From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BEIRUT DISPATCH
Birth of a Nation
With the Syrians gone, Lebanon finds its identity.
BEIRUT, Lebanon--In September 1986, Raymond Bouban, a 21-year-old Maronite Catholic, was detained by Syrian officers and taken to their intelligence headquarters, in the city's Beau Rivage district. The following day, the mukhabarat accused him of involvement in a rocket attack on their headquarters that had taken place the previous July. Mr. Bouban protested his innocence: He'd been in Europe at the time and had the stamps in his passport to prove it. But the Syrians claimed not to believe him, and demanded a written confession. Mr. Bouban refused. So the torture began.
"You know what is a 'German chair'?" he asks, whereupon he describes a contraption purpose-built to arch a victim's back excruciatingly forward. "You know what is the 'car wheel'?" He describes a technique in which ankles and head are squeezed into a tire. He describes other tortures, such as being suspended from a rope by a single leg.
Mr. Bouban endured this for two months, but when the Syrians threatened to arrest his family he agreed to sign the confession they demanded. He was then transferred to Syria: First, to a succession of prisons in and around Damascus, one of them completely underground; then, 18 months later, to a prison called Tadmor, in Syria's eastern desert. "You can say this was the real hell," he tells me, as if to suggest that what had come before was a mere purgatory.
Tadmor was mainly used as a prison for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose 1982 rebellion against Hafez al-Assad had been savagely suppressed. The Lebanese in the prison were housed in a windowless structure with two large holes in the ceiling for air. Guards kept watch from above, occasionally singling out the men in their field of view for torture. There was little food, no books, newspapers, radio or TV, and no medicine. At one point there was an outbreak of cholera. Periodically, prisoners would be made to write home, saying all was well. Mr. Bouban spent nearly five years in Tadmor. In August 1992, he was moved to a prison closer to Damascus, where he spent another five years before being released to Lebanon. He remained on parole until 2001. "They told me: Don't talk to the press; you don't know anything."
For the better part of the 29 years during which Syria was in Lebanon, its occupation was considered comparatively benign. In a certain sense, for certain purposes, it was. The world had had enough of watching Beirut and the other cities reduced to rubble by quarreling factions, and so had most Lebanese. People knew Hafez Assad was not the gentlest of men. But a firm hand was better than anarchy. Besides, even the Assad clan wouldn't be so foolish as to behave in Beirut the way they did in Damascus. To do so would be to kill their golden-egg-laying goose.
Yet, as Mr. Bouban's story testifies, Syria's occupation was not benign, not even remotely: A local NGO knows of at least 630 Lebanese prisoners who are unaccounted, a number that continues to rise as former prisoners and their families no longer fear coming forward with information. Still, Syria's occupation did have one unintended benefit: It created, for the first time, a functional identity for Lebanon.
The word that captures this is lubnaniyun, which came into common usage in the weeks of joint Christian-Muslim mass protest preceding Syria's withdrawal. Literally, it is the plural form of lubnani--"Lebanese." In spirit, it's akin to America's e pluribus unum--out of many, one.
For most of Lebanon's history, lubnaniyun had no practical meaning. The country was founded on a rigidly sectarian formula of political representation known as the confessional system. During the civil war, Christians, Druze, Sunnis and Shiites fought each other as only sectarians do, without mercy.
Yet by the time the "Independence Intifada" got underway, 15 years had passed since the end of the civil war. A new generation had come up with only dim childhood memories of the war, while an older one was in no mood to repeat the experience. And both generations, across most sectarian divides, were disgusted or had been victimized by the Syrians, a new point of common national reference. The murder on Feb. 14 of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri crystallized these feelings. But it did not create them.
What is remarkable is that what began as an alliance of convenience between Christians, Sunnis and Druze to expel Syria has not only survived Syria's departure, but has deepened into an alliance of shared convictions. Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik and likely the next prime minister, is running an interdenominational slate of candidates in the parliamentary elections tomorrow. Across nearly the entire political spectrum, candidates advocate the same things: Eradicate what remains of Syria's influence in the army, intelligence services and the government; establish an independent judiciary; use the discipline of Lebanon's $34 billion debt to trim the budget and privatize state-owned assets.
"We need to keep this momentum for reform going," says Yassin Jaber, a Shiite parliamentarian. "To the Arab world, the revolution in Ukraine meant nothing. But Lebanon really means something. If we're going to be the ones carrying the message of change, we have to make sure the change is good." Even more surprising is how wide the support is for ending the confessional system. "Muslims as well as Christians consider that they need to rebuild a country based on freedom and democracy beyond the logic of communities," says Amin Gemayal, a Maronite former president whose community has the most to lose from ending the system.
By contrast, the group that has most to gain here is the Shiites. They are constitutionally excluded from holding the presidency or the premiership. Yet while a census has not been taken in Lebanon for decades, there is little question they are on their way to becoming a majority in the country. Nizar Hamze, an expert on the Shiite community at the American University in Beirut, estimates there are between eight and nine live births per Shiite household, compared with between five and six for Sunnis and one and three for Christians and Druze.
The growing demographic strength of the Shiites raises the question of their most notorious party, Hezbollah, otherwise known as Hizb Allah, the party of God. The U.S. considers it a terrorist organization; Israel sees it as a mortal threat; and it receives $100 million a year from Iran. Yet when I ask Lebanese whether they're concerned about Hezbollah's prominence, I encounter a disarming nonchalance.
Yes, they acknowledge, Hezbollah remains the only armed faction in Lebanese politics after others were forced to disarm, and yes, the justification for its armed role pretty much vanished with Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. Yes, too, Hezbollah was Syria's ally during the Independence Intifada. All the same, Hezbollah is widely spoken of as a legitimate political party that plays a number of useful social roles--"more hizb than Allah," as one prominent journalist quips.
Yet that's hardly the impression I get visiting a Hezbollah office in the south suburbs. In a city festooned with Lebanese flags, none are to be seen here. Instead, two portraits dominate the room where I interview Hezbollah spokesman Ibrahim Zarkit: one of Ayatollah Khomeinei; the other of his successor, Ali Khamenei.
Mr. Zarkit offers Hezbollah's new rationale for not relinquishing its weapons, including 12,000 short- and medium-range missiles: They are needed to serve as a supplemental Lebanese defense force against Israel. But Prof. Hamze has his doubts about Hezbollah's claims to patriotism. "Nationalism for them is some sort of transitional moment," he says. "They continue to believe in an Islamic state." And while Hezbollah may operate as a Lebanese party when it comes to domestic matters, on regional issues it takes orders from Tehran, much as the Soviet satellite states did from Moscow during the Cold War. Prof. Hamze is persuaded that, sooner or later, Hezbollah will become the country's dominant faction, entirely through democratic means. "They're in no rush," he says.
But perhaps the apparent nonchalance of most Lebanese is warranted. Wherever I go here, the impression is of a people intent on making up for lost time, and determined never again to be dragged down by extremism. It is these Lebanese, one senses, and not Hezbollah, who are making the country anew, and who are doing so, at long last, in the absence of fear.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
