LEBANON: Rapprochement with Syria bittersweet for ‘Cedar’ revolutionaries
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It is said that politics make strange bedfellows, and none are stranger than Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and Syrian President Bashar Assad, the man Hariri has accused of killing his father.
This weekend, Hariri made his first trip to Damascus since 2005, when his father, former prime minister Rafik Hariri, and 21 others were killed by a massive car bomb in downtown Beirut.
The Hariri family has repeatedly blamed the killing on Syria, but Damascus denies involvement.
And things between Lebanon and Syria are far from being resolved. Early today, unknown assailants opened fire on a bus of Syrian workers passing through northern Lebanon, killing a 17-year-old Syrian laborer. Such attacks were common after Hariri’s assassination, when anti-Syrian sentiment was running high, although officials have not publicly speculated about a possible motive.
While rapprochement was inevitable, Hariri was reserved in his statements to the press Sunday, emphasizing that ‘Syria and Lebanon will not benefit from negative perceptions.’
The prime minister’s visit to Damascus followed a series of diplomatic overtures over the past year, including the exchange of embassies between Lebanon and Syria and several high-level visits.
Hariri’s allies have publicly praised the prime minister for his ‘positive attitude,’ but the visit comes as a disappointment for many supporters who remember the heady days of the so-called ‘Cedar Revolution’ following Rafik Hariri’s assassination, when tiny Lebanon appeared to have beaten back Goliath Syria.
Some remember this time as a joyous outpouring of patriotism. For others, it was a dark period of rabid nationalism and bitter polarization.
The weeks following Hariri’s death saw massive demonstrations in Lebanon both for and against Syria, eventually leading to the withdrawal of the Syrian army and the launch of a U.N.-backed international tribunal to investigate Hariri’s killing. It was against this background that Saad took his place as the new head of Lebanon’s most powerful political dynasty and leader of the anti-Syrian March 14 Coalition, united under the banner of ‘freedom, sovereignty and independence.’
But circumstances have changed over the past five years, even if Lebanon’s essential sectarian nature has not, and Hariri the son appears to be coming to terms with the political realities of running his father’s country.
Today, the March 14 Coalition is plagued by internal bickering and rumors of splits. Enthusiasm for the tribunal is waning among Western leaders who are eager to include Syria in wider regional solutions, and even Syria’s former die-hard enemies in Lebanon, including Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and Gen. Michael Aoun, have reconciled with Damascus in the interest of their own political longevity.
‘On the one hand, many of the same internal power dynamics are in place,’ wrote Elias Muhanna, a Harvard researcher and author of the Lebanese political blog Qifa Nabki, ‘ ... and Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are the dominant foreign players on the Lebanese stage...On the other hand, there is little doubt that the landscape has been altered in fundamental ways.’
-- Meris Lutz in Beirut