This is the state of Lebanon today: deep sectarian anger that could boil over at any moment. In mixed Beirut neighborhoods, tensions rise between Sunnis and Shiites after each bombing. Tempers flare, small fights get out of hand, people start calling their friends and relatives to come in from other areas to help them and eventually the police have to step in. (A Shiite friend who lives in a mainly Sunni neighborhood told me that for several days after Eido’s killing, he found a broken egg each morning on his car.) And there’s no shortage of bombings to stoke tensions. Read more about Lebanon's bloody summer
The establishment of the tribunal for Lebanon as conceived in resolution 1757 also suffers from many legal and political imperfections. The question remains: would other possible alternatives — such as a tribunal established within Lebanon, which some Lebanese lawyers believe could have been accomplished whilst taking into account the peculiarities of the Lebanese legal system — be better? After all, the current deficiencies with the judicial system will not be ameliorated by the establishment of a new tribunal outside the country. Nisrine Abiad and Victor Kattan look at the legal aspects of the Hariri tribunal. Read more about The Hariri tribunal: A fait accompli?
Finally, an international tribunal will be tasked with investigating and prosecuting murder and mayhem in an Arab country. For human rights activists who have railed against continuing impunity for grave crimes in the Middle East, whether committed by Israelis or Arabs, whether orchestrated by states or non-state actors, this should be an occasion for unalloyed celebration, or at least relief. However, EI’s Laurie King-Irani writes, there are worrying aspects of the unprecedented legal initiative of the UN-mandated tribunal charged with investigating the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and other recent crimes. Read more about Tribunals, Trials and Tribulations in Lebanon?
“In the first three days of the recent events involving the Lebanese army and Fateh el-Islam in the Nahr el-Bared camp, the Lebanese army committed what would amount to war crimes in a similar fashion to that of the Israeli army in Gaza and in Lebanon last summer, firing on a civilian population indiscriminately. When the Israelis do this, we scream at the injustice, but when the Lebanese army does it we applaud them. These are double standards.” Sami Hermez analyzes the Lebanese support for the siege of Nahr al-Bared camp for Electronic Lebanon. Read more about Cheering to the beat of the Palestinians' misery
Thousands of Palestinian refugees are fleeing from Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon as five days of fighting by the Lebanese army and a militant group known as Fath al-Islam has left dozens of soldiers and fighters and an unknown number of civilians dead. As the situation of these Palestinian refugees worsens, 59 years after they were first expelled from their homeland into Lebanon, the world looks on in silence. Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah spoke with As’ad Abukhalil, the creator of the Angry Arab News Service blog on the origins of Fath al-Islam, the events that led to the violence and what it means for Lebanon and the region. Read more about Interview: As'ad Abukhalil on the Nahr al-Bared siege
Simplistic and knee-jerk reactions to Lebanon’s current travails are too easy, and not up to the standards of good and responsible journalism. I’ve spent much of the past 48 hours trying to get a better grasp on what is really going on in Tripoli. It’s not easy to do, and it occured to me this morning that this may, in fact, be the story: the difficulty of interpreting these events stems from the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the ways that dramatic changes throughout the region, and indeed, the world, are echoing through Lebanon’s war-damaged sociopolitical landscape. Read more about What is happening in Lebanon?
In late January the State Department delivered a potentially explosive report to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The classified report asserts that Israel may have violated the Arms Export Control Act with its use of American-made cluster munitions this past summer in Lebanon. Multiple contacts to both offices indicate neither Biden nor Pelosi has any intention of pursuing the matter. In contrast, a congressional investigation 25 years ago helped persuade President Ronald Reagan to suspend cluster munitions to Israel for six years. Read more about Damaging Congressional Silence on Israeli Violations in Lebanon
In a time of political upheaval and economic crisis following the July-August 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, we constantly think of the young Lebanese who have lost hope in their mother country, resorting to what they believe is their only solution: deserting Lebanon. It would be foolish to pretend we cannot understand, as we also feel disheartened and find ourselves temporarily drawn to the thesis of a chaotic Lebanon struck by brain drain. Read more about The emigration of Lebanese youth: National hemorrhage or national treasure?
Turning the pages of De Niro’s Game, one is transported to the war-torn streets of Beirut in the midst of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, a tragic reality of flying bombs and bullets. De Niro’s Game is the debut literary work by Montreal author Rawi Hage, who conveys this era of Lebanon’s turbulent history through the experiences of a pair of youths from Beirut, childhood best friends growing to adulthood in the political quagmire of civil war. EI contributor Stefan Christoff reviews the new work of fiction and interviews its author. Read more about New fiction portrays Lebanon's shadows of civil war
This week U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi concluded her visit to the Middle East in Damascus, Syria, to which President George W. Bush’s response was that her visit “sends mixed messages.” While Pelosi’s delegation to the region should be met with applause for refusing to participate in isolating Syria, her visit to Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria should be met with a great deal of caution. Twice in the last month Pelosi delivered a speech — of more or less the same message — before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual policy conference and before the Israeli Knesset. Read more about Pelosi's Misguided Middle East Visit
