Chronicle of the Middle East and North Africa

The Cedar Revolution: How Lebanon Was Further Divided

Sectarian hostility between Sunnis and Shia grew after 2005, exacerbated by pro-Syrian sentiments of Hezbollah and Amal, the 2006 war with Israel, and Hezbollah’s takeover of the capital in May 2008. But the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 had already deeply divided Lebanon.

Cedar Revolution
The statue depicting assassinated Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was unveiled in downtown Beirut on February 14, 2008 to mark the third anniversary of his death. The bronze statue was created by artist Mkrtich Mazmanian and was originally placed close to a building partially destroyed in the explosion which killed the PM on Valentine’s Day 2005. Enes Canli / Anadolu Agency (Photo by Enes Canli / ANADOLU AGENCY / Anadolu via AFP)

Author: C.R. Pennell, former Al-Tajir Lecturer in the History of Islam and the Middle East, University of Melbourne, Australia

Edited by: Erik Prins

The assassination of Rafik Hariri

The assassination of Rafik Hariri on 14 February 2005 caused an immediate political crisis: it sparked anti-Syrian rallies inside Lebanon and brought international pressure.

On 21 February, there was a huge protest rally at the site of the assassination. The crowd called for the end of the Syrian occupation and blamed the pro-Syrian President Émile Lahoud for the murder. The demonstrations were repeated every week in Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut. This began what became known as the “Cedar Revolution”, after Lebanon’s national symbol. On 28 February, Omar Karami resigned as prime minister and called for new elections.

Internationally, the reaction of the US, French and Saudi governments was strongly anti-Syrian. When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad visited Riyadh on March 3, 2005, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz gave him a blunt ultimatum to withdraw the Syrian army and intelligence services at once.

Emergence of Two Political Camps

On 8 March 2005, pro-Syrian parties – notably Hezbollah and Amal – hit back with a mass demonstration in downtown Beirut in response to the Cedar Revolution. They were eventually joined by Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and formed the March 8 Alliance.

A week later, there was another huge demonstration in central Beirut, numbering hundreds of thousands of protesters – some reports said a million. It called for “Freedom, Sovereignty, Independence”. It brought together the Maronite Phalangist (Kataib) party, the Lebanese Forces, Walid Jumblatt’s Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) and the Future Movement that was now led by Hariri’s second son, Saad Hariri.

Saad was politically inexperienced but as a young businessman with very close Saudi relations (like his father), he enjoyed international support and popularity among the Sunni community. This alliance was subsequently called the 14 March Movement.

The protesters of ‘March 14’ demanded an international inquiry into Hariri’s murder, and the evacuation of the Syrian army from Lebanon. That was quickly satisfied because the overt Syrian presence became unsustainable. The withdrawal of Syrian army and intelligence forces began in late April 2005. It was rapid, unplanned and humiliating. It was completed in less than a month. In the Lebanese parliamentary elections in May and June, politicians whom the Syrians had previously backed were crushingly defeated, with two exceptions: candidates for Amal and Hezbollah.

After the elections, the prime ministership went to Fuad Siniora, a banker who had been Minister of Finance between 2000 to 2004. He had the political experience to head the 14 March Alliance, something that Saad Hariri lacked. He formed a new government in July. The Syrian government quickly demonstrated that while it had withdrawn its army and closed the border between the two countries, it would continue to demonstrate its authority.

The Shia and many Christians were suspicious of what they saw as Sunni triumphalism. Hezbollah, allied with Amal, also did well in the elections and Amal leader Nabih Berri was re-elected as speaker of parliament. Hezbollah announced it would give the new Siniora government its full support. Syrian troops may have gone but Hezbollah remained a strong force in its own right.

The 2006 Lebanon War or 33-Day War

The Syrian withdrawal of 2005 did not draw Hezbollah’s teeth as some commentators had predicted. Hezbollah raids on Israeli positions on the border continued and on 12 July 2006, a Hezbollah unit killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two more in an ambush on the border.

Hezbollah demanded an exchange of prisoners with Israel, but the Israeli army responded with airstrikes and artillery shelling and hit both Lebanese civilian infrastructure and Hezbollah’s military positions. Israeli forces then began a ground attack on Southern Lebanon, but Hezbollah was well dug in.

Cedar Revolution
A file photo dated July 20, 2006 shows a view of the area which was evacuated days ago for security reasons, while Israeli warplanes continued to bombard the area, in Dahiyeh neighborhood, Beirut, Lebanon. A group of Turkish journalists were allowed to take pictures of the area, which is inhabited mainly by civilians and devastated by bombs. Riza Ozel / Anadolu (Photo by RIZA OZEL / ANADOLU / Anadolu via AFP)

The 2006 war on Lebanon caused much civilian damage and the UN Security Council passed a resolution (1701) calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah, for Israeli withdrawal, and for the Lebanese Armed Forces to deploy under the protection of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). UNIFIL was expanded, and Lebanese army troops did deploy in southern Lebanon, for the first time in decades. Most Israeli troops withdrew by 1 October, but Hezbollah did not disarm.

Lebanon was not at peace. International Arab and Muslim opinions were divided. Broadly speaking, Iran, Syria, and Yemen strongly supported Hezbollah, while Egypt and Jordan criticised it. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies – along with the Palestinian Authority – strongly opposed Hezbollah. Within Lebanon there were massive demonstrations in December 2006, followed by a general strike and clashes between pro and anti-government forces, assassinations and car bombs. Various militias began to rearm.

