My interview with professor Asad Abu-Khalil is now published on the MEPEI website here. It concentrates mainly on the geopolitical situation in the greater Middle East and the much-vaunted shift in the power balance from a US-dominated scene to a more multipolar situation where China, Brazil, Iran, Russia and Turkey seem to be playing ever more important roles. Abu-Khalil roundly contests the validity of this view and states that very little has changed on the ground yet. Part of our talk is nevertheless devoted to discussing the imminent end of Israel-as-we-know-it, which we both agree is not very far off. The interview took place in July, and so more recent developments, e.g. concerning the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, are not mentioned. An excerpt: ‘The US still is able to impose its will on issues dealing with Israel, and on economic issues, the US is still able – with the help of the oil producers – to decide on matters of production and such. Israel still on behalf of the US can do what it wants. What’s true is this, for electoral reasons, the US is currently so preoccupied by Afghanistan first, and secondly, by Iraq, that is willing to allow certain manoeuvres by its enemies. However, that is not going to allow for any changing of the rules according to which, Israel rules supreme in the Middle East region, while Arab dictatorships continue to act on behalf of the US empire. ‘
Interview with Angry Arab
20, September, 2010 by BartThree years in the third world…
18, September, 2010 by BartHere’s a piece I wrote during the Lebanese heat wave of late August. I have been promising some of you to publish it as soon as I left the country. It is a stream-of-consciousness rant which pretty much encompasses my experiences living in Lebanon for three years. I was in a lousy mood, so the negative aspects prevail. Soon I hope to write a positive counter-rant about all the things I loved about living here – but meanwhile, here goes:
‘Forgive me if I’m ranting. In the course of the three years I have been writing this blog, I have usually reported on local and regional politics, as well as social and cultural issues, as a more or less disinterested and objective, detached observer. At least that has been the ideal – and like any ideal it is unattainable even while you strive to approach it as closely as possible. But even so, objectivity does not necessarily equal neutrality, and like anyone else I have developed sympathies and dislikes by being a close observer and a ‘privileged witness’. But after three years in this country, in which I have evolved from the comfortable position of an outsider just-passing-through to a long-term resident getting ever more integrated in the fabric of Lebanese society, there are a few things I need to get off my chest.
Contrary to what you might conclude from reading the international press, the issue currently occupying the minds and raising intense emotions among the Lebanese (and residing foreigners) is not the coming indictment of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon or the possible cut-off of military aid by US Congress – it is a much more basic and important issue. Demonstrations are taking place all over Lebanon, some of them turning violent, to protest… the lack of electricity. Power cuts are ubiquitous all over Lebanon. Even in the best of times, most parts of Beirut experience power cuts of three hours a day, poorer parts of the city spend six to twelve hours a day without electricity and outside Beirut many parts of the country get a mere six hours a day of supply. In the present heatwave, this is insufferable, and it is severely compounded by the fact that Electricite du Liban (EDL) announced a few weeks ago – just like that, without even bothering with an excuse or a reason – that electricity would be rationed even more. The reasons for this are many and, like everything else in Lebanon, mired in a web of corruption, cronyism and party politics as inextricable as the bunches of electrical wires you can see all over the country dangling across the streets. The power infrastructure is hopelessly inadequate and antiquated, and no government has invested in it for decades, apart from some ad hoc repairs after the 2006 war. Electricity is stolen on a large scale, and contrary to what some M14 figures like to repeat like a mantra, definitely not only in ‘opposition areas’ (never mind that the ‘opposition’ is actually part of the national unity government now – for those wrongly insisting to see themselves are ‘the majority’, M8 remain ‘the opposition’). Neither are these ‘opposition’ areas, like Dahiyyeh, the ones that ‘refuse to pay their electricity bills’ – or at least not more than any other areas. In fact, both electricity theft and non-payment of bills are largely confined to the political and business elites of this country and their proteges, the same corrupt wheeler-dealers who never experience power cuts in their luxurious villas and tasteless palaces. Not coincidentally, they also control the generator mafia that benefits from the cuts and protect the thieves that cause the chronic shortage of money of EDL – to the point where ministries run by those benefiting from the generator mafia actually refuse to pay the fuel bills for EDL, thus augmenting their own income. Anyone living close to even a minor politician’s house anywhere in the country will confirm that they are mysteriously free from power cuts. Beirut areas like Quraytem (where Hariri’s palace is) or Clemenceau (where Junblatt has his town house) of course never experience power cuts and neither does the Grand Serail in downtown (the government’s HQ). Anyone else might as well be living in blockaded Gaza or post-US Iraq.
