beirut, this involved privatizating
virtually everything. The historical downtown, which Arabs throughout
the region refer to as Al-Balad (literally “the country”) was
transformed into Solidere, the private company founded by the Hariri
family. This “actually existing neoliberalism” was sugarcoated in a
language of hope: the narrative was that only through business ties
could the menace of the civil war be kept at bay. This was the time that
our generation was born—the postwar generation that I like to refer to
as the “afterthought generation.” We grew up hearing stories of “the
good old days” prior to the war, when Beirut had a tramway and people
could sell merchandise in public spaces. Needless to say, that rosy
picture of the pre-war years glossed over many crises at the regional
and national levels, crises that ultimately led to the civil war in
1975.
But the 1990s also saw other developments. The parliament passed an
amnesty law in 1991 forgiving most of the crimes committed during the
war, enabling those with established power to get into government. Most
of the current political heavyweights were warlords or related to
warlords, or else became active in the postwar era either in its first
days or after the 2005 Cedar Revolution that expelled the Syrian army.
These political figures include Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal movement
since the 1980s and speaker of parliament since 1992; Michel Aoun,
president of the republic, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM)
who returned from exile in 2005, and father-in-law of Gebran Bassil, who
is also a leader of the FPM as well as the foreign minister; Samir
Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces (LF) since the 1980s, freed from
prison in 2005 and historical rival of Aoun; Hassan Nasrallah, leader of
Hezbollah since 1992; Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive
“Socialist” Party (PSP) since 1977; and Samy Gemayel, leader of the
Kataeb party and nephew of Bachir Gemayel, a warlord who was
assassinated in 1982 while president-elect. In addition, we can count
Future Movement (FM) leader Saad Hariri, repeat prime minister and son
of assassinated prime minister Rafik Hariri, as one the most prominent
oligarchs of the postwar era, alongside Tammam Salam, former prime
minister and the son of Saeb Salam, six-time prime minister before the
civil war, and Najib Mikati, also former prime minister and usually
cited as the richest man in Lebanon.
In short, Lebanon is ruled by political dynasties that were forged in
the fire of the civil war or during its postwar “reconstruction.” This
is who protesters in the northern city of Tripoli addressed on November
2 with the chant “we are the popular revolution, you are the civil war.”
Tripoli, Northern Lebanon’s biggest city, has been at the forefront of
the uprising. Nearly every day since October 17, thousands of protesters
in Tripoli have taken to the streets to demand the fall of the sectarian
regime. To quote one 84-year-old participant, “There is so much poverty
and deprivation here that, no matter how this turns out, things will be
better.” In addition to the spectacular displays of popular
mobilization, kellon yaani kellon and “the people want the downfall of
the regime” ring out on a daily basis.
Tripoli, a Sunni-majority city, has been openly defying the sectarian
narrative by declaring that they stand with Nabatiyeh, Tyre, and
Dahieh—all Shia-majority. When Hezbollah and Amal shabbiha (government
thugs) attacked protesters in Nabatiyeh on October 23, Tripoli responded
“Nabatiyeh, Tripoli is with you until death.” The “popular revolution
vs. civil war” chant, quickly adopted in the rest of Lebanon, presents a
narrative in which those who still cling to their sectarian identities
as relics of the civil war oppose those who are trying to build a future
that is inclusive of all regardless of religious sects. Tripoli’s
protests indicated early on that this uprising would be different.
Tripoli has maintained a distinct momentum because of the organizational
structures that have emerged. As in Beirut, protesters in Tripoli have
set up people’s hospitals and discussion forums in addition to occupying
the municipal building. The mobilizations have been so inclusive that,
for the first time I know of, protesters from elsewhere in Lebanon have
gone to Tripoli to participate in the protests there, in response to an
open invitation. On October 22, just before protesters started chanting
“the people want the downfall of the regime,” a man with a megaphone
declared “if they [the government] shut down all the squares, you are
all welcome in Nour Square [the main square].” For the first time,
Tripoli became the center of national Lebanese outrage. Nour means
“light” in Arabic; the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury named Tripoli the
light of the revolution.
To grasp the significance of this, it is necessary to understand that
parts of Tripoli and the Akkar district north of it have historically
born the brunt of state violence while being demonized by the public and
media as hubs of Sunni extremism. Both the Lebanese state and Hezbollah
have adopted their own versions of the post-9/11 “War on Terror”
narrative, and the Sunni-majority areas of northern Lebanon, among the
poorest of Lebanon and close to Syria, have become scapegoats. Yet
despite these attempts by the sectarian parties, the scapegoating of the
North has failed to hinder this movement. One can find sectarian
comments online, usually mingled with anti-refugee comments, but they
have not significantly impacted the momentum on the streets.
This is why the status of Tripoli as the de facto capital of the
revolution has made political actors like the FPM very uncomfortable.
The FPM television station, OTV, has regularly demonized protesters in
Tripoli and Akkar, engaging in a disinformation campaign from the start.
One headline claimed that Tripoli was “copying” the Syrian city of Homs
(brutally crushed by the Assad regime in 2014), suggesting that
militants from Idlib were making their way there. Another pundit on OTV
proclaimed “just as we went to Syria and buried their revolution, we
will bury this revolution in Lebanon.” (The FPM never militarily
participated in Syria, but its ally Hezbollah obviously did). When an
activist in Beirut responded to anti-Syrian refugee sentiments by
chanting “Bassil out, refugees in,” OTV took that footage and added the
headline “American training, Saudi incitement, Syrian infiltration.”
The Syria connection runs deep. Protesters in Tripoli have chanted
“Idlib we are with you until death,” in reference to the Syrian city
that continues to be bombed by the Russian and Syrian air forces; Syrian
chants have been adopted and re-purposed throughout Lebanon. As one
Syrian activist wrote, “Lebanon’s political establishment, particularly
the part of it that is still in power, is increasingly annoyed by
Tripoli and going to lengths to paint in a bad light the city and its
inhabitants.” The scapegoating of Tripoli could be seen as an extension
of the Lebanese government’s response to the Syrian revolution,
especially on the part of Hezbollah, Amal, and the FPM. Although
officially unaffiliated, the Lebanese government has taken a hardline
turn against refugees since Aoun’s election in 2016—not that the
government was pro-refugee before. Bassil especially has associated
himself with this rhetoric, hence the anti-Bassil pro-refugee chant.
The district of Akkar has arguably been scapegoated by politicians and
media outlets even more than Tripoli. Although protests there began
alongside the rest of Lebanon, media coverage remains minimal. On
October 30, protesters in Akkar, as elsewhere in the country, echoed the
famous Syrian chant “yalla erhal ya Bashar” (hurry up, leave Bashar
[Assad]), adjusting it to “yalla erhal Michel Aoun,” as first heard in
Beirut. That same night, security forces attacked a march in Akkar as
protesters tried to block the roads. The violent response by security
forces led protesters to contrast the relatively mild response by
security forces in Beirut to their response in Akkar.
The other part of the story here is set in the South, especially in
Nabatiyeh and Tyre (known as Sour in Arabic), as well as the Bekaa
Valley in the East.
Protesters in Nabatiyeh were among the first to demonstrate on the night
of October 17. By October 18, some were already challenging
long-standing taboos. The very suggestion one protester made on live
television—that Nabih Berri, whose Amal movement dominates the region
politically alongside Hezbollah, has been Speaker of Parliament for too
long—terrified the journalist interviewing him; the tweet documenting
this has since been deleted. To understand why this occurred and why
what is happening in the South and East is so important, we need to
discuss the shabbiha.
The shabbiha have historically been a Syrian phenomenon. The word itself
comes from “ghost” or “shadow”; it is often associated with black
Mercedes S600 cars (called al-shabah) which have been used for
kidnapping Syrian dissidents and protesters. Later on, the term took on
a more general connotation, describing men willing to be violent on
behalf of their zu’ama (singular: za’im)—local warlords or
chieftains—who often receive orders from above. This can be anything
from beating up protesters to kidnapping, torturing, even killing them.
The latter isn’t as common in Lebanon anymore, which is why the term
shabbiha now means any pro-government actor willing to inflict violence
on protesters.
One image, for example, shows armed pro-Amal shabbiha in Tyre on October
19; a video from that same morning shows these shabbiha attacking
protesters. Due to their nature, it is often very difficult to identify
shabbiha, and almost impossible to “prove” a chain of command. But for
both historical and contemporary reasons, they have become associated
with the Amal Movement and Hezbollah (although armed FPM shabbiha have
also attacked protesters on at least one occasion).
Although Beirut also experienced two major attacks by shabbiha, it is
worth noting here that even the events of October 29, when hundreds of
Amal/Hezbollah men went to downtown Beirut to beat protesters and
journalists and destroy tents set up by protesters, pale in comparison
to what they have been getting away with in the South. On October 23,
Amal/Hezbollah shabbiha attacked protesters in Nabatiyeh, injuring over
20 of them. This so shocked protesters that half a dozen municipal
council members resigned the next day under pressure. In response to the
October 23 attack, October 24 was called “the day of solidarity with
Nabatiyeh” and a meme was passed around with the words “Nabatiyeh
doesn’t kneel, ask the Zionists.” On the “Sunday of Unity” (November 3),
protesters in Kfar Remen, historically known for its communist
resistance to Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, met with
protesters from Nabatiyeh. Some protesters fleeing Nabatiyeh’s
Hezbollah-affiliated police went to Kfar Remen to join the protests
there.
This is an extraordinary turn of events for a region of Lebanon that is
often considered Hezbollah and Amal’s unchallenged territory; the same
goes for the Bekaa valley. But the challenges to the dominant powers
have continued. We’ve heard chants such as “We don’t want an army in
Lebanon except the Lebanese army” (a challenge to the actual dominant
military power, Hezbollah) as well as in solidarity with Tripoli and the
rest of Lebanon. We saw violence by shabbiha in Bint Jbeil, a town on
the southern border which suffered greatly under Israeli occupation and
then during the 2006 war. Tyre also joined on the first evening,
chanting “the people want the downfall of the regime”; by October 19,
shabbiha were violently attacking protesters. Journalists were forced to
flee the scene as shabbiha were indiscriminately beating anyone in their
way. One witness described how the mukhabarat (secret police) were
following protesters alongside the shabbiha.
As for the Bekaa valley, media coverage has been relatively low. There
have been protests in Zahleh, Baalbek, Taalbaya, Bar Elias, Saadnayel,
Chtoura, Majdal Anjar, Al-Fakeha, Hasbaya, Rashaya, and Al-Khyara, among
other places.
The reactions to these shabbiha attacks were an early sign of the
proverbial barrier of fear being broken. Protesters in Beirut chanted
“Tyre, Tyre, for you we will rise” (which rhymes in Arabic), a chant
that rapidly became common throughout the country.
Since then, we’ve seen a now-familiar pattern repeat itself: repression
is followed by resistance, which is sometimes followed by sectarian
supporters turning out in large numbers, but other times results in
protesters gaining the upper hand. This is an important part of the
uprising; there is also a very clear attempt by protesters to “convert”
sectarian party supporters under the unified banner of anti-sectarian
politics. Up to now, this has proven relatively successful: while we can
never assess who officially supports sectarian parties and who does not,
anecdotal evidence and direct testimony suggest that a majority of the
population would at least agree with the broader discontent motivating
the protesters.
These attacks could be described as the stick part of the government’s
carrot and stick strategy. As for the carrot part, it’s been rather
confused. The main actors have been struggling to offer a coherent
response to the protests, largely because they disagree among themselves
and are trying, as usual, to navigate their own politics on a daily
basis. The decentralized and horizontal nature of the protests has
hampered the state’s attempts to demonize or co-opt them.
Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, gave a speech on October 19. As of
this writing, Nasrallah has spoken four times since the beginning of the
uprising already, an unusual phenomenon in itself. Although Nasrallah
holds no official position in the Lebanese government, he is seen as a
de facto kingmaker due to Hezbollah’s military power. But despite having
a reputation among his followers of being relatively sober in his
speeches, his first speech was characterized by unadulterated rage,
arrogance, and condescension. He directly told protesters that they are
wasting their time and that this “mandate” (his choice of words could
also be translated as “era” or “covenant”) will not fall, in reference
to the 2016 deal that led to Michel Aoun becoming president and Saad
Hariri becoming Prime Minister (Remember, Nabih Berri has not left his
position of Speaker of Parliament since 1992.) He even accused
protesters of being funded by foreign embassies, leading protesters to
respond by saying “I am funding the revolution,” which has since become
a meme and appeared on street signs as well. One Lebanese videographer
responded by posting a video of Nasrallah himself saying that Hezbollah
is 100% funded and armed by Iran.
