Without it losing face, the political question in Lebanon is how to tame Hizbullah and secure for the future a workable balance between the country's confessional faiths, writes Hanna Ziadeh* After long months of uneasy waiting, everything in Lebanon has now arrived at a total standstill. Since 2 March, a tight security cordon has sealed the reconstructed old city centre of Beirut that is hosting the "Lebanese national dialogue" -- a roundtable arranged by parliament Speaker Nabih Berri. For the first time since the end of the civil war in 1991, 14 top leaders from Lebanon's fractious religious communities are to sit face to face and conduct negotiations to end the limbo into which the otherwise dizzy city and country have fallen since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri on 14 February 2005. The avowed aim of the majority of participants is to bring Lebanon back to normal and underwrite its status as a sovereign state. If you ask Druze leader Walid Jumblatt or his ally, head of the largest parliamentary bloc, Saed Hariri, they want "to complete the transformation of Lebanon," which started almost a year ago with huge demonstrations calling for the withdrawal of Syria and for uncovering the truth behind the assassination of Hariri. The paradox is that all sides complain of the same chaotic situation, which leaves the future of Lebanon open to all scenarios, but they disagree on who is to blame for this state of affairs. While Jumblatt and Hariri point to continued Syrian intervention, now through local proxies, the opposition lead by Hizbullah points to the interference of the US and France, who they describe as the new "mandate powers". Abnormalities are almost the rule in Lebanon: where else on earth can the diplomatic head of a foreign power visit a sovereign country and meet with its leaders with the more or less declared purpose of toppling the head of that same state? Where else on earth can the same top diplomat succeed in meeting two presidents and the head of a world church, all in their separate residences, within the space of a four-hour visit? Of course it must be Lebanon. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spent four eventful hours on 23 February, shuttling under huge security between the various seats of Lebanese confessional powers. First she met the moral leader of the country, Patriarch Sfeir, head of the Maronite Church that has congregations all over the globe. Since his church was midwife to the only Arab state that for almost a century now has had a Christian as its head of state, he is treated with all the honours of a sovereign. Then Ms Rice met with Sunni Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, lifelong friend of the late Mr Hariri, and expressed in clear terms the support of her administration for his government in its standoff with recalcitrant pro-Syrian forces. The prospect of removing the staunchly pro-Syrian President Lahoud -- the symbol of Syrian influence in Lebanon -- is the apparent cause of the present impasse between the Sunni-Druze-Christian anti-Syrian camp -- the so-called "Forces of the 14th of March" -- on the one hand, and the Shia-lead bloc of pro-Syrian and anti-American forces -- the so-called "Forces of the 8th of March" (both referring to huge anti- and pro-Syrian demonstrations in March 2005). The embattled and obviously either stubborn or desperate Lebanese president, who rarely leaves the Babda Palace, is presented as the cause of all misery in the present no-win and no-loose political limbo, which has the effect of blocking all major decisions in Lebanon. True, Lahoud is the symbol of the Syrian inheritance and it might even be fair to describe him as a "deposit", as Saed Hariri described him in front of almost a million demonstrators commemorating the first anniversary of his father's assassination on 14 February. By "deposit" he meant a mine left behind to sabotage the "complete transformation of Lebanon". But to place responsibility for the present limbo totally at the doors of Babda Palace is simplistic. A fair share of responsibility must be placed on the "Forces of the 14th of March", who failed to capitalise on their initial success in securing the withdrawal of Syrian troops in April 2005 and winning a majority of parliamentary seats in last summer's elections. The cause of this failure was that the leaders of this broad coalition fell easily into the trap of confessional mobilisation. They were tempted by easy and immediate gains to their own sects and lost sight of the necessity to solidify what they themselves declared was the reason behind their success on 14 March: a cross- communal appeal. This failure was most clearly demonstrated when one of the most influential Christian leaders, the controversial General Michel Aoun -- an old foe of Damascus and a traditional ally of Washington -- joined hands with Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hizbullah. This happened in a surrealistic scene conducted in Saint Michael's Church, once a ravaged symbol of sectarian confrontations between Christians and Muslims, now apparently the symbolic stage for a meeting of the two great excluded leaders. But what the meeting demonstrated above all was the failure of both main parties to reintegrate the clout of the Shia community and its main flag bearer, Hizbullah, within the new realities of the post-Syrian era. It is this complex exercise of engineering a new sectarian formula of power sharing, which the 14 March leaders are