Twenty years have passed since the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, which sparked the March 14 uprising against Syria’s interference in Lebanon. The succession of events weighed heavily on those who lived through it, including those who survived the civil war, the Israeli, Assad, and Iranian occupations, and the series of assassinations and shifting allegiances. Two decades later, the steps forward have been few and far between, hindered by setbacks, disasters, and even the collapse of the nation’s core.
The most difficult aspect of these challenging years has been the entrenched racial segregation among Lebanon’s sectarian groups. There’s no need to sugarcoat the reality: what we’re experiencing in Lebanon is a severe form of apartheid. Any argument between instinctive sectarians exposes this racism, along with the isolation of each group from the others, even when they live in the same geographic area. At that point, hidden agendas take over, but only for a while, before they explode into violence and continue to harm the nation.
The irony is that this racism has its own tools for false and fake coexistence, as most groups possess the flexibility and skill to conceal the truth of what they truly harbor toward each other when forced to coexist. This inherent racism is the tool that power brokers invest in, as well as the projects that serve their personal gains and ideologies based on distorting and falsifying the essence of religions, relying on whoever opens the way for these brokers at the expense of citizenship.
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The best indicator of this can be seen in the reactions of brokers and their audiences to what happened on the Syrian coast, where there have been reports of hundreds of civilians, mostly from the Alawite minority, being killed. These responses, which claim to be utopian and pure in their condemnation of the massacres, reek of hypocrisy. Their views are shaped by the contrast between the oppressor’s forgetfulness and the oppressed’s memory of years under the Assad regime, passed down from father to son.
The oppressors, along with all those who praised, participated in, or remained silent as Bashar Assad committed his crimes to suppress the revolution, have no right to object to or condemn the crimes and massacres that justified the shedding of innocent blood on the Syrian coast. The only right to do so belongs to those who have never deviated from the truth since before the Daraa massacre, which sparked the revolution. These are the people who rejected the slogan “Freedom, Sovereignty, Independence,” and with it “Syria out, out,” fighting it with malicious intentions while denouncing the shedding of blood—other than the blood they worked and continue to work to shed.
But it is the racism that no event of the magnitude of the March 14 uprising has been able to cure in the Lebanese people, who remain stubbornly attached to their sect and its leader. Some might argue that the absence of the state is why the Lebanese have turned to sectarian isolationism. However, such a statement can only be seen as a justification, and its logic is unsustainable.
The absence of the state should be an incentive to work toward its restoration, and the weakness of its institutions should drive efforts to strengthen them, not plunder them and then eliminate their components and foundations, or demand federalism to consolidate the foundations of apartheid. The Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory should have mobilized the Lebanese, particularly the people of the south, to create a state to protect and liberate them, not to be intoxicated by a religious group that monopolizes resistance in loyalty to a supreme leader who has never benefited them.
The Syrian tragedy and its impact on us may eventually end one way or another, and Israel may withdraw for various reasons. But Lebanon will not rise again, and the Lebanese will not regain a promising image based on unity around freedom, sovereignty, and independence, as long as the walls of racial separation between sects remain the gateway to corruption, influence, and bullying of partners in a lost citizenship, with no end in sight.
Sana Aljak (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)