By maintaining support for the government, Nasrallah threw his weight
behind two of the most unpopular men in Lebanese politics: the FPM’s
Gebran Bassil and the FM’s Saad Hariri. This exposed the establishment
as opportunistic and corrupt. Just as the sectarian political parties
united in 2016 to defeat Beirut Madinati in the municipal elections,
they were now once again uniting to defeat the popular uprising. But
Nasrallah made a grave error. By saying that this government will not
fall, he added pressure on Hariri to resign. Hariri was already the
weakest link in this coalition, as he had to appeal to his rivals the
FPM and Hezbollah to stay in power against his own supporters’ wishes.
On October 29, Hariri finally resigned, apparently surprising Hezbollah.
In thirteen days, protesters had forced the collapse of a government
that had taken months and months to be formed.[1] In the weeks since the
revolution started, the warlord-oligarch class has been scrambling to
address a crisis they never anticipated.
But as mentioned above, other political parties have been trying to ride
the wave of the revolution. This has been especially obvious with Geagea
and the LF, the FPM’s historical rival—a rivalry that dates back to the
bloody Geagea-Aoun battles during the civil war and was rekindled after
2005. The LF saw a golden opportunity when the revolution started: by
quitting and leaving an unpopular government, the LF believed it could
weaken its rivals, as both groups appeal to the same sectarian votes.
There have been LF supporters blocking the roads as well; this has posed
a conundrum for anti-government protesters. Following Hariri’s
resignation, some protesters prefer to focus on the big players
currently in government—Aoun and Berri, respectively president and
speaker of parliament—yet the slogan kellon yaani kellon continues to
dominate protests. Despite what supporters of the FPM/Amal/Hezbollah
want to believe, the LF is not popular among protesters; it has
negligible support in most places that have seen protests. There is a
strong consensus that no sectarian political party will be supported, no
matter how hard they try.
It is still too early to know what the government’s next steps will be.
As of this writing, the caretaker government has yet to appoint new
ministers and the parliament is planning to discuss a law that would
grant a general amnesty covering crimes such as abuse of authority,
negligence, and environmental crimes. The situation is developing very
quickly.
The protests in Lebanon have been incredibly creative. Students in
Tripoli have used cranes to get other students out of class; sandwiches
were handed out in Beirut labeled “funded by Saudi Arabia/France/US” to
mock those alleging that the protesters are funded by foreign powers;
one of the many roadblocks was turned into a public salon with couches,
a refrigerator, and people playing football, and featured on AirBnB (for
free); protesters occupied Zaitunay Bay, a private waterfront built on
top of Beirut’s stolen coast, and screened the film V for Vendetta (on
November 5, obviously); images of sectarian leaders have been taken down
and burned; people have banged pots, echoing Chile’s cacerolazos, on the
streets and from their homes; volunteers have established soup kitchens
in Beirut and Tripoli; a historic abandoned cinema was reclaimed and
repurposed as a cinema, classroom, and gathering spot for artists;
people formed a human chain from the north to the south; protesters
blocking roads sang “baby shark” to a child stuck in traffic; protesters
regularly wear masks of Guy Fawkes, Dali, and the Joker; organizers have
arranged open forums to bring together protesters from Tripoli, Saida,
Nabatieh, Zouk, Aley, and Beirut. Protesters “blocked” a railway station
as a joke, to make a point: Lebanon’s railways were destroyed during the
civil war and never rebuilt. The privatization of the 1990s came at the
expense of public spaces and services, which is why a big part of the
protests have sought to reclaim them, engaging in guerilla planting and
the like.
The general idea here is that protesters have to re-invent their tactics
constantly in order to make it difficult for the state to keep up. For
example, there is an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of
roadblocks. The chief objection is that politicians are not as affected
by them as everyday people trying to go to work or send their kids to
school. As of now, this tactic is still being used, but it’s no longer
the main one. In recent days, protesters have moved to occupy or protest
in front of government buildings and other symbols of power: everything
from politicians’ houses to national power stations (most of Lebanon
still does not have 24/7 electricity), passing the main
telecommunications and data operators, banks, municipalities, and so on.
