BEIRUT: It took the visit of a top Syrian official to quell the recent torrent of abuse aimed at Lebanon’s president, but even soothing tones from Damascus failed to completely silence the critics of Michel Sleiman. Syrian Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Abdel Karim Ali met on Tuesday with Sleiman and offered him Damascus’s full and public support. “A healthy Lebanon is in the interest of Syria,†he told reporters at the Baabda Presidential Palace in the hills surrounding Beirut. “The president has an essential role in preserving a healthy county.†US Ambassador Michele Sison and Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir both chimed in with messages of solidarity for the beleaguered president. But this multinational, multiconfessional show of support for Sleiman did little to truncate domestic rebukes from pro-Syrian opposition MPs. Some members of the opposition hold that Sleiman’s tenure on the presidency, which started with the 2008 Doha Agreement – itself hastily drafted to prevent the clashes at the time between Hizbullah and pro-government gunmen engulfing West Beirut and the Chouf Mountains infecting the rest of the country – has been marred by impotence. The president, his detractors maintain, is not doing enough to force majority and opposition MPs to reach consensus on a range of issues, the most divisive of which involves Hizbullah’s considerable arsenal. The recently reconvened National Dialogue committee, which is tasked with striking a Lebanese defense strategy, was postponed for a month without the faintest whiff of agreement. Majority forces maintain that Hizbullah’s vast stockpile of weapons is a threat to national security. Opposition members insist that, since the Lebanese Army is still too weak to stand on its own two feet, the Resistance’s weapons are the only existing deterrent against a trigger-happy Israeli administration. The impasse has proved impossible to break; neither side wants to budge and both believe themselves not only morally right but also constitutionally justified in their demands. Prominent pro-Syrian politicians, Wiam Wahhab and Omar Karami (himself a former prime minister) have recently initiated a campaign against Sleiman, launched off the back of stalled National Dialogue talks, the breakdown of which they say is the president’s fault. “The National Dialogue committee is nonsense and it will lead nowhere,†Wahhab said in response to Ali’s comments on Tuesday. “We only demanded from the president to fulfill his promises to the Lebanese and he should resign if he incapable of fulfilling them.†Sleiman, put simply, is being made a scapegoat for the inability of Lebanon’s constitutional arrangement – and the unwillingness of Lebanese politicians – to actively manage disagreement. Sleiman, as Lebanon’s National Pact guarantees, is a Christian (the Prime Minister must be Sunni, the Speaker of Parliament Shia) and is registered as part of his own, independent parliamentary bloc. His job description, if one exists, is to mediate disputes between majority and opposition and, with five seats out of a 30-strong cabinet, his members theoretically hold in their hands the power to pass or veto laws and amendments. In practice, however, Sleiman is hamstrung. Neither opposition (dominated by the Shiite Amal Movement, Hizbullah and Michel Aoun’s Maronite Free Patriotic Movement), nor majority (mainly constituting Sunni Future Movement, Christian Phalange and Lebanese Forces parties), are willing to bend, and Sleiman is taking the rap for lacking malleability. In spite of his constitutionally legitimate position, ordained with the blessing of other Arab states, Sleiman is in practice no more powerful than the successive individuals who occupied the presidency during Lebanon’s several wars between 1975 and 1990. Bestowed with the task of reconciling parties who don’t want to get along, Sleiman finds himself in the no-doubt thankless position of helpless bureaucrat, with no more practical power than the Tawheed men who want him gone. It is not the fault of one individual that National Dialogue continually fails to deliver. The rifts in the Lebanese political system go far beyond that; these are men with checkered histories and long grudges. Sleiman has no choice to continue doing what he is (hardly) doing. He must keep lobbying for opposing blocs to discuss burning issues. It is unfortunate that the framework in which this needs to be achieved continues to prove so impenetrable. BM