conducting in order to find a way to put the Shia jinni back in the bottle. However, all previous attempts to force it or oblige it back are what have created the actual limbo. The militant "Party of God", which is on both US and the EU terrorist lists, has been the only military Lebanese faction not to put down its arms after the civil war ended, "because it is a legitimate resistance against Israeli occupation." This unique armed status was bestowed on Hizbullah by Syria, who saw in the military arm of the largest Lebanese community first an invaluable ally in the internal power struggle among the various communities, second a valuable asset in its confrontation with Israel, third a means of securing a regional alliance with the Shia Party's guardians in Tehran, and fourth a way of blackmailing Arab regimes to bolster Damascus's finances in return for its role in "taming the beast". On its side, Hizbullah has used Syrian patronage to expand its military stature and its anti-Israeli prowess to win huge popular support inside and outside of Lebanon. The party monopolised resistance against Israel and branded itself as the only Arab-Islamic resistance force ever to push Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab territory without a "humiliating" peace deal. According to Hizbullah historiography, this occurred when Israel withdrew its forces from the occupied zones of South Lebanon in 2000. Hizbullah's success in becoming the real representative of the Lebanese Shia has in turn been explained both as the result of the party's fiery Islamist discourse riding high on the popular Islamic resurgence sweeping over the region and as an artificial phenomenon which owes its success to the financial backing of Iran. In reality, Hizbullah's success has been due to more complex reasons and cannot be reduced to mere ideological appeal or foreign bankrolled vote buying. The party capitalised on Syrian patronage and Iranian financial backing to establish itself both as the generous provider of welfare services to the otherwise impoverished Shia community and as a political protector of the same, which throughout Lebanese history has found itself as a third wheel to the self-confident and well-connected Maronite community and the Sunni community who traditionally enjoyed the patronage of the Arab world. The party became protector of the overall communal interests of the Shia; it guaranteed that the Shia obtained their parliamentary seats without being dependent on sanction of other communities in the complicated Lebanese voting system. Through its successes it gained key posts in the administration, resources to build roads, hospitals and schools in Shia areas. "Completing" the transformation of Lebanon means producing a country where the national army is the only armed group, where central authority can decide what and who comes in and out of its territory, and where communities don't field international political programmes transcending both the scope of the national government and the capacity of the country. This transformation would not only entail replacing Lahoud, but also disarming all militias (both of which are required by UN Security Council Resolution 1559), ie not only the Palestinians groups but also Hizbullah. Hizbullah can no longer legitimate keeping its arms by referring to Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory, despite the party's relative success in using the disputed Shebaa Farms for justification. Disarming Hizbullah by force without casting the country into civil war is impossible. The only alternative is to convince the Shia to support the normalisation of Lebanon, which can only be achieved by guaranteeing that the Shia community does not loose the gains it fought so hard to obtain once Hizbullah is disarmed. For the Shia jinni to return to the bottle, the bottle has to be much larger and re-entry smooth, without loss of face. Only then can Lebanon secure a peaceful transition where the Shia's influence is neither oversized, as it was during the Syrian period, nor reduced back to how it was in the old days, where they were a socially deprived and politically marginalised community, which would not fit Lebanon's present demography where Shias are the largest single community. Hizbullah knows better than anyone else that to consolidate the Shia community's very recent status as equal partner to the Maronites and the Sunnis in the post-Syrian era, it needs the free assent of other communities. This status cannot be guaranteed with arms or by Iranian protection, but only by constitutionally enshrined multi- communal compromise. This is the Lebanese sectarian formula. It is this card that the other communities have to play and ask in return that Hizbullah cut its stature from an oversized regional player with lots to lose in the future into a major national and communal player with many secured gains in the present. Once again the Lebanese have succeeded in making the whole world hold its breath as the Lebanese tempt fate: will civil peace be maintained and a new sectarian "national compromise" formulated -- or will the Lebanese once again cast their country into sectarian conflict and regional polarisation, from which, after much bloodshed, they would have to return to the same table and agree on almost the same compromise they rejected before? The 14 egos meeting on the 3rd floor of the French-built parliament will decide. * The writer is author of Sectarianism and Inter- communal Nation-Building in Lebanon