There are now dozens of different actions on a daily basis, with most
actions announced only a day before. As of this writing, high school and
university students—and some even younger students—have been protesting
for three days in Saida, Beirut, Jounieh, Tripoli, Koura, Bar
Elias/Zahleh, Mansourieh, Hadath, Baalbek, Nabatiyeh, Al-Khyara, Al-Eyn,
Mazraat Yachouh, Furn El Chebbak, Akkar, Tannourine, Batroun, and
Byblos/Jbeil, among other places.
There has also been an online effort to counter fake news spread by
supporters of the government and the political parties themselves, as
well as to help protesters stay informed more generally: el3asas (“the
city watch”) is verifying news spread on social media and by official
news outlets; a directory called Daleel Thawra (“directory of the
revolution”) is keeping track of the various actions, activities and
initiatives; TeleThawra (“revolution TV”) offers an alternative to
Lebanon’s government-owned Télé Liban; Fawra Media (“Outburst Media”)
aims to document “the individuals and groups that are sustaining the
Lebanese Revolution”; Sawt Alniswa (“Voice of Women”) is a women-run
magazine published weekly; and Megaphone News has been a leading
independent media outlet since 2017.
These developments have opened up a space for people and narratives that
are usually suppressed at the national or party level.
In addition to the aforementioned, Palestinian and Syrian activists have
actively participated in the protests, particularly in the two biggest
cities, Beirut and Tripoli. Elements of the sectarian media took
advantage of this to reiterate their allegations that the protests are
“infiltrated by foreigners.” Aware of this, many Palestinians and
Syrians have since learned how to navigate Lebanese politics, chiefly by
keeping a low profile. Besides a protest in Ain El Helweh Refugee Camp,
where Palestinians directly expressed solidarity with the Lebanese
protests, the Palestinians in Saida, Beirut, Tripoli, and elsewhere who
have participated so far have been careful to “keep to the sidelines in
the Lebanese demonstrations to avoid being accused of instigating or
usurping the protest movement.” This, notably, has made it more
difficult for the xenophobes to play their usual game, given that it is
impossible to differentiate between Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian
people unless they wave their respective national flags. (This text
offers some background on the scapegoating tactics.)
We’ve also seen, to a lesser extent, chants from protesters in
solidarity with Egyptians, Sudanese, and other Arab parts of the Middle
East and North Africa region, and there is some awareness, mostly
expressed on social media, of ongoing protests and violence in Iraq,
Hong Kong, Rojava, and Chile. Although quickly forgotten at the national
level, we also saw riots on the first day in Zahle and Roumieh Prisons
in solidarity with the protesters, as well as to bring attention to
Lebanon’s horrific prison conditions and to repeat calls for a general
amnesty law, as many people are arrested for supposed links to jihadi
groups, drug possession, and so on.
As of now, there’s been no major participation by migrant domestic
workers, who are generally confined to Lebanese family houses or else
are languishing in horrific underground prisons with little to no
political rights under the country’s notorious Kafala (sponsorship)
system. That is unlikely to change in the near future, given the
restraints imposed on them, but if the momentum of the protests
continues, it could open up enough political space for new political
connections to form.
Up to now, the protests have focused on tackling widespread corruption
and the sectarian system. But the role of feminists, including LGBTQ+
and/or non-Lebanese activists, suggests an attempt by segments of the
protesters to create a more progressive and inclusive movement.
Feminists have held separate marches to highlight the patriarchal
structures that disproportionately oppress women and LGBTQ+
people—notably, the fact that Lebanese women still cannot pass on their
nationality to their spouses and children and the fact that the
country’s sectarian laws governing such affairs as marriage, divorce,
custody and so on discriminate against women. Both women and men have
marched for the right to pass on nationality, in Tyre and Tripoli, and
elsewhere.
Women have also used their bodies to protect other protesters from the
police and prevent violence from escalating. As Leya Awadat, one
participant in these “feminist walls,” put it, “In this chauvinistic
society, it is badly seen for men to publicly beat women” (emphasis on
publicly)—so they have been using that to their advantage.
