Lebanon and Syria: Peering Into the Abyss
Lebanon and Syria: Peering Into the Abyss
SADLY for the Lebanese, it was a familiar scene. The car bomb that gutted a quiet residential street in their capital, Beirut, on October 19th, killing a senior policeman and seven others, fits into a series of political murders that stretches back to the country’s civil war in 1975-90. Most victims have had one thing in common, particularly in recent years: they angered the regime that runs neighbouring Syria, as well as its powerful allies inside Lebanon.
As Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, fights for survival in a conflict that increasingly looks like the vicious warfare between Lebanon’s sectarian militias a generation ago, many Lebanese have feared that the bloodshed would eventually spill across their meekly defended border. A deep polarisation adds to the sense of doom. The fragile ruling coalition, in which Hizbullah, Lebanon’s Shia party-cum-militia, is the strongest component, has struggled to appear neutral over Syria. But whereas some Sunni Lebanese factions back the Syrian rebels with arms and money, other factions, most notably Hizbullah, lend emphatic support to the embattled Assad regime.
The Beirut bombing underlines the precariousness of Lebanon’s politics, inspiring worries of a slide into renewed civil war as well as more recent memories of an uprising against Syrian influence. In that instance, in 2005, an even bigger car bomb, which killed Lebanon’s then leading Sunni politician, Rafik Hariri, and 22 others, sparked mass protests that swept pro-Syrian parties from power and forced Syria to withdraw the 15,000 “peacekeepers” it has kept in Lebanon since the 1970s. Yet neither a repetition of that revolutionary precedent nor a decline into wider civil strife appears likely just now.