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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to