LGBTQ+ people have also been the target of homophobic insults. One
shabbiha attacking protesters on October 29 was heard on live television
yelling, “Men are fucking men!” A guest on OTV claimed that protesters
want to destroy sectarianism in the name of some kind of “gay agenda.”
The feminist marches always meet up with the main marches. The idea is
not to create separate movements but rather to make their presence known
within the wider demands for justice and equality. Feminists have led
many of the roadblocks and many chants as well as maintaining an active
presence in day-to-day activities that help maintain the momentum of
this uprising. One way they have accomplished this is by reclaiming
chants and songs—both traditional and recent—and removing their sexist
connotations. The popular “hela hela” song against Gebran Bassil
insulted his mother—it is very common in the Arabic-speaking world to
use women or their genitals as insults—so feminists changed it to insult
both Gebran and “his uncle” (the president, Michel Aoun) instead,
creating a chant that has since caught on. They also reclaimed a
traditional song used to send women off to marriage, changing the lyrics
to “she went to protest, she went to close the roads, she went to bring
down the government.”
Contrary to what some have assumed, the elephant in the room is not
sectarianism as of now. While the risk of sectarian tensions will likely
remain for the foreseeable future, the more immediate risk is the
looming economic crisis. In my opinion, this is why more radical forms
of politics are only timidly surfacing. The fear that things will get
much worse is both real and realistic; it is very difficult to speak of
alternative ways of organizing ourselves, even transcending the petty
(and dangerous) Lebanese/non-Lebanese distinctions, when most people’s
primary concern is the likelihood of medicine and fuel shortages and
possibly even food shortages. While more radical politics may
organically develop if the economic situation gets worse, it is also
possible that the more nationalistic and sectarian elements of Lebanese
politics will be strengthened instead. The latter tendencies have
decades of experience in power, whereas the kinder forms of politics are
relatively new, just being built on the streets and online.
Consequently, a dominant perception among protesters is that we need to
be both angry and careful.
That being said, the soup kitchens, the free healthcare tents, and the
reclaiming of privatized historical sites and coastal areas are all
initiatives that implicitly affirm what we can call the commons. This is
crucial to understand in a country that has had no commons in recent
memory, where they dominant “pro-market” ideology predates the
establishment of the nation state of Lebanon.
Although the main actors could be argued to be roughly a dozen or so
public figures, the reason the clientalist networks have so far worked
also has to do with the existence of a subset of the population which
benefits from these networks. They place themselves as intermediaries
between the oligarchs and those seeking wasta (bribes, nepotism, “who
you know”) to receive services not provided by the state. In other
words, some people have financial incentives to maintain clientalist
networks against the establishment of anything that might be called
public institutions. Overhauling and then overthrowing such a system
will be difficult. Overthrowing such a system while confronting the
state’s brutal potential will be even more difficult.
But if the loose coalition of anti-sectarian progressives doesn’t tackle
this issue, it is likely that the state will scapegoat those it has
already been targeting: Syrian and Palestinian refugees and workers,
migrant domestic workers (mostly from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the
Philippines, and overwhelmingly women), LGBTQ+ people (citizens and
non-citizens), sex workers, and the like. Any individual who doesn’t fit
the dominant patriarchal-capitalist-sectarian paradigm is at risk of
physical, psychological, and symbolic violence.
Finally, and this is related to the previous point, defeating political
sectarianism and “the sectarian way of doing things” is seen as an
immediate priority. This system, which dates back to the 1860s in one
manifestation or another, has been losing its aura of being untouchable
with the postwar generations, both Millennials and, especially,
Generation Zs—those who have lived their entire lives hearing their
parents complain “Where is the government?” when they have to pay two
separate bills for electricity (private and public) and three separate
bills for water (private and public running water, private bottled
drinking water). As the warlords get older—two of the most powerful
ones, Aoun and Berri, are 84 and 81 respectively—we will see the
inevitable decline of the sectarianism of the civil war era.
But while this might be inevitable, the question is whether
anti-sectarian progressives will succeed in building sustainable
alternatives that can challenge the old order.
We have many reasons to hope, as Bassel F. Salloukh wrote, because “the
October 17 revolution marks the definitive end of the civil war, and a
genuine bottom-up reconciliation between one-time warring communities.”
[1] You can read a detailed summary of the 72 days before October 17
here.