On one side of the wire coils, anti-government protesters fed bread crumbs to the pigeons. On the other, a dozen Lebanese soldiers dozed in the shade. Up the road, a convoy carrying Arab League mediators weaved past barricades outside the prime minister’s office. The bodyguards’ heads swiveled in the car windows, scanning for trouble.
The recent parallel scenes — the languid and the menacing — show why Lebanon is a puzzle to the outside world.
The country defies easy definition: a parliamentary democracy with a power-sharing quota for top posts, a place where luxury developments sit near bullet-pocked ruins, a commercial hub whose land and sea exits are vulnerable to the whims of powerful neighbors like Israel and Syria.
Alliances shift, enemies become friends.
Lebanon is three-quarters of the size of Connecticut and with a population of 4 million, smaller than Singapore.
It is different from the rest of the Arab world in key ways. But its overlapping tensions — religious, sectarian, regional and international — act as a kind of compressed textbook on the problems that simmer across the Middle East.
Lebanon’s adversaries negotiated in Qatar on Sunday after ending the worst violence since the 1975-1990 civil war but normality today in Lebanon is elusive.
Hezbollah has a nearly parallel state, with its own social services, police and combatants who took on Israel in a 2006 war.
The group prevailed militarily in clashes with pro-government factions last week that killed 67 people and forced the Cabinet to rescind decisions to sack the airport security chief and declare the militants’ private telephone network illegal.
The country’s army did not intervene in the fighting, for fear of more sectarian bloodshed.
Lebanon’s lopsided reality also includes UN resolutions that call for the dismantling of all militias. But the masked gunmen roaming the country last week testify to the virtual irrelevance of those resolutions.
Bomb attacks on prominent Lebanese are also a grim routine. The first victim in October 2004 was Marwan Hamadeh, the economy minister who resigned to protest a term extension of the Syrian-backed president. He survived with serious injuries and, as telecommunications minister in the current Cabinet, tried in vain to dismantle Hezbollah’s communications network.
After its civil war ended in 1990, Lebanon enjoyed a long period of relative peace and even prosperity and its people clearly crave conventional normality.
As the recent tensions subsided, the military established a heavy presence in Beirut. But civilians did too: children played in alleyways, and cafes on the famed Hamra shopping street again drew crowds.
All that means Beirut sometimes resembles a city of alternate visions. In some spots, banners bear the image of Shiite heroes such as the religious leader Moussa al-Sadr, missing since a 1978 trip to Libya. In other spots, billboards bear the image of global sporting icons like Roger Federer and Tiger Woods.
“I have a lot of chalets in the mountains for the summer season,” said Christian Baz, owner of a real estate company.
Baz, himself a Christian, said property prices have remained stable.
But some Lebanese companies want to move to eastern Beirut from the Muslim west, where Hezbollah gunmen were active, and fears remain.
“It can happen again,” Baz said, citing rumors that prices on the illegal market for AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons had soared, indicating increased demand.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver