WITHIN 24 hours of resigning, former Lebanese prime minister, Saad Al-Hariri was asked by President Michel Aoun to form a caretaker government, which is supposed to be of technocrats rather than the country’s widely-discredited crew of politicians.
Hariri had quit in the face of unprecedented protests by tens of thousands who took to the streets to demand an end to corruption at the highest levels and collapsing public services as well as root and branch financial reform which would stop to country’s descent into a serious debt crisis. Ten days into the protests he agreed a modest raft of changes, which included cutting the generous salaries of politicians. These concessions were not enough and came too late. The public mood is one of burning anger at the venality and incompetence of those chosen to run the country.
Though Hariri was the main target of the furious demonstrations, he was thrust into the firing line by Lebanon’s sectarian-based system which divides power between Sunni, (the prime minister) Shiite (the speaker of parliament) and Christians (the president). This distribution of authority, confirmed in the 1989 Taif agreement, would function if all participants in government and the bureaucracy were working for a single national goal. But it was always a big ask that that agreement, brokered here in the Kingdom, would enable Lebanese to recover and rebuild from 15 years of brutal and destructive civil war, which had in particular wrecked Beirut, once one of the leading cities in the Middle East.
Syria’s Assad regime played a long and discreditable role in Lebanon’s misery. But there were hopes that when Syrian troops quit in 2005, the country could really begin to heal itself. Unfortunately, in one respect, the Syrians did not actually go. Hezbollah, the Shiite satrap of the ayatollahs in Iran remained closely linked to Damascus. That link became the greater when with Tehran’s considerable help, in 2011 Bashar Assad set about crushing his rebellious people. At Iran’s behest, Hezbollah provided much-needed foot soldiers for Assad’s struggling armed forces. And indeed Lebanon faced the very real new danger of the Syrian conflict spreading over its borders.
But it is not their country’s regional relationships that concerns the crowds that have brought Beirut to a standstill, but the parlous state of its domestic politics. And what has been notable about these protests is that they have drawn in large numbers of people from every community. All seek an end to the old constitutional disposition they claim has outlived its usefulness. They want leaders who hold power on their merit, not their community allegiance. Hariri seems to get this, but is clearly trapped within the existing corrupt and inefficient system. Maybe if he puts together an administration of technocrats, he can start to break the mold.
It is significant that the Hezbollah leadership has deplored the anti-government protests, not least because many Shiite have been part of them. Gunmen from this terrorist group have been firing into the demonstrators, in a direct echo of the crowd murders in Iraq being carried out by men from Shiite militias allied to Tehran. Yet in both Beirut and Baghdad, the process of government has failed so completely, public patience has finally snapped. Homicidal gunmen acting on orders from Iran’s ayatollahs are only likely to bring this anger to white heat.
