For
Lebanese over a certain age, the 2005 Cedar Revolution marked the biggest
turning point in their (political) lives. A common refrain of many who
participated was that this was the first time they felt truly Lebanese (as opposed to identifying solely
or principally with one’s sect). Yet while the region’s first ‘velvet’ uprising
forced an end to the 29-year Syrian occupation, the ‘revolution’ was stillborn.
Within weeks of the Syrians’ departure, several of the civil war-era’s most
prominent warlords whose ambitions Damascus had more or less repressed returned
from prison (Samir Geagea) or exile (Michel Aoun) to try and finish in peace
what they could not achieve in war.
More
than a decade later, this class of septua- and octogenarian strongmen still
dominates Lebanese political life. And rather than bring a hundred flowers to blossom,
the Cedar Revolution triggered a relative closing of the Lebanese political mind.
In its wake, two intransigent political blocks emerged (March 8 and March 14), each
with heavily sectarian constituencies; backed by competing foreign powers;
lacking much in the realm of ideas; and marred by perpetual volte face, personal vendettas and
infighting tit-for-tats. (Sound familiar?) And if the 2006 Lebanon War greatly
exacerbated tensions between them, the ongoing war in Syria has blown them out
of all proportion.
At least
on paper. Upon closer reflection, the war in Syria has also provided excellent cover
for Lebanon’s political class to run roughshod over the constitution and
conveniently ignore many of the state’s most basic responsibilities. Since
April 2014, Parliament has failed to elect a president. And in November of that
same year, that same body voted to extend its own mandate in office by an additional
two years and seven months, delaying elections until 2017 with the swipe of a finger.
It was the second time this group of lawmakers – elected in 2009 to ostensibly
four-year terms – voted to extend their “stay” in office. The first was in May
2013, when they cited similar fears that holding elections posed too much of a ‘security
risk.’ Nay, they have not given one half of two shits for many years.
Thus do the
Lebanese now find themselves with no executive; a corrupt, unconstitutional and
self-serving legislature; and a judiciary whose penchant for trying civilians
in military courts grows in proportion to the conflict in Syria.
Given
the regional backdrop of chaos and counter-revolution, most Lebanese grin and
bear it. After all, dysfunction almost always trumps destruction. This summer,
however, things have taken a turn for the worse – or the better, depending on
how Chernychevskian one is. After a ‘trash crisis’ that began in July in which much
of Beirut was buried under mounds of rotting refuse, a rapidly growing number
of people finally began to say khalas.
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Thanks for
this development should go to Sukleen, the waste management company that has
enjoyed controversial monopoly rights over trash collection in Beirut and Mt
Lebanon for the past 18 years. When an already much-disputed contract between
Sukleen, the government and residents living near the company’s principal
landfill in Naameh (a village south of Beirut) expired on 17 July, residents
shut down the roads leading to the landfill. For Sukleen had also been ‘dancing
on their nerves’ for many years, to quote a future Lebanese leader. What was
meant to be a six-year contract from 1997-2003 and receive 2m tons of waste was
(extra-extra-legally) extended by 12
years. It now contains 15m tons.
Once a picturesque
valley, the landfill in Naameh is now a 650ft mountain. If winds are blowing
from the west, residents cannot leave their homes until the evening when the
stench has receded. A physician who founded the Department of Emergency
Medicine at the American University of Beirut’s Medical Center found that local
inhabitants had blood cancer rates four times higher than the baseline
population. Of course, inhabitants of Naameh needn’t medical studies to know
they are dying from a mountain of toxic waste snuck into their backyard (where
hither they’d go hiking). One resident compared the landfill to the 1982
Israeli invasion, which also destroyed the village: “Either the landfill goes,
or we do. There isn’t enough room for us both.”
When
residents finally shut down the road to the landfill the day its contract ended
in mid-July, Sukleen retaliated by simply stopping their garbage collection in
Beirut and Mt Lebanon. Coinciding with a heat wave, the air in Beirut rapidly
became noxious, and many of the capital’s inhabitants began suffering from skin
rashes and respiratory problems (in a country where everyone already gloriously
chain smokes, this is saying something). Visible for miles, a dark yellow haze hovered
over the city as people took to setting fire to hundreds of mounds of plastic,
shit and festering urban sludge – not only along its principal thoroughfares,
but also on the corners of boogie tree-lined residential neighborhoods. It was
sad and utterly dystopian, but strangely beautiful. Cormac McCarthy meets John
le Carré, a front-seat for the end times – and they’re not half bad. At least
the bottle shops still have electricity.
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A highly
visible part of the city’s fabric, Sukleen has long since come under attack
from the general public. Granted monopoly rights to collect the capital’s trash
since 1994, the company embodies much of what is controversial about the rash
of privatizations of public services that occurred in the 1990s in the
Yeltsinesque free-for-all that followed the Lebanese civil war. Under constant
fire for unauthorized dumping, failure to recycle, unsanitary and unlawful
landfill practices, Sukleen has also long since been the object of public scorn
for ripping off municipalities with rampant price gouging. Though Sukleen
operates throughout the Middle East, the Lebanese pay far more for waste
disposal ($130/ton of garbage) than their counterparts in Amman ($38) or Cairo
($20). Nor has Sukleen ever competed for any of these contracts: its owner is a
long-time friend of former Prime Ministers Rafic Hariri (father) and Saad
Hariri (son) and has long-standing ties to their Future Movement (FM) party and
other leading cabinet members and parliamentarians.
All
things considered, it is not that surprising that people have finally taken to
the streets: clean air is a ‘commodity’ that even the most resolutely
un-politicized, middle class pessimist still relies upon, and the Lebanese,
notorious for “coping with any situation” to a fault, can be no more
resourceful in the face of poisonous air than anyone else. Then again, as
another associate starkly put it: “I haven’t got time for taking rubber bullets
in the tummy. Nor do I for senseless protests. Assassinations will be much
quicker and cleaner.”
______________________
Hence
the curiously powerful new movement that has emerged in recent weeks as the
single biggest challenge to Lebanon’s fractious and paralyzed socio-political
system in a decade. Though more or less leaderless, unorganized and lacking any
actionable platform, the YouStink movement – which began by targeting Sukleen
and the politicians whose pockets it lines but since expanded to include a whole
checklist of widespread grievances – has Lebanon’s normally complacent
political class in its most serious bind in years.
Last
weekend alone, more than 20,000 people turned out in downtown Beirut’s Riad
al-Solh Square to call for the resignation of senior cabinet members such as Prime
Minster Salal Tammam and the ministers of the interior and environment. Convening
in front of the Grand Serail, the Ottoman-era Government Palace that houses the
president of the council of ministers, it was not long before protestors were met
with violence. Over the course of two days, more than 75 people were injured by
tear gas and rubber bullets. Protesters lobbed bottles of water and the
occasional stone; police responded by firing live rounds into the air. (Which
part of gentrified downtown Beirut the stray bullets fell is anybody’s guess).
On one exciting occasion, an officer chased a young man with a parking meter
wrenched from the sidewalk. The hoses were refreshing; the stones lobbed by the
police back into the crowd of women, children and chicken-hearted American
decidedly less so. Far more playful was the plastic chair that made its way
back and forth between the demonstrators and the police. Political scientists
are calling it the “beach-ball effect” and are saying it could work wonders in
the rest of the region.
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Meanwhile,
the country’s leading politicians have been scrambling to respond in their
usual Panglossian way: by supporting both the protestors and the government
more or less in equal measure. The MP, leader of the Druze community and head
of the Progressive Socialist Party, Walid Jumblatt openly supported YouStink
one day, before condemning it the next. A notorious turncoat for decades, he
still occasionally outdoes himself. Not to be outdone, the two irascible Maronite
Christians contending for the (vacant) presidency both claimed their
‘solidarity’ with YouReek. Even Prime Minister (and acting President) Tammam
Salam, for whom protestors have reserved a great deal of their ire, expressed
his sympathy. With characteristic magnanimity, he then added that everyone should be held responsible for
the “excessive force [against] civil society and the [public].”
Unfortunately,
the one leader who could not be reached was interior minister Nouhad
Machnouk, then vacationing
abroad. The very
moment things started really heating up in downtown Beirut, a now-widely shared
video surfaced of him dancing with young
bikini-clad women at a beachside bar in Mykonos, laughing and sporting a
ridiculous backwards cap. On Monday morning, however, he was back to work, bald
and floppy in suit and tie, coordinating the construction of a concrete blast
wall to fortify the Government Palace and put a physical barrier between the
government and its mass of enraged citizens. Once it became clear this ‘wall of
shame’ was only “enabling” the YouStink constituents’ artistic urges, it was
taken down the following day.
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For
those too young to have partaken in the Cedar Revolution, the YouStink movement
feels like a kind of turning point for many of the country’s young, urban, educated
and politically discontented. For the first time since 2005, one hears people
from every (religious not social) background exuberantly saying, “this weekend
was the first time in my life I felt truly
Lebanese.” Not only did those who protested
represent a wide spectrum of Lebanon’s mosaic of 17 religious sects; crucially,
there were no visible signs or audible expressions of loyalty to any of the traditional
political parties or movements. And while people in the 30s, 40s and 50s were
also highly represented, a large number of young families also brought their
children to the protests, braving tear gas and hoses in the process.
Though
encouraging, these signs of cross-sectarian unity mask an underlying malaise. For
any observer, one of the single biggest questions is that of socio-economic
participation: the vast majority of people present this weekend were ‘educated’
– which is code for ‘middle class’ – i.e. code for ‘not from the city’s (Sunni
and Shia) slums.’ As a leading protestor told your correspondent, the biggest
challenge for YouStink’s organizers – apart from apathy, tear gas, rubber
bullets and concrete blast walls erected around the Grand Serail – is finding a
way for the movement to better connect with the ‘street’ – that is, the young
men and women from Tariq el-Jdideh (a working-class Sunni neighborhood) and
Dahiye (a sprawling, often-impoverished and mostly Shia area in the southern
suburbs of Beirut under Hezbollah’s de facto ‘jurisdiction’).
Unless
they can make common cause with Lebanon’s undereducated and truly disenfranchised,
the movement will lack the mass base necessary to overcoming the caudillo curry
of throwing peanuts at communal flunkies. One should remember: the impetus for
the demonstrations was to protest not only the mounting trash crisis, but the
fact there’s no president, perennial electricity shortages and chronic corruption
all around. Bourgeois concerns? Not always: while Beirut has mandatory 3-hour
daily power outages, the countryside has 6- or 9-hour outages. Whatever the
case, YouStink’s organizers, one of whom is Druze and the other is Shia, must agree
that the movement’s success is as likely to hinge on cross-class collaboration as
it is cross-sectarian solidarity. Rubbish clearly divides people from their
governments; but is it enough to unite Lebanese from widely differing
socio-economic backgrounds?
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The
other looming question is the rash of conspiracy theories now making the
rounds. Who stands to gain from the ‘unrest’? And which ominous puppet-master
is pulling the strings? Many whisper that Hezbollah is tacitly behind them,
since any opposition to the current government increases the odds of their ally
and preferred candidate, former general and leader of the Free Patriotic
Movement, Michel Aoun, of assuming the presidency. In any case, the extent to
which Hezbollah has remained silent on the issue, neither condemning nor
condoning the protests, has been striking. Its TV station Al-Manar neglected to
cover much of the protests – though in all fairness, the left-leaning Al-Jadeed
is the only one that did – and Nasrallah has remained intriguingly reticent as
to whether or not he supports this deluge of public opposition to a government
he has excoriated for years.
Oddly and
ominously, the second major fear is the overwhelming consensus among
demonstrators that Nabbih Berri, the (Shia) Speaker of Parliament since 1992
and long-time rival of Hezbollah, is behind the protests turning violent. As
the man who holds the creaky parliamentarian system together, he stands to lose
the most. Hence the appearance of dozens, if not hundreds, of shirtless rude
boys showing up in masks, clutching sticks and stones, and donning 6-inch
necklaces in the shape of swords.[1]
In addition to giving hell to the police and army, they put the better-dressed
protestors, many of whom were doused in perfume and cologne, very ill at east.
Whatever
the case, most can agree that a step in the right direction has been made. The
important thing, a thoughtful but pessimistic protestor told me, is to not lose
sight of the broader struggle – the establishment of a secular democratic
republic whose government is accountable to all its citizens. For in Lebanon,
she forewarns, “Every moment in our lives is the illusion of a fake victory.
Every time I take a shower and the water is hot, it’s a fake victory. Every
time I hit the switch and the light comes on, it’s a fake victory. All our
lives are spent in a poisonous cloud of fake victories.”
But many
Lebanese now seem hungry for more than fake victories. In a little-publicized
story, a young man immolated himself in Saida, Lebanon’s third-biggest city, in
one of many copycat protests that broke out across the country last weekend.
(For the bleeding hearts among you: police doused him with water before he
could become a ‘martyr’). Another young man traveled all the way from the South
to Beirut to take part in the downtown demonstrations. In a television
interview, he explained how he had come to the capital explicitly against his
father’s wishes; the latter preferred for his son to go and fight in Syria (for
Assad). As he told the journalist, “Excuse me, father, but why would I fight in
Syria when I can fight for my own people in Lebanon?”
They
have called for even bigger protests this very afternoon – in addition to solidarity
rallies being held in Berlin, Washington, Detroit and Montreal. I don’t know
about you, but I gots a bus to catch downtown.
