April 7, 2008 10:10

Boots on the Ground

Cherry Orchards under Mount Sannine, Spring in Lebanon/ Photo ALB

Want some good news about America's involvement in the Middle East? Well put on your hiking boots (as I did this weekend) and head up to the Lebanon Mountain Trail, a 250-mile highland track that runs almost the entire length of the country. The project was inspired by the Appalachian Trail in the United Sates, and funded in large part by the American government.

The American advisors to the project, which started in 2005 and finished last year, no doubt found conditions a little different here in the Middle East than in peaceful Appalachia: the route through southern Lebanon had to be changed several times because war with Israel in 2006 left several proposed paths littered with cluster bombs. But the LMT has some advantages all its own, especially the broad span of culture and history amid the cedar trees and snow capped-peaks. The path (which takes about 30 days when done all in one go) meanders through Christian, Druze, and Muslim communities, some totally modern, others semi-nomadic, amid the archeological and architectural cultural remnants of Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and French Colonial eras.

The Lebanese architects of the LMT are hoping to promote a sustainable alternative to the rapacious development that is destroying this tourism-dependent country, and preserve local cultures along the way. They've refurbished traditional red-roofed mountain cottages, owned by local families, turning them into bed-and-breakfasts for thru-hikers. They built the trail itself by finding and re-habilitating traditional mountain byways that had become overgrown and lost since mountain-folk traded in their donkeys for cars.

The LMT is just one of the many high-minded projects that the American government supports in the Middle East, ranging from civil society training, sustainable agriculture to education that rarely receive much attention. But perhaps that's because they pale in comparison to so much of the other stuff we do here. The US is the largest arms dealer in the Middle East, selling billions in weapons every year, mostly to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Remember those cluster bombs in southern Lebanon that have killed 40 people and wounded 252 others since the END of the war in 2006? Many of them were made in the USA.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Mount Lebanon

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April 4, 2008 8:03

Pajama Party in Beirut

Because I was away in Damascus last weekend, I missed out on an exciting new development in Lebanese demonstrations. Instead of the usual Hizballah supporters, or anti-Syrian activists commemorating the death of one or another martyr, this one consisted entirely of people dressed in their pajamas.

Last Saturday night, the residents of Gemayzeh blocked off the main street into their East Beirut neighborhood to protest the noise and traffic that has accompanied the transformation of their once quiet, historic district into the center of the city's nightlife. The demonstrators came armed with pillows and placards with slogans like "We need sleep!"

Such civic activism is rare in Lebanon, which has a weak notion of shared public space. Also unusually, the government acted quickly. This week, it closed some 20 Gemayzeh watering-holes that had parking or noise violations. But the government's commitment to peace and quiet is unlikely to last for long: there's just too much money at stake for the party not to continue.

The wild success of the Gemayzeh nightclub scene is one of the best examples of Lebanon's bizarre economy. Despite the fact that the country is still rebuilding from a war in 2006, is hugely in debt, in the middle of a political crisis, and that tourists have been scared away by an ongoing terror campaign, pockets of society are awash with money thanks to investment from wealthy overseas Lebanese and those few locals who can afford to eat, drink and be merry.

But in many ways, such economic froth makes life that much more difficult for average people struggling in hard times. Almost every week, some lovely old building in East Beirut (which probably once housed working-class tenants on rent control) is destroyed to make way for a luxury condo high rise with apartments that will be empty for three quarters of the year while their owners are in London or Paris or wherever. Add to that the rising cost of energy, food and other commodities, inflation caused by the drop in the Lebanese Lira (which is backed by the sinking dollar) and you have enough class resentment to pose a serious threat to the American-backed government here. Though Lebanon has become a battleground in the Cold War for regional supremacy, its fate just might be determined by such seemingly small matters as the price of bread and power cuts. Even in the Middle East, all politics is local

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

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April 3, 2008 10:10

No Books? 'Long Live the Gaza Jihad'

In Gaza ...oops, every time I write the words 'In Gaza', I think I'm losing readers whose eyes glaze o ver. But bear with me. .. Inside Gaza, Palestinians say that they fear the next generation of kids –-and nearly 48% of the territory’s 1.5 million people are under age 14-- are growing up full of murder towards Israelis. The next bunch will make today's militants seem like love bunnies.

Of course the Israelis do plenty to make the Gazans mad at them. How can kids in Gaza not be afraid and angry when a missile fired from a plane kills one of their relatives (either a militant or a passerby); their house is either overrun by soldiers or demolished during IDF operations; their brothers are in jail, and their fathers can’t find work because Israelis won't allow in supplies to keep the factories chugging.

But it doesn't help that from an early age, Gaza’s children are instructed that the heroes of society are the martyrs, not the peace-makers. But that’s probably true of any society drumming up resistance against an enemy. And this indoctrination starts early, too. The kiddie show on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV has a new twist: on March 30th, they aired a puppet show in which a Palestinian boy slips into the White House, slays President George Bush and turns the place into a mosque.

It's savage and vengeful and it's just the kind of thing that make many Israelis nod their heads sagely and say: "Ahh, Golda Meir was right when she said that we’ll only have peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

Everyone agrees that education is the answer. Teach Arab and Israeli kids to stop hating each other. Even the politicians pushing the Road Map have figured this one out. The United Nations helped the Palestinian Authority re-tool their textbooks, with less bias towards Israel. Some rightwing Israelis accuse the UN of twisting the facts so that these books really teach hatred towards Israel. Sensitive to such criticism, the U.S. State Department hired an academic to study the Palestinian books. He concluded that the books had cleaned out the old anti-Semitism and didn't "seek to erase Israel, de-legitimize it or replace it with the "State of Palestine".