In truth, the images the international media so much like to project – ad nauseam – of scantily clad girls in beach clubs and rich kids showing off daddy’s Porsche Carrera in the bars of Gemmayzeh are not a true reflection of the life of the large majority of the Lebanese population, which is actually desperately poor and living largely on remittances from family members working in the GCC countries, Europe, North and South America and even Africa, with some occasional handouts of whatever sectarian politician they are paid to vote for. This large majority of Lebanese – at least 90% – no matter whose side they are on politically, is permanently hit by power cuts – which actually cost you three times: first you have to pay the regular EDL bill for having power part of the time, then you have to pay the local generator mafioso to have electricity for the rest of the time (usually that bill is higher than the EDL bill even though typically you only get a measly 5 amp, not even enough to run an AC or washing machine), and then you pay again when you have to replace your fridge, AC, TV, laptop etcetera much more often because the daily power cuts destroy them in the long run… Oh, and of course you have to buy that equipment from dealers who have a monopoly license to import them – i.e. it again benefits the corrupt cronies who refuse to provide proper services. It is the same story with the crap roads full of potholes destroying cars at an unnecessarily high rate, and who holds the import licences for the car brands? You got it…
Typical for the total lack of interest politicians show in the well-being of their electorate, neither parliament nor the government bothered to hold an emergency session to try and solve the electricity problem, even while tyres were being burnt, roads blocked and police forces attacked by outraged demonstrators from Akkar in the north to Sour (Tyre) in the south. For all their ‘Lebanon First’ sloganeering and despite the few hundred dollar bribes they give you at election time, for all their rhetoric of protecting whatever sect they pretend to represent and despite all their promises, they just don’t give a fuck about you, my Lebanese friends…
Another issue, while we’re at it, is the impossibly high cost of mobile and international calls in this country – mobile phone calls here are the most expensive in the world in absolute terms, let alone relative to the local wages. Lebanon is the only country in the entire world, to my knowledge, where people are forced to communicate using missed calls because their prepaid credit runs out in a matter of – literally – minutes. There are only two mobile providers licensed in Lebanon, Alfa and MTC, who cartel the prices between them and thereby provide an incredible quarter of the annual government income. The protection racket goes so far and is so blatant that parliament recently tried to pass a law criminalising and blocking Skype and other internet telephone software just to safeguard the ridiculously high prices monopoly landline provider Ogero (owned by – who else – PM Hariri!) charges for international calls. This in a country where every family has to send some of its sons and daughters abroad to earn an income which can actually sustain the family, as Lebanon offers only scarce and ridiculously underpaid jobs, no social security to speak of, a systematically underfunded public education and health system and private hospitals which routinely leave people to die in front of their doors who don’t have either health insurance coverage or enough cash on them.
All this makes Lebanon the worst possible combination between capitalism and communism: you pay capitalist prices for communist (or worse) services… In essence, all these are manifestations of one and the same problem that affects this country in many different ways: the state, as far as it even exists, is not actually there to provide services to the citizens and guarantee their rights. And we are not just talking the south or the Bekaa here, we are talking about the entire country. It is not just Hezbollah who have set up a ‘state within the state’, these set-ups exist all over the country: every sect, feudal landlord, ‘former’ civil war militia and ‘political party’ runs their own. The actual national ‘state’ is only there to fill the pockets of the political elites and their cronies and protect their interests. That is why even major highways are full of potholes and unlit at night. That is why there is still no broadband available here, even though the slow and unreliable internet ruins the economy and stops many businesses from expanding. That is why in the one Middle Eastern country with plentiful water resources, the population suffers semi-permanent water shortages in their houses, while broken pipes are flooding the streets for days on end elsewhere. That is why the police rarely show up when you call them and are uncooperative and uninterested when they do, yet refuse you entry to their office when you show up wearing flipflops or shorts in the middle of a heatwave, because it shows ‘lack of respect’ for this institution that does nothing to deserve it. That is why bureaucrats can arbitrarily deny you any papers you are legally entitled to when you don’t want – or can’t afford – to bribe them. That is why Lebanese pay twice the price for their passport than Belgians, even while their average income is only a quarter of that in Belgium – and then the bureaucrats have the nerve to open a criminal case against you for ‘negligence’ when your passport gets damaged and you simply apply for a new one – at full cost of course. Incredibly, if you are found to have been ‘negligent’, you will be denied a new passport for six months – an illegal proposition even by Lebanon’s own defunct laws! That is why there is an army which has never protected the country from any foreign invasion or attack, yet insists on putting up roadblocks all over the country creating even more traffic jams than the crap roads already do, then mans them with soldiers who rarely bother to check anything more than the decolletes of women drivers and passengers. That is why any and all shopkeepers, taxi drivers, car mechanics, internet providers or satellite TV pirateers can rip you off at will with crap services and expired products sold at extortionate prices while you can get no redress anywhere because the police and the courts are as corrupt as the elite circles they serve or belong to and who will at all times protect each other at the expense of ordinary citizens.
