Lines In The Sand

“Amal Movement,” says Mazen, identifying the convoy as followers of the militant Shiite party which enjoys, if that’s the word, strong ties to Hezbollah. “They’re from the neighbourhood, so it’s no problem. It’s the Amal guys who come from outside that we have to watch for.”

 

Mazen and his friends, all university students or graduates in their twenties, are Sunni Muslims loyal to the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. And backed by the Future Movement, the dominant Sunni political party founded by assassinated former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and now led by his son Saad, they patrol their neighbourhood every night, protecting it from the Shiite Muslim gangs they accuse of repeatedly attacking them. Similar clashes play out every week across Beirut at demographic flashpoints and this political tension turned violent has many Beirutis fearing a return to the sectarian fighting of the 1975 to 1990 civil war between Christians and Muslims over the presence of armed Palestinian groups in the country.

 

Mazen and his buddies help the Future Movement protect the area of Ras al-Nabaa, on the Sunni side of the divide but containing a significant Shiite population. Growing up together has kept the residents from outright fighting – “We know them from school and many are our friends, we just cannot speak about politics with them,” says Mazen’s younger brother Mohammed – but the political tension has drawn violent clashes with other Amal-aligned gangs entering the area. One such incident in mid-February saw running street battles between Sunni and Shiite youth after the Sunnis allege that Amal attackers “beat people, torched any car with a Hariri poster on it”, and burned offices of the main Sunni political party, says Mohammed. “They were asking young children and women ‘Are you Sunni or Shiite?’ and if they were Sunnis, they would hit them or yell at them. They even came into our mosque and beat the imam.”

 

Incidents of this scale – more than a dozen major clashes in a year – have been repeated across the city at a series of sectarian flashpoints. Supporting the Future Movement, a group that was formed after the civil war as the only major political party in Lebanon without militia roots, are Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party, composed mostly of the Druze minority, and the Christian “Lebanese Forces”. Infamous civil war-era militias spawned both parties after being disarmed in the early-1990s, but Hezbollah and Amal were allowed to retain their weapons to fight the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, which essentially ended in 2000. Both have since refused to disarm.  

 

It is all the most recent manifestation of political paralysis that has dogged the country for more than a year. And the current crisis, which pits the Western-backed government against a powerful coalition led by Hezbollah, has done more than fail to elect a president 17 times since Emile Lahoud’s term expired in late November: it has splintered the old leftist-Muslim alliance – which collapsed after the 2005 car bomb murder most Sunnis blame on Hezbollah ally Syria – and turned the country into a less-bloody version of Iraq, with Sunnis and Shiite battling for control and most Christians aligned with their former Sunni and Druze foes. The government looks towards the West for economic stability, while Hezbollah and its allies fight to maintain their arms in the struggle against Israel. 

 

Once divided by the infamous Green Line that split the city into Christian East and Muslim West, Beirut is again beginning to strain under the weight of the political stalemate. The new schism divides northern Beirut, which is predominately Sunni and dominated by the Future Movement and other government supporters, from the mostly Shiite southern suburbs dominated by Hezbollah and its secular ally, Amal. 

 

Although Hezbollah and Amal both maintain well-armed militias – designed, in theory at least, to resist Israel – the professional fighters have mostly eschewed involvement in the clashes. Tensions, though, escalate, not least over the February assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyah, which the group claims was Israel’s work. Both sides of the conflict in Lebanon, according to observers, are basically reverting to their civil war-roots by organizing gangs of supporters into street fighting units – designed to both protect their turf and intimidate opponents. Beatings, smashed shop windows, torched cars and even occasional mysterious sniper-fire have become commonplace in the Beirut spring, particularly in pockets where either Sunnis or Shiite live on the wrong side of the redrawn lines of division. Political speeches are now frequently marked by celebratory gun and rocket fire as each side tries to intimidate rivals.

 

“They are drawing the lines,” says one military official, not actually authorised to talk to the press, about the increasing sectarian divisions opening up across the capital. He adds that Hezbollah refuses to deploy its professional fighters – considered better equipped and trained than even the Lebanese Army – to this political combat, but has still been organising – and possibly arming – Hezbollah’s political supporters, Amal members and even some small groups of Christian allies, a claim confirmed by residents of Hezbollah-controlled areas. Sources inside the Future Movement and Lebanese Army also say that government supporters are doing the same, albeit on a small scale. For now. 

 

According to one critic of both sides, the lack of heavy weapons and supply logistics probably will prevent a full-bore civil war in the near future, but the low-intensity clashes and sectarianism will continue to increase because both the government and opposition remain convinced that instability helps their cause.

“The most danger is that each leader seems to find more power on his own as a sectarian leader than as part of a functioning government,” according to Habib Zoghbi of the National Sovereignty Movement, which opposes sectarian politics. “Until a war, either regional or between Israel and Hezbollah, changes the power structure, there’s little reason to think anything will change.”

 

A full version of this article appears in NOX 22.