Lebanon mulls over its pluralistic exceptionalism

What the Arabic language media says about 40 years since the start of the Lebanese civil war, featuring Asharq Al Awsat, L'Orient Le Jour and Annahar.

Lebanese students write "Before I die, I want Lebanon" on a wall along a street of Beirut's former green-line to mark the 40th anniversary of Lebanon's civil war. Jamal Saidi / Reuters

As Lebanon marks 40 years since the start of its civil war, the country remains mired in instability caused by factors that range from internal politics to the influx of refugees and repercussions of regional events.

Sawsan Al Abtah, writing in the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al Awsat, said the Arabs believed Lebanon’s “exceptional pluralism” was the result of its unique traits.

“The Lebanese civil war began after the arrival of Palestinian factions in Beirut, following the bloody events of the so-called Black September, before the Camp David talks, and a few years before the war between Iran and Iraq started,” she wrote.

“This war did not come out of the blue. It followed an Arab Nakba, a resounding setback.”

This Arab perception of Lebanese exceptionalism persisted for a long time, she noted.

“Perhaps they believed that its hellish model could be cloned and reproduced in every country of the region and that the ‘Lebanonisation’ could, one day, become an ‘Iraqisation’, a ‘Syrianisation’, or even a ‘Yemenisation’?”

Writing in the Beirut daily L’Orient Le Jour, Fifi Abou Dib described the civil war as a “blood-drenched episode” marked by pain and chaos.

The country had functioned since 1943 on the basis of a constitution based on confessional representation, which proportionately reserves certain posts for representatives from certain religious communities. This continues today and remains strangely efficient.

The “glorious 1960s are undeniable proof, featuring the highest levels of education and schooling in the region, a relatively prosperous population and sacred freedom of expression”, she noted.

“The plurality that characterises Lebanon made it host the oppressed – the Armenians, the Kurds and the Syrians driven out by successive dictatorships, as well as the Palestinians.”

However, on April 13, 1975, this same unusual constitution became dysfunctional. Even though the streets now carry the names of those who fell in the civil war, time will erase their memory and soon their names will be forgotten.

In the Beirut daily Annahar, Ghassan Hajjar said the Lebanese perceived themselves as “peoples negotiating, disagreeing and reconciling – not on the basis of national interest but rather driven by individual interests and by the interests of regional players”.

Right now this theory is being tested by what he called “the inescapable regional conflict that engulfs us and weakens our ‘internal’ immunity”.

He said that the Sunnis in Lebanon stand by the Syrian opposition, and with the Yemeni regime, and support the Saudi-led coalition’s Operation Decisive Storm.

Meanwhile, the Shiites stand by the Syrian regime and against the regimes in Bahrain and Yemen, with unlimited support from Iran.

“There is no other deterrent between the two sides than a standing political consensus, which until this moment shields the country from the woes of a new civil war that has knocked at our door many a time over the past few years,” he noted.

“This consensus evolves as one would in a minefield because it might collapse at any moment.”

Translated by Carla Mirza