I guess all this is pretty much the essence of what is meant by the expression ‘the third world’. Because however much the Lebanese bourgeoisie and political elites try to project the image of Lebanon as modern, developed and democratic, it is none of these. In actual reality it is a corrupt, underdeveloped, backward fief of feudal landlords and former warlords masquerading as parliamentarians while running what passes for the ‘state’ as their personal cash cow. It is a country where women count for nothing and can’t even pass on their nationality to their children, let alone their husbands. It is a country where theocrats rule, civil marriage is non-existent and the personal life of even the most secular and atheist Lebanese is governed by medieval church laws or the sharia. It is a country where the large majority lives in crushing poverty and counts for nothing, while suffering a tiny rich elite to flaunt their ridiculous unearned wealth in their faces. It is a country where appearance and external form means everything and actual meaningful content is buried and neglected. It is a country where foreign maids are routinely kept as slaves by many families and just as routinely commit suicide because it is the only way out of their misery. If they try to run away, they are chased by the police (ah! here is one thing the police actually does!) and either returned to their ‘owners’ or locked up in inhumane conditions under a highway bridge in Adliyeh. It is a country where Palestinian refugees are treated only marginally better than they are in Israel. It is a country where every newspaper, magazine and TV station is owned by one political party or another and they all toe the party line with incredibly biased and dishonest reporting. The rest are vanity publishers in the pay of some Gulf prince or other. It is a country where the few independent journalists who actually do their job are arrested for digging up corruption scandals and where the president sues ordinary citizens who criticise him on their facebook pages. It is a country where the CEO of a major bank (SGBL) has an opponent shot openly in a nightclub and then simply flies his private jet to Milan undisturbed. It is a country where your car gets stolen in Beirut and you can buy it back in one particular village in the Bekaa valley which everybody knows but which never gets disturbed by the police. It is a country which exports large amounts of hash and heroin to large parts of the world yet locks its own citizens away for years when they smoke a spliff. It is a country where something as simple as actually using an existing parking garage to relieve a neighbourhood of desperate parking problems takes a decade of tow-tugging between businessmen, local and national authorities about how to divide the loot of the potential parking fees. It is a country whose politicians routinely crow about sovereignty and pose as nationalists while taking money from foreign governments to keep the country underdeveloped and subservient to the highest bidder. It is a country which sells out and wastes its scarce natural resources and destroys its environment on a massive scale to enrich the few while making life a misery for everybody else. Its capital is given over to Saudi and Emirati project developers who destroy the wonderful old architecture and the social fabric of the community for greed, building more luxury holiday flats that are empty for eleven months a year, while rents become unaffordable and over a million Beirutis have to drive miles out of the city to find something vaguely resembling a park or a green spot. No wonder the majority of Lebanese prefer to flee their native land and live abroad. I will soon follow their example.’
Sorry is just not going to be enough…
12, September, 2010 by BartA very interesting and aggressive press conference took place this morning. It was held by Jamil Al Sayyed, one of the four Lebanese generals who spent four years in jail accused of – though never charged with – complicity in Hariri’s assassination. Their detention rested entirely on the testimony of what have turned out to be false witnesses. The man attacked Saad Hariri personally and comprehensively, going to the point of demanding that the Hariri memorial on Martyr’s Square be removed because it is situated on land stolen by Solidere, Hariri’s public-private project development company which expropriated thousands of Lebanese home owners in its effort to rebuild downtown Beirut – with money borrowed by then PM Rafiq Hariri from his own banks to pay his own company, debts to be repaid by the Lebanese state at a handsome interest rate of course. Sayyed announced judicial actions – so does Hizbullah by the way, as well as Syria which has announced arrest warrants for a number of March 14th characters including PSP personality Marwan Hamade, who has reportedly already fled to Paris. Sayyed accused Saad Hariri, among many other things, of spending a quarter of his father’s inheritance on fabricating and compensating false witnesses which he plucked from Lebanese jails and promised plastic surgery and lifelong financial security. He actually went as far as saying ‘the Lebanese people should reject the status quo and work on change even if that requires the toppling of the government by force in the street.’
It will be interesting to see Saad Hariri’s reaction to these accusations – which by the way are uttered by a man who has a lot of accurate inside information and powerful backers. It is amazing that the March 14th forces even thought they would have been able to get away with a four-year long concerted political attack on their large and powerful neighbour – while being at war with their only other neighbour – without suffering consequences. It has been clear since May 2008 at least that their US, French and Saudi backers were not prepared to actually go to any serious lengths to protect them. The (relative) defeat of the neocons in the US by means of Obama’s election should have dispelled any lingering doubts on the matter. The forward-looking Junblatt was the first to defect from the camp after the 2009 parliamentary elections (and seems to have handsomely shifted all personal blame on his lieutenant Hamade while apologizing personally and profusely to president Assad). Saad Hariri’s Future movement has followed suit for all practical purposes, shying away only from officially announcing its retreat. Since the formation of the national unity government (in itself an admission of defeat by M14), the army now officially stands with Hizbullah – and therefore with Syria and Iran. Bashar Al Assad has visited Lebanon for the first time since 2005 – and significantly he was accompanied by the Saudi king Abadallah – and Iran’s Ahmadinejad is to follow on October 13th, reportedly planning to visit the Israeli border. He might well enjoy an afternoon in the family-oriented picnic site ‘Park of Iran’ overlooking Israel – which In the Middle of the East described earlier here – and which finally seems to be discovered by the international media (by VOA first, for some weird reason). The 150-odd Israeli collaborators and spies who have been apprehended in Lebanon over the past two years and are in the process of being tried, are another indication of the shift in the political equilibrium. To be continued for sure.
Sorry…
7, September, 2010 by BartAin’t life simple? “At a certain stage we made mistakes and accused Syria of assassinating the martyred premier. This was a political accusation, and this political accusation has finished.” Ah well, ma3lesh, don’t worry, that’s ok then.
Twisted standards in an ‘upside-down’ world
1, September, 2010 by BartWhat was it again we were (and are) told by the extreme right wing hatemongers in Europe and the US? Oh yeah, ‘they’ hate ‘our’ freedoms! That is why ‘they’ attack ‘us’. Well, apart from the obvious argument that it is exactly those right-wing hatemongers who are most eager to destroy ‘our’ freedoms and replace them with autocratic oppressive regimes very much like ‘their’ regimes (which are of course imposed on ‘them’ by ‘our’ foreign policies against ‘their’ will, but never mind that), we are now seeing some shining examples of how exactly this works. While the ‘freedom-loving’ US christians are mounting a vicious hate campaign against a mosque opening in NYC’s ground zero, in Beirut the old Magen David synagogue has recently been reopened. There has been no smear camapaign against opening a jewish place of worship in a ground zero which has repeatedly and very recently (2006) been the scene of destruction so massive it makes 9/11 look like the insignificant fait divers which it actually is in historical terms. This in a country which is still under daily and very real threats of total annihilation by the Israeli regime down south. But then the Lebanese and Palestinians have always shown a real capability of distinguishing between jews and Israelis- and yes, that includes Hizbullah, who actually make a point of this issue. All through the civil war this very same synagogue and the remaining jewish community around it was protected by the PLO. Until the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982, when their position became untenable, the Lebanese jewish community stayed on in the country, and when they eventually left, the large majority did not leave to Israel but settled elsewhere. The synagogue was eventually destroyed by… indiscriminate Israeli bombardments and air strikes during the medieval and brutal siege of Beirut in 1982. It has now been rebuilt, partly at Lebanese expense, ready to be destroyed again – along with the rest of the country – by those splendid straight shooters of the IDF. Read a salient comparison of the American and Lebanese attitudes to a virtually identical issue here.
In another instance of ‘our’ superior civilization, values and respect for human rights, a self-appointed rabbinical court has sentenced an Israeli singer to 39 whiplashes for the heinous crime of performing for a mixed male-female audience… The fact that this is not an official Israeli court is beside the point – the point being that the Iareli state allows this court to go ahead without the slightest whimper of protest, as this article in the Jerusalem Post makes clear. As for the official Israeli court system, it just acquitted an IDF officer who emptied the entire chamber of his machine gun into a 13-year old Palestinian girl and publicly declared he would have done the same if the girl had been 3 years old. The rabbinical court looked on in approval, as the act was apparently not performed in front of a mixed audience… Note that the officer was not even prosecuted for viciously and in cold blood murdering an unarmed little girl without any reason or provocation – that has never been a prosecutable crime in ‘democratic’ Israel as long the killer is jewish and the victim is not – but for ‘illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident’…
Damn, ‘they’ must hate ‘our’ ‘freedom, democracy and respect for human rights’ so much, it must be unbearable. No wonder ‘they’ come to ‘our’ countries to blow themselves up…
The heat, the heat!
25, August, 2010 by BartDemonstrations have been taking place all over Lebanon to protest the aggravated power cuts in the middle of a scorching heat wave. Tyres are burning, roads being blocked, people are suffering as if they lived in blockaded Gaza or US-occupied Iraq, and parliament and government do… nothing. That is right, not one emergency session or meaningful statement.
Meanwhile, the M14 politicians are insulting their own voters by trying to implicate the demonstrations are only ‘opposition’ ploys to discredit the government – conveniently forgetting the the ‘opposition’ is actually in the government of national unity, and also forgetting that they are not the ‘majority’ anymore.
The merciless heat and humidity seems to have driven some people crazy in poorer areas of Beirut last night, where a fight over a parking spot between a Hezbollah official and an Ahbash official turned into a night-long firefight involving RPGs and kalashnikovs, resulting in 3 dead (including the Hezbollah official) and untold damage to streets and homes in the area (Ras al-Nabah, Burj Abi Haidar, Basta and Nweiri neighbourhoods). Ahbash (which literally means ‘the Ethiopians’) is a fundamentalist sunni group which emerged in the eighties under the Syrian occupation, and was (is?) supported by Syria. They are part of the M8 coalition, i.e. allies of Hezbollah, which makes it unlikely that there was a political dimension to the fight. People fight about parking spaces all the time in overcrowded Beirut and the suffocating heat, aggravated by frequent power cuts, in combination with people being grumpy and hungry all day during the fasting month have been causing rising tensions and bad tempers all over the place. All you need to add is the circumstance that virtually everybody in Lebanon has at least a few kalashnikovs and some grenades in their house.