In response, Hezbollah insisted Shia ministers should quit, which they did, and called for the Siniora government to resign, which it did not do. During the crisis, Parliament could not meet for the election of a successor to President Lahoud, whose term of office had expired. Siniora became the acting president until a successor could be chosen.

Lebanon was now deeply divided: most Shias now supported Hezbollah as the only force that could resist Israeli attacks. Most non-Shia saw Hezbollah as the main danger to the country.

The Increased Political Role of Hezbollah

Hezbollah’s relative success in rebuilding war-ravaged communities contrasted unfavourably with the state’s ill-prepared and slow efforts. In a state leadership dominated by Sunnis, along with Maronites, and the opposition dominated by the Shia, there was a real risk of civil war.

On the opposition side was an alliance of strange bedfellows: Hezbollah and General Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, which was the main Maronite group that opposed the government. Aoun did not want to disarm militias and neither did Hezbollah. That created a common ground of policy.

Even so, by 2007 Hezbollah’s leadership realised that there was little to be gained by fighting. Many of its supporters in the south preferred Hezbollah to act as a deterrence rather than an open resistance. Despite Hezbollah’s criticism of UNIFIL as serving the interests of Israel, many people in the south viewed the UN forces as part of their protection. That reality drew Hezbollah more and more towards a political involvement on the Lebanese scene.

Hezbollah’s demand for national unity provided it with protection by participating in the system. But the party continued to be led by clerics, and the fear that it would eventually seek to impose Islamic rule limited Hezbollah’s trans-confessional appeal.

Hezbollah was not the only point of conflict. In May 2007, violent clashes erupted between the Lebanese army and the Islamist group Fatah al-Islam. Members of the group who had robbed a bank were pursued into the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon by the Lebanese Army. It took the army until September, more than three months and hundreds of casualties, to overwhelm Fatah al-Islam, which was a small group. This was clear evidence of the army’s fundamental weakness.

More Sectarian Divisions

The other symbol of the Lebanese state, the Banque du Liban, put on rather a better performance in the mid-2000s. Its careful policy ensured monetary stability and good interest rates, so foreign capital continued to flow in. Foreign remittances – mainly from the Gulf – totalled $6 billion, making Lebanon the eighteenth-largest recipient of remittances in the world.

As a result, Lebanon weathered the global financial crisis of 2008 quite well. GDP continued to grow (8 percent in 2008). Inflation, which had reached double digits in the summer of 2008, dropped to 4 percent in January 2009.

By the beginning of 2008 however, the Siniora government itself was foundering. It was unable to solve the central problem that had plagued Lebanon for almost four years: which parties would be in government and which in opposition? Hariri’s assassination in 2005 had made it clear that the necessary reform of the electoral system and the presidency could not happen because it posed an existential threat to Hezbollah’s military power, which Hezbollah would not permit.

The government tried to rein in Hezbollah. On 6 May, it removed Beirut airport’s security chief, who was pro-Hezbollah, and questioned whether Hezbollah should control its own independent telephone network.

On 7 May 2008, the General Confederation of Lebanese Workers, which had ties to the opposition, called a general strike in Beirut. It called for an increase in the minimum wage, a general rise in salaries and subsidies for energy prices. It split the union movement; unions allied to the government refused to participate. The strike was about far more than workers’ rights: it was concerned with deep political loyalties.

This provoked a showdown which Hezbollah clearly won: it took over West Beirut for three days. The Lebanese army commander, General Suleiman, kept his troops out of the conflict and the government backed down. The fighting solidified sectarian divisions, but it kept the army neutral. It weakened the government, although Siniora did not fall.

Conversely, Hezbollah lost some of its legitimacy as a political, rather than a sectarian movement. On 21 May, at a meeting in Qatar, Lebanese parties signed the Doha Declaration which reasserted the presidency. The latter had fallen vacant because MPs could not agree on a consensus candidate. It also instituted a reform of the electoral law which benefitted Christian candidates in elections, due in 2009. This favoured the 14 March Alliance.

The 14 March Alliance was also bolstered on 1 March 2009 by the long-awaited foundation of the international inquiry into the killing of Rafik Hariri. The UN finally established the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague, which included both Lebanese and international judges.

On 25 May, Parliament elected Michel Suleiman, the army commander, as president and three days later he re-appointed Siniora as prime minister. But Hezbollah and its associates did well in the elections of June 2009. On a fairly high turnout (55%) the March 14 Alliance won 71 seats in parliament, while the March 8 Alliance won 57 seats. On 9 November, the leader of the Future Movement, Saad Hariri, became Prime Minister.

Saad Hariri took over a Lebanon that was more divided than ever. Sectarian hostility between Sunnis and Shia had grown since 2005, exacerbated by pro-Syrian sentiments of Hezbollah and Amal, the 2006 war with Israel, and Hezbollah’s takeover of the capital in May 2008. Both the Saudi and Syrian regimes accepted the results of the elections, but an unexpected and deep challenge was waiting for all the regimes in the Arab World, and the Syrian one in particular: the popular uprisings at the end of 2010 known as the Arab Spring.

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