‘Ghosts of the Past’

Haitham Abbas was shocked. Shortly after dark Sunday night, he watched as a group of angry young men pelted a passenger van with stones in Kaskas, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in west Beirut. News of the attack spread quickly and more young men poured into the area. Over the next few hours, Sunnis and Shiites fought running street battles with sticks and knives. Abbas, an 18-year-old Shiite who studies computer science, says he saw one man get stabbed. Gunfire soon broke out. The violence only subsided after Lebanese security forces—who say both sides were provoking each other throughout the day—moved in with armored personnel carriers and cut off access roads to trouble spots. By that time, more than a dozen people were injured and one man, a 21-year-old Shiite was dead from gunshot wounds. “I’m angry,” says Abbas, who lives in the Dahiya, the Shiite suburbs of south Beirut. “My community is being targeted and the army isn’t protecting us.”

The dead man, Ahmad Mahmoud, was the first fatality in the Hizbullah-organized protest against the Beirut government, but he probably won’t be the last. The killing left the Lebanese capital inflamed on Monday, as roads were closed and soldiers and armored personnel carriers deployed at major traffic junctions. Nor could the clashes have come at a worse time for a strife-torn nation. Sectarian tensions have been on the rise since Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and his political allies called for an open-ended sit-in last week that drew hundreds of thousands of protestors into downtown Beirut with the goal of toppling the standing government. It was a risky gambit: even though the Hizbullah bloc does have Christian supporters, the majority of protestors are Shiites and the bulk of their criticism has been aimed at Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a Sunni.

It hasn’t helped that Siniora and a handful of his cabinet ministers have added to the siege mentality by bunkering down in the Grand Serail, an Ottoman era building surrounded by protesters. The standoff has also ratcheted up pressure in the Christian community, which is divided between pro and anti-government camps. In recent days, the sit-in has taken on a carnival atmosphere with vendors hawking cheese sandwiches and flags alongside groups of men smoking water-pipes. But the violence last night was the moment many Lebanese had been dreading for weeks and the fault-lines, between Shiites and Sunnis and within the Christian community, are becoming clearer. “The violence may spread,” says a senior security official who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the record. “The situation is very tense in all the country now.”

Sunday’s clashes took place near Ain el Rummaneh, a neighborhood where sectarian violence sparked off the civil war in 1975 and a painful reminder of where things could be heading now. Smaller clashes broke out near the neighborhood about 10 days ago, and the situation could flare up again when Mahmoud is buried. Already, reports of scuffles emerged when Mahmoud’s body was brought to downtown Beirut on Monday night.

The latest violence follows problems last week between Christian groups, who are playing a key role in the current power struggle. Under Lebanon’s “confessional” system of sectarian quotas, only a Christian can be president. Michel Aoun, a former general who returned to Lebanon last year after more than a decade in exile, is widely seen as having presidential ambitions and made his first bid at a comeback by teaming up with Hizbullah earlier this year. It was no coincidence that Aoun was the only senior politician among Hizbullah’s allies who spoke on the first day of the rally last week. “It’s very important for Hizbullah to have Christian support,” says Michael Young, an editor at the Daily Star newspaper. “Hizbullah has repeatedly used [Aoun] to gain legitimacy for its actions. Which were partisan actions.” Thousands of Aoun supporters, decked out in orange T-shirts, caps and scarves, have been joining the protests downtown, irking some Christians who say they are sowing discord in their community. Aoun’s main rival is Samir Geagea, a Christian warlord turned politician who heads the Lebanese Forces, a political party that developed from a militia. Geagea also re-emerged on the political scene last year after spending more than a decade in solitary confinement for his role in a series of political assassinations. The two men fought pitched battles in and around Beirut in 1990. In a NEWSWEEK interview last week, Geagea admitted that tensions in the Christian community were a throwback to past rivalries. “When things go wrong suddenly the ghosts of the past will wake up,” he said.

Indeed, those ghosts stirred two weeks ago with the assassination of Pierre Gemayel, a cabinet minister and scion of a prominent Christian family.  Many within the Christian community blamed the killing on Syrian agents; since Aoun is allied with a pro-Syria faction, he also came in for criticism. Tensions reached the point where Gemayel’s father Amin, a former president, refused to accept a telephone call of condolence from Aoun; banners and posters of Aoun were torched in Christian areas around the city. Aoun and Geagea’s followers faced off in Sassine Square, a ritzy commercial area in the heart of east Beirut, last Monday. The two sides exchanged taunts and threw bottles. Things could have gotten much worse if the Lebanese Army hadn’t stepped in to disperse the crowds. Lebanese security officials recently arrested nine men in the village of Shahtoul with Mac 10 and Uzi machine guns. Security officials claim they were members of Geagea’s Lebanese Forces carrying out illegal military training exercises, a charge that members of the Lebanese Forces deny. “The Christians are at the edge of a cliff. Some of them are pushing forward to go down,” says Karim Pakradouni, a prominent Christian leader who was once in the Lebanese Forces. “This is a catastrophe for Christians and this is a catastrophe for Lebanon.”

For now, there’s no sign that the protests, and the linked sectarian tensions, are going to die down anytime soon. Although numbers dwindled slightly on Monday, thousands still turned out and more arrived as the workday ended.  Organizers have set up tents and portable bathrooms to prepare for the long haul. But the mood is a far cry from the first day of the protest last Friday, when a list of instructions handed out among the crowd included a warning not to make partisan statements about parties, sects or religions and demonstrators carried placards bearing the slogan NATIONAL UNITY. The banners are still there, but the sentiment is looking more and more remote.