The fighting started during yet another Nasrallah speech, this one addressed to an all-women iftar meal (via a screen of course, mind you), in which he suggested Lebanon take Iran’s lead and build a nuclear power station to solve the problem of the power cuts – which, provocative as it is, is actually the first sensible suggestion from any Lebanese politician to solve the country’s perennial electricity shortage . He also suggested Lebanon’s army could call on Iran for its weapons, seeing as the pitiful leftovers they received from the US are now blocked and likely to be cut off entirely. The international media is dutifully reporting Nasrallah’s call, but bizarrely omitting the fact that president Suleiman has actually already officially requested Iran’s help in arming the LAF two days ago. (Then again, the only source for this report seems to be Iran’s state-owned PressTV). Whether Suleiman just intends to put pressure on US congress to rescind the blocking of military aid to Lebanon or actually pursues a serious change of policy remains to be seen, but the danger to the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia in cutting off the military aid was of course always that Lebanon would turn to the other side for support. As usual, the US and Israel are shooting themselves in the foot with full enthusiasm.
Meanwhile, another spy for Israel has been arrested – this time an official of the ministry of telecommunications. It has transpired recently that during the July 2006 war, Israel only attacked antennas and stations of MTC (where no Israeli spies have been found – Alfa seems to have been infested by them), while leaving the Alfa installations intact. That should have rung some bells earlier, no?
Nasrallah has spoken…
10, August, 2010 by Bart… and the Middle East listened. The full two-hour presentation and Q&A session was carried live not only by every Lebanese channel (except, unsurprisingly, Hariri’s own Future TV), it was also carried in full by Al Jazeera and even Al Arabiya. And by Israeli TV, but they ‘stopped [the] live broadcast when al-Manar unveiled footage allegedly intercepted from Israeli surveillance planes of the Lebanese coastline, including the site of the murder of ex-PM Rafik Hariri prior to his 2005 assassination.’ (original source: Al Akhbar newspaper) For more or less complete transcriptions in English of the text see Qifa Nabki or Al Manar.
Nasrallah presented a pretty convincing case – based on Israeli drone surveillance footage, confessions of Israeli collaborators and public statements by Israeli politicians – that Israel had the motive, capability and intention to assassinate Hariri – as well as plenty of documented experience in the assassination of foreign dignitaries abroad of course – and was moreover closely monitoring Hariri’s tracks in the days leading up to his assassination – surveillance images presented live during his speech. The story starts back in the early nineties when Israeli collaborators informed Hariri that Imad Mughniyeh (a main military leader of the resistance, himself assassinated in a ‘mysterious’ car bombing in Damascus in early 2008) ‘wanted to murder him’. Plenty of circumstantial evidence, no real smoking gun, but probably about as close as anybody ever got – certainly a lot more convincing than anything the STL itself has ever come up with, and that was the whole idea of this press conference: to convince the Arab audience. The entire presentation was riveting and very professionally produced. And of course, the simple cui bono question has always pointed to Israel and against Syria and Hezbollah, neither of whom stood to gain anything from killing Hariri.
The big revelation militarily speaking – and the one that really hit the Israelis where it hurts – is that Hezbollah has been able since at least 1997 to intercept and decrypt Israeli drone footage as it was sent to the IDF command centers. Nasrallah obviously relished in recounting the resistance’s ambushing and killing of a team of Israeli navy seal commandos as they landed in Ansariyyeh in 1997, after lying in wait for months on the evidence of Israeli drones’ intensive monitoring of the location. He also relished in revealing Israeli drones and collaborators closely monitoring the moves of Israeli ally Samir Geagea and the seaside home of president Suleyman…
By the way, if you are looking for serious reporting on what was probably the most widely watched media event in the Middle East this year (possibly barring Star Academy), don’t bother with the increasingly biased and irrelevant BBC, who just tuck a measly ten-line excuse for an article (Nasrallah shows Hariri murder ‘evidence’) way down on the frontpage of their website, of course surrounding the word ‘evidence’ with their famed quotation marks – those raised eyebrows invariably reserved for Arabs in the BBC’s Middle East, where Israeli spokesmen are apparently the only ones whose statements never need to be ‘independently confirmed ‘… Instead read serious and dependable media such as Al Jazeera (Israel implicated in Hariri murder) or Reuters (Hezbollah says Israel staked out Hariri routes). Or alternatively, you could read the Israeli Haaretz newspaper, which manages to not mention the captured drone images (shown extensively during the speech) even once. But at least they are clear about whose side they are on…
In related news, the US Knesset – oops, sorry: the US Congress – has moved to block the paltry aid the Lebanese army receives from the US ($100 million, mostly spent on training plus basically a few old Cessna planes, some sniper rifles and a handful of secondhand cars). As one Rep. Cantor put it: ‘Lebanon cannot have it both ways. If it wants to align itself with Hezbollah against the forces of democracy, stability and moderation, there will be consequences.’ In other words: allow the Israelis to walk all over your country and kill you at will or… allow the Israelis to walk all over your country and kill you at will. ‘Forces of democracy, stability and moderation’ indeed… Meanwhile, private donations are reported to be ‘flooding’ into the presidential palace at Baabda to better arm the LAF. If you too want to contribute, call this number to donate (does that sound like a scam or what?)… Unsurprisingly, Iran too has reiterated its willingness to offer assistance but realistically speaking, of course, any significant response would have to come from Russia or China.
Murdoch goes Arabic
9, August, 2010 by BartWhile we are all holding our breath here in Lebanon for star media player Hassan Nasrallah’s tonight speech – in which he has promised to reveal ‘hard evidence’ of Israel’s involvement in Hariri’s assassination – a rather less noticed but much more dangerous development has been taking place behind the scenes. A new 24-hour news channel is set to shake up the Middle East mediascape, and behind it is nobody other than Rupert ‘Fox’ Murdoch – destroying media freedom for decades now all over the world – partnering for the occasion with Saudi prince Waleed ‘Rotana’ bin Talal – destroying Arabic music for decades now. Paul Cochrane has investigated the deal and wrote up an excellent article for Arab Media & Society: ‘“However, in the case of the tie-up between Rotana and News Corp., the extent of the harm is much worse, and more pressing. The Arab world is yet to even appreciate the extent of the problem. It’s very unfortunate. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is more than a media company with an eye on profits. It has political and even ideological dimensions that are hardly hidden. By providing it with that opportunity under the guise of technology transfers, or whatever, Rotana has introduced a menacing new factor to scattered Arab media, which already lack true, authentic identity, and will have little chance standing up to a global giant like News Corp. And the latter doesn’t stop at 9 percent ownership of anything; its model is predicated on constant and rapid expansion. It is hard to imagine a good scenario emerging out of this tie-up,” [Ramzi Baroud] added.
Indeed, Prince Alwaleed gave an indication at the announcement of the tie-up that News Corp.’s acquisition is motivated by more than just profit. “This (News Corp) transaction values Rotana at more than $800 million… But the transaction is way, way beyond finance… Rotana does not need to be financed. It has near zero debt,” he said. (…) The channels may be used as tools to stoke tensions between Gulf countries – best exemplified by the spats between Saudi Arabia and Qatar over Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya – and over wider geopolitical issues, such as Iran, Iraq and Yemen. And crucially, will these new channels “objectively” cover stories in their headquarters’ countries?
Both Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have been banned in certain countries for reporting uncomfortable truths, yet do not apply the same journalistic ethos when it comes to airing dirty laundry in their home countries. But knowing which stories should run and others to be avoided is a compromise News Corp. knows how to make, having struck a Faustian bargain with China’s censors and state broadcasters to be able to air in the world’s most populous country. Furthermore, Murdoch and Bin Talal are powerful and influential men; men that could stand up to power but more often than not go along with it, and shape the discourse of power. Murdoch after all had a hotline to British Prime Minister Tony Blair during his time in office, and the two talked three times in nine days in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. Ultimately, it is too early to tell what these new ventures will entail, but the region’s news duopoly seems set for a shake up.’
The article is also featured on Paul’s blog Back in Beirut.
The Middle East: it’s all about drinking and dancing!
I am taking this occasion to finally link to two articles I wrote for Executive magazine last year. The first one, ‘Rockin’ the Shop’ is connected to the above story in that it talks about the music industry in the Middle East, specifically contrasting the corporate Rotana Music to Lebanon’s homegrown independent Incognito Records. The second article, ‘Ales of an Industry’, talks about Almaza – the Heineken-owned ‘Lebanese’ national beer – and 961, a recently started microbrewery challenging Heineken’s stranglehold on the Lebanese beer market. As a Belgian, I am of course severely biased in this matter (i.e. the words ‘Dutch’ and ‘beer’ should never go together), and thus pleased to announce that 961′s beer enthusiast in charge, Mazen Hajjar, is proudly inspired by Belgian trappist and white beers. He promised me that 2010 would see the release of his very own Chimay. Almaza, on the other hand, was not so happy about the article, as it reveals that virtually all ingredients of Lebanon’s ‘national symbol’ are actually imported – mainly from the Netherlands – with the only local ingredient being the water…
Pity the tree
6, August, 2010 by BartAnd so the tree was cut down after all. Israel and its members of US congress are urging to end the (ridiculously scanty) American support for the LAF, while Dar Al Hayat reports that the IDF threatened to bomb ‘the Lebanese army’s positions along the border’ if they would be prevented from cutting down the tree (a scrub more like). Israeli officials are rambling about the ‘Hezbollization of the LAF’. The Israelis are furthermore trying, through UNIFIL – which has been playing a particularly unsavory role in the whole affair – to obtain the firing or court-martialling of the officer in charge of the shooting, and keep claiming – as does the UN – that although the territory the tree was on is lying north of their self-erected ‘technical fence’, it is ‘Israeli’ because it is south of the blue line. No mention in the international media that the blue line is not an international border, let alone an internationally recognised border, but an armistice line decreed by the UN in 2000 and simply marking the line of the Israeli withdrawal after its 18 year occupation of the south of Lebanon, which is disputed by both Lebanon and Israel in many places. Legally speaking, it is no man’s land in between two countries who have been at war since 1948. Gideon Levy, one of the few sane voices left in the land of zion, describes the Israeli attitude in an article fittingly named ‘Only we’re allowed’ in Haaretz: ‘Those bastards, the Lebanese, changed the rules. Scandalous. Word is, they have a brigade commander who’s determined to protect his country’s sovereignty. Scandalous. The explanation here was that he’s “indoctrinating his troops” – only we’re allowed to do that, of course – and that this was “the spirit of the commander” and that he’s “close to Hezbollah.” The nerve. And now that we’ve recited ad nauseum the explanations of Israel Defense Forces propaganda for what happened Tuesday at the northern border, the facts should also be looked at.