The sad fact is that when the UN tried to send paper and materials to Gaza to print out these textbooks, the shipments were delayed for months by Israeli authorities at the border crossings into Gaza, no doubt for “security reasons”. The UN looks after the education of 200,000 children in Gaza, and these textbooks would have gone a small ways towards counter-acting the jihadi propaganda against Israel. Says the UN’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman Chris Gunness: “We think that improving education in Gaza offers an escape from the poverty trap and from radicalism.” How else can you make kids switch channels away from a puppet-show about a pint-sized assassin in the White House?

---by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem

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April 2, 2008 8:07

Slow Progress for Palestinians in Lebanon

Young Palestinian refugees in Lebanon protesting Israeli attacks in Gaza/ Photo by ALB

In the past few weeks of writing about Palestinian refugees, I've painted a grim picture of their treatment by Lebanese society: how after nearly sixty years and four generations in exile here they still don't have citizenship, how they are barred from some seventy professions and face all sorts of other legal discrimination, and how during last summer's battle with foreign jihadis based in Nahr al Bared camp, the Lebanese army appears to have taken out its frustrations on Palestinian civilians.

But I should also give credit where it is due. The current Lebanese government is the first to begin to address the Palestinian issue with anything resembling a policy. When it was elected in 2005 after the end of the Syrian occupation, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government began setting up an initiative to address some of the key problems: the laws the restrict Palestinian civil rights, the terrible conditions in the camps, and the presence of armed Palestinian factions. Granting citizenship to such a large population of Muslim refugees (the 400,000 of them make up about 1/10th of Lebanon's population) is something that the Lebanese political system -- which is precariously balanced between Muslims and Christians -- is clearly unable to do.

But the Lebanese government's efforts to do what it can were quickly derailed by Lebanon's endemic instability: the 2006 war with Israel, the uprising in Nahr al Bared in 2007, the ongoing wave of political assignations, and a political crisis that has left the country without a president or a functioning parliament.
Lebanon is too weak to handle the Palestinian questions on its own, nor should it have to, according to Khalil Makkawi, the head of the Lebanese government’s Palestinian initiative. “The Palestinains are here because they were driven here,” he told me. “As long as Israel refsues to honor [the Right of Return], the Palestinians are an international responsibility.”

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

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March 29, 2008 4:07

Arab Disunity in Damascus

So I'm probably one of the first western journalists to live blog from an Arab Summit. The experience would be a lot more exciting if I was actually at the Arab Summit, and not in a smoke-filled holding pen for journalists about 3k away from the actual conference with no food, minimal water, and even less coffee. At least I was able to join the photo pool that was bussed into a hotel outside Damascus (where the event is being held) for a two-minute relay-race snapping pictures of Arab leaders. Say what you want about these guys, but at least they know how to dress.

Other than red-carpet style fashion commentary, there really isn't much to do at an Arab Summit. They are notoriously long on hot air and short on action. Please let me know if any of you can think of some major accomplishment that came from an Arab Summit. I'm having trouble myself.

That's not to say these gatherings are unimportant. They are like high school reunions, where attendees feign indifference even though they spent three months beforehand getting in shape and getting makeovers.

This year's host, Syria, has made a particular effort to look like it has moved up in the world. Cleaning crews gave the city one of the most thorough going overs its had since the Mongols sacked it in the 15th century. The government built a score of villas along the airport road to house princelings from the Gulf states, banned commercial flights, booked every four- and five-star hotel in town, and recalled all government-owned luxury cars for use by official delegations

There's more than just traditional Arab hospitality at work here. Syria is determined to break out of the international isolation and quasi-pariah status imposed upon it by the Bush administration and western countries that consider Syria to be a state sponsor of terrorism. The Syrian regime of President Bashar al Assad believes that it is the key to solving the major problems in the Middle East -- the Arab-Israeli conflict, the civil war in Iraq, and the political crisis in Lebanon. Critics say that Syria is helping cause many of those problems.

But it is Syria's role in Lebanon that is causing the most controversy among its Arab brethren. Some of them accuse Syria of mounting a campaign to bring down the American-supoprted Lebanese government with a string of attacks that have killed Lebanese politicians and journalists in order to regain control of its smaller neighbor. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, America's main allies in the region, refused to send high-level delegations to this year's summit, and Lebanon -- which still has no president thanks to the political crisis between the government and the Syrian-backed opposition -- sent no one at all.

Arab families normally keep their personal problems private, so such an open display of squabbling bodes ill for the future of the region: in the Middle East public disputes rarely remain polite. The split at the summit reflects the larger regional face-off between Israel, America and its Arab allies on the one hand and Syria, Iran and their militant proxies (Hamas and Hizbalalh) on the other. One fear is that some kind of war will break out now that the summit is out of the way. (Watch out for how Hizballah responds to the assassination last month of its operations chief Imad Mugniyah.) Another is that the Lebanese government will pay a price for spurning Syria's advances. It's been weeks since the last attack. Expect another soon.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus

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