Lebanese Sunnis play the confessional card against Hizbollah
Beirut (AsiaNews) – The fall of the government and the change of the majority are a virtual “coup d’état”, members of the old majority say unanimously. They denounce a ‘pronunciamento’ in which the threat to have Hizbollah use force played a crucial role. With Walid Jumblatt’s shifting his support to the alliance between the Hizbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement (the latter led by Michel Aoun), the change occurred in a week. All it took was for a few Hizbollah men to show up early in the morning in Beirut and in the Druze mountain, for the Druze leader to throw his support to the self-styled “pro-resistance and pro-Syria” camp. Just a week before, Jumblatt had said that he could never renege on his alliance with Saad Hariri’s Future Movement.
What Hizbollah militiamen wanted to do remains unclear. They were not armed, except for walkie-talkie. However, their brief show of force was enough to frighten parents who had sent their children to school. Many schools quickly closed their doors.
Informed sources say that the Hizbollah men planned to swarm local government buildings and launch a civil disobedience movement from inside courthouses and police buildings. Those black-dressed militiamen who arrived around 5.30 am were just the vanguard of a large contingent from the Islamist party, sources say.
Nagib Mikait, the rich businessman who was picked to form the new government, has the job cut out for him. An independent Sunni who is well liked by Syria, he has to consult all factions in parliament since the latter has to the power to vote in the new government.
At the same time, he has to deal with the international community, which is leaning heavily on him, starting with US Ambassador Maura Connelly, to ensure that Lebanon respects its international obligations, as well as with “his” community.
Yesterday in fact, the main leaders of the Sunni community, including outgoing Prime Minister Saad Hariri, met. As Prime Minister-designate, Nagib Mikati attended the event as well. During the meeting, he was warned against abandoning the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which is trying to find out who killed Rafik Hariri in 2005.
A statement issued at the end of the assembly warned that if the STL was abandoned, whether explicitly or not, most Sunnis would “feel oppressed or vanquished”, and would seen the decision as a denial of justice.
In fact, the new majority wants to get rid of the international tribunal, and for good reasons. Sources suggest that some Hizbollah officials were directly involved in the plot.
The communiqué, which spoke plainly and carried threats against the Shia community in between the lines, marks a turning point for it embodies the views of a large segment of the Sunni community.
Faced with Hizbollah’s weapons and its failure to respect democratic rules, the Sunni community appears to have opted for its one weapon, its ‘Asabiyya’ or group solidarity.
Will the prime minister-designate be able to meet the challenge and form a government with essentially parties from the pro-Syrian camp? And if he does, how long will it be before the antithetical visions of the two camps explode?
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15/09/2021 13:55