On Tuesday morning, Israel requested “coordination” with UNIFIL to carry out another “exposing” operation on the border fence. UNIFIL asked the IDF to postpone the operation, because its commander is abroad. The IDF didn’t care. UNIFIL won’t stop us. At noon the tree-cutters set out. The Lebanese and UNIFIL soldiers shouted at them to stop. In Lebanon they say their soldiers also fired warning shots in the air. If they did, it didn’t stop the IDF.
The tree branches were cut and blood was shed on both sides of the border. Shed in vain. True, Israel maintains that the area across the fence is its territory, and UNIFIL officially confirmed that yesterday. But a fence is a fence: In Gaza it’s enough to get near the fence for us to shoot to kill. In the West Bank the fence’s route bears no resemblance to the Green Line, and still Palestinians are forbidden from crossing it. In Lebanon we made different rules: the fence is just a fence, we’re allowed to cross it and do whatever we like on the other side, sometimes in sovereign Lebanese territory. We can routinely fly in Lebanese airspace and sometimes invade as well. (…) Three Lebanese killed, including a journalist, are not enough of a response to the killing of our battalion commander. We want more. Lebanon must learn a lesson, and we will teach it. And what about us? We don’t have any lessons to learn. We’ll continue to ignore UNIFIL, ignore the Lebanese Army and its new brigade commander, who has the nerve to think that his job is to protect his country’s sovereignty.’
Meanwhile, more Israeli spies are being arrested in Lebanon, the last one being an ex-army officer who is now a high-ranking official in Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (allied with Hezbollah). Bellemare ( currently in charge of the STL) has been reported telling diplomats at the UN that the tribunal’s coming indictment of Hezbollah members for the assassination of Hariri will be based on ‘inconclusive circumstantial evidence’… US congress has just passed a (non-binding) resolution supporting an Israeli attack on Iran. Seems some parties are really looking forward to starting ‘the big one’, the mother of all wars to end all wars.
Update: I was interviewed by Radio Centraal in Antwerp on the subject of the tree incident. Those of you who understand Dutch/Flemish can listen to the audio on their website here.
Update 2: Ann over at the Pulsemedia blog quotes my above post on the ‘border that is not a border’ issue, and tells me Robert Fisk was the only one to even touch on this issue – which happens to be rather central to understanding or judging the whole incident – in the mainstream western press. Which just goes to show how much you’re not being told if you rely on the mass media for your information… as well as being rather serendipitous in regard to the ‘Pity the Tree’ title…
Update 3: An interview with ex-UNIFIL spokesman Timur Goksel on the indicdent was published here - he has this to say over the ‘blue line’ issue (but the entire interview is well worth reading, as he is one of very few people who have lived through most of UNIFIL’s history on the inside – emphasis is mine) : ‘‘When [the] UN marked the Blue Line in 2000 to determine the Israeli withdrawal (it was not a border demarcation) with the participation and consent of the two parties, it was discovered that in certain locations, not many, the Israeli security fence erected according to the lay of the land, did not correspond to the Blue Line. During the occupation years, Israel had built fences inside Lebanon, which they had to give up of course. They did not want to put up a new fence in those places. Lebanon did not want to put up a fence along a border that is not officially demarcated. So, UN painted some stones blue to say this is the border, while the fence was up to 200 metres to the south. The paint peeled away in couple of months. The shepherds, farmers, etc. (including myself) always get confused because you instinctively think the fence is the border not a couple of stones with faded blue paint. Israel usually refrained from crossing the fence for safety reasons of course but became more aggressive in keeping intruders away after 2006 when they felt that especially Hizbullah operatives were operating in that what the IDF calls “the enclave.” I have been talking about the perils of this situation for many years, and I think the UN finally got around to starting a project to better mark the Blue Line, with the participation of both sides. I don’t know what happened to the project, but knowing the inevitable bickering of the parties for half a meter here, 2 meters there, it is bound to take a long time.’
The tree incident
4, August, 2010 by BartThe momentous importance of yesterday’s ‘skirmish’ across the blue line is only beginning to sink in. There are several unexpected aspects to this event. Not only is it the first armed incident on the border to involve Israeli victims since 2006, it is also the first time in living memory – ok, since 2000 at least – that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) actually returned fire and fought the IDF. Another remarkable aspect is that the incident took place only days after the Saudi king, the Qatari emir and the Syrian president, discreetly joined by high functionaries of the Jordanian and Egyptian governments, held a summit in Beirut – and on the exact anniversary of the end of the July war of 2006. It also happened only hours before Hezbollah’s secretary-general Nasrallah was scheduled to deliver a speech to commemorate the ‘divine victory’ of 2006. Hezbollah meanwhile was careful to stay out of sight during and after the incident. All of this points to a carefully prepared and highly coordinated operation – the first meaningful implementation of the doctrine adopted in the statement of intention issued by the national unity government formed after last June’s elections, which asserted that the LAF would stand by the resistance in the defense of Lebanon. Of course, the incident was sparked by an Israeli breach of Lebanese sovereignty (and UNSC 1701), but Israel’s hubris makes incidents like this a daily occurrence anyway – only a few days ago they fired rockets at a Lebanese fishing boat in Lebanese waters, and then went on to shell a UNIFIL post just for fun or target practice. Overflights of war planes are literally a daily occurrence – the LAF regularly shooting at them, but not sorting much effect, woefully undersupplied in effective air defense equipment as it is. Kidnappings of Lebanese shepherds – even goats – by the IDF are equally regular events. So the Israelis make it incredibly easy to provide the Lebanese army with provocations to its heart’s content – confident that the LAF will forever stick to its inferiority complex and allows the Israelis to keep walking all over its soldiers. So this time, they decided to cut a tree situated behind their own ‘security fence’ on Lebanese territory – ‘disputed’ of course, in the best Israeli tradition of landgrabbing on all sides – to replace it with a camera.
