Here’s at least one good thing that happened in the midst of yesterday’s sectarian madness in Beirut. The Lebanese army got involved. When the quarrel between Sunni students and Shia students that broke out at Beirut Arab University turned into full-scale street fighting, the Lebanese army began sealing off surrounding neighborhoods. They made arrests. They disarmed many of the gangs moving in to join battle. And for the first time since 1996 (when Israel bombed the country in Operation Grapes of Wrath) they declared a curfew.
That was in marked contract to Tuesday’s general strike when the army stood and watched as the Hizballah-led opposition set up barricades to shut down Beirut. The concern was that if they were seen to be taking sides in the country’s political crisis, they would risk splitting the army along sectarian lines, as happened during the 1975-1990 Civil War. But by doing nothing on Tuesday, they opened the door for pro-government gangs to take the law into their own hands.
So there’s still hope that Lebanon will avoid more mass unrest, especially if yesterday’s riot pushes the rival sides in the political crisis back to the bargaining table. The country is so deeply — and so evenly — divided in their support of or their antagonism towards Prime Minster Fouad Siniora’s Westernized government that for weeks many observers have been saying that it will take some tragedy or explosion to bring the country’s leaders to their senses.
This could be that opportunity. Because the violence didn’t occur as a result of a planned opposition protest, Hizballah-leader Hassan Nasrallah has enough face-saving room to return to talks without accepting responsibility for the chaos. He could play the statesman in order to avoid more of the same.
But the opposition in general and Nasrallah in particular will be ultimately responsible for any violence that occurs if the opposition continues its street campaign to topple the government. Their claims of democratic legitimacy, and it’s use of the term “civil disobedience” to describe their actions, became void the day they prevented people from driving on the roads of their own country.
The concern now is Ashura, the Muslim holiday held especially dear by Shia, as it marks the day their ancestors were massacred by the armies of the Sunni Caliph in Karbala in Iraq in the seventh century. Tempers tend to flare on Ashura — which is celebrated among Lebanon’s young Shia men by ritually beating and cutting themselves. Earlier in the week, opposition leaders had said that the next stage of the street protests will take place sometime before Ashura, which is on Monday. If they stick to that schedule, it could be 1975 all over again in Lebanon.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

For the moment there’s lots of ink being spilled in local newspapers about the possibility that Iran and Saudi Arabia might be able to broker some kind of deal between Lebanon’s government and opposition. More power to them. Though it’s unlikely that Lebanon’s internal problems can be settled for good without a full scale regional diplomatic agreement, anything that lowers the temperature in Beirut’s streets — even temporarily — is for the better as far as Lebanon is concerned, and from a shallow and self-centered perspective, as far as journalists like myself are concerned.

That’s because the pattern of these streets fights foreshadows a conflict that’s going to be pretty tough to cover. Beirut is a beguiling city, and Western journalists who cover the Middle East from their home-base here wouldn’t be the first foreign invaders to have been lulled into a false sense of security by the balmy Mediterranean lifestyle. Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, one lives in Lebanon with ones’ guard down. On Thursday, I was eating a fancy turkey sandwich at a business lunch in a California-style restaurant. Thirty minutes later I was trapped in a firefight, without a flack-jacked or helmet, without my notebook, and when the city’s mobile phone network went down with the surge of phone calls, I also found myself pining for a satellite telephone.

Another problem is that no one wants coverage of their side causing trouble, no one wants to be blamed for starting a civil war, and everyone wants to play the victim. Your average Beirut street fighter (who may well be a finance or marketing MBA student) is pretty media savvy. He knows that he is going to have a tough time explaining why there’s a picture of him on Time.com with a Molotov cocktail when he goes for his next job interview at the Price Waterhouse Coopers Dubai office. So when I trained my camera on some Sunni guys throwing rocks on Tuesday, one of them decked me. Not long afterwards he apologized (which was nice) but his buddies then tried to get me to take pictures of their Shia opponents making mischief on the other side of the street. “I can’t believe you don’t have a telephoto lens!” one of them practically screamed at me. “Are you sure you’re a journalist?”

It was also hard to miss how many of the rioters on Tuesday and Thursday were so clearly enjoying themselves. Over and over again, I’ve heard how people in Lebanon don’t want to go back to the bad old days, and that only outsiders agitators are the ones responsible for causing trouble. But there’s a subsection of bored and underemployed young men who want to bring it on. Why else were they pouring into the neighborhood around Beirut Arab University from all over town to join a fight between students they didn’t even know? I was hiding from gunfire behind a soda machine a couple of streets down from BAU on Thursday, when some alpha male street fighter with a submachine gun ran around the corner followed by a wannabe entourage of about seven cronies, one of them carrying an extra ammunition clip, like teenagers trying to get a turn on their rich friend’s new toy. It was a scene from high school with small arms.

Obviously, the tragedy of what may happen here won’t be its effect on the foreign press. And of course we’ll figure out a new set of do’s and don’ts to keep working. And it’s true that anytime something bad happens in Lebanon, there’s a lot of breathless stories about a new civil war being on its way. (I just wrote one myself.) But defending for a second a profession that is often accused of wanting disaster to happen to other people so that they can write about it, I just want to say right now that I’d much rather Lebanon stays as it is, with its ski slopes, and beaches, and lifestyle that appears to be as superficial as I am.

–Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut