LEBANON: Prez pick postponed again
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To the surprise of no one, Lebanon’s political mess continues on and on. Parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri on Friday afternoon delayed Saturday’s session for choosing of a president until Jan. 21. It’s the 12th time the session has been postponed.
A jumble of foreign diplomats have tried and utterly failed to resolve a crisis that has left the country without a president for nearly two months. The latest would-be hero: the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. He’s held tens of meetings with feuding political parties, in Beirut and around.
His three-point plan: elect army chief General Michel Suleiman as a compromise president; form a national unity government with no one wielding veto power; start writing up some new election laws so there’s no repeat of the current stalemate.
The plan is stil alive as possibly the best hope so far to save Lebanon’s a political establishment from the machinations of the Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and American governments vying for influence in Lebanon.
Shortly after its release, the plan was hailed by Lebanese politicians from both sides as ‘historic.’ One key: it was the result of deal between Saudi Arabia and Syria, two big players who have been at odds over Lebanon.
But soon after Moussa arrived in Lebanon, it became clear cementing any deal wouldn’t be so easy.
Although camps agree on Suleiman as the man for the top job, they disagree over the make-up of the next government, which could decide to disarm Hezbollah. The Hezbollah-led opposition also refuses to budge unless it is given veto power, or at least more say, in any future government.
And the pro-U.S. March 14 group isn’t being so easy either. It demands that it maintain its current majority status in government. (In the Lebanese system, seats are doled out to Shiites, Sunnis, Christians and Druse according to a power-sharing formula and not a popular vote.)
U.S. analyst Joshua Landis, on his Syria comment website, said finishing the final mile of any deal is going to be tough and long haul:
The devil is in the details of the national unity government. Initially there were reports that the president would be given ten members of the thirty member cabinet to appoint. This caused resistance among both the opposition and parliamentary majority. The opposition has called for each side being allotted a share of cabinet members in proportion to there membership in parliament, but this is not acceptable to March 14 as it would increase the opposition’s authority. The March 14th group would like to keep the composition of the cabinet as close to what it is today as possible.
At this point the positions of the two sides are clear. The Shiite-led opposition says they’ve got the numbers on their side and their increasing population makes their claims for more power legit. But to the anti-Syrian majority, the Cedar revolutionaries of 2005 who captured the world’s imagination by pushing Syria out of the country in massive street demos, Damascus is still at the heart of the Lebanese problem. As one pro-March14 blogger, writing at Beirut Spring, put it, ‘the opposition keeps having impossible demands, confirming that what Syria really wants is a political vacuum in Lebanon.’
Meanwhile, many Lebanese feel that the hopes of having a new president soon are slim. They’ve written off Moussa’s proposal as they wrote off French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner’s mediation efforts and U.S. attempts to force a solution amenable to Washington’s interests. One blogger, Jonathan, writing on the Bilad Sham website, said:
Mark my words, the wonderful Arab initiative will follow the same pattern as all the others: the over-enthusiastic embrace (currently); the ‘unprecedented’ visit (again); the postponement of the previously hailed unprecedented visit (again); more of same; the declaration of the success of the Arab Initiative; the mutual recrimination and laying of blame for its failure.
— Raed Rafei and Borzou Daragahi in Beirut