But being walked over is exactly what the LAF didn’t do yesterday and it obviously took the overconfident IDF completely by surprise. Their military reaction was ridiculously flailing and uncoordinated – and in the best of IDF traditions of course involved shelling civilian targets and killing a journalist. Israeli reactions on the political level equally showed a total loss of the plot. For lack of demonstrable involvement of the resistance, Netanyahu and co incredibly claimed that the LAF is ‘infiltrated’ by Hezbollah people. Of course Hezbollah has people in the army, just like any other Lebanese organisation and every section of the Lebanese population – sectarian quotas are scrupulously maintained in every state institution. And of course the LAF should defend the country against attacks by hostile elements as best it can, that is after all the purpose of any national army. Since Israel and Lebanon are at war since 1948, there should be no surprise involved here and no explanations of ‘infiltration’ are required to explain anything.
On the Lebanese side, all parties that matter are united in their support of the army and condemnation of the IDF – from president Suleyman to PM Hariri to Nabih Berri’s Amal. Of course, some of the hardline remnants of the rapidly shrinking March 14th block are spouting predictably anti-Hezbollah and pro-Israel statements, but they are left with very little popular support. Geagea and Gemayyel’s eternal misreadings of the situation and consistent refusal to find any common ground have left them quite isolated – they were the only parties not to be invited to last weekend’s Arab mini-summit in Beirut, to mention but one thing (and then childishly went on to say that they were ‘not interested’ anyway). Even Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs Abu Al-Gheith and the Jordanian government immediately condemned the Israeli side – in stark contrast with July 2006, when they and Saudi Arabia started out condemning Hezbollah’s ‘adventurism’. Yesterday, these ‘moderate’ US allies were on the same line as the ‘resistance front’ – Syria, Iran and Hamas.
The message is obvious: from now on, the army and the resistance will cooperate and the Lebanese government, as well as those of most of the Arab regimes, are behind them (the latter at least on the rhetoric level). To drive the message home, the Lebanese army command today authorised troops to fire on any IDF soldier violating Lebanese territory without contacting superiors for advance permission. Hezbollah’s non-intervention was thus a rather brilliant ploy both on the domestic political level and on the international diplomatic scene. Domestically, Hezbollah first does not want to be seen as ‘starting’ a new devastating Israeli attack and secondly is under heavy attack from leaks and/or rumours concerning the Special Tribunal for Lebanon – which is claimed to be on the verge of indicting Hezbollah members for the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005. Nasrallah has recently claimed that the STL is guided by Israeli and US interests bent on implying Hezbollah and consistently neglecting to investigate the Israeli track. Which is of course correct, and the fact that much of the tribunal’s evidence is linked to mobile phone records, while the phone companies turn out to be replete with Israeli spies, will not lend any more credibility to its findings. Neither will its various informants that were later proven to be plants and frauds, nor its shabby and leaky communications methods. In his speech yesterday night, Nasrallah has promised that next Monday, August 9th, he will give another speech to present ‘hard and irrefutable evidence’ that Hariri was executed by the Mossad. In short, with all these accusations flying around and creating serious political tension within Lebanon, Hezbollah does not want to be seen as engaging in fighting the IDF to ‘detract attention’ from its supposed involvement in the assassination.
Internationally, some of the same motives are playing, in addition to the fact that an all-out attack on Lebanon by the IDF ‘provoked’ by the LAF instead of Hezbollah would not go down well with the international community or be an easy sell in the UNSC. Israel fighting Hezbollah is one thing – Israel fighting the LAF will destroy its last shred of credibility and definitely reduce the country to pariah status in the eyes of all the world (excepting the AIPAC-controlled US government of course). Maybe I am reading too much into this, but it seems a devilishly clever ploy and the cooperation of so many traditionally divided and antagonistic parties against the real common enemy is a very hopeful sign indeed. Not to mention the morale boost for the LAF which did very well in the confrontation with an infinitely better armed enemy, killing a lieutenant-colonel and critically wounding another soldier before the IDF resorted to its usual massive-overkill-from-the-safety-of-the-air tactics.
As a Lebanese friend dryly pointed out yesterday, that tree must be feeling really important now…
Then again, maybe I am reading too much into this. Update: 10:05am AFP: Israeli troops cut down the tree that caused deadly clashes on Tuesday.
