Rotate The Power in Lebanon

In a previous article, Lebanon 2005, I talked about the problems Lebanon faces in the aftermath of the assassination of its former Prime Minister Rafik Elharrir. I then voiced concerns about the nature of the Lebanese people and if they will ever have the national integrity to create a country, a real country. In this article, I’m more of a pragmatist. I see hope in Lebanon’s problems by starting to reform the political system. This system was created primarily to navigate the various religious groups that make up the Lebanese social life and in some opinions was created to protect the Christians. It does not make sense anymore and it needs to be changed to create the new Lebanon that can survive and be a normal country. We still can not ignore the hard feelings each religious sect feels about its own group; in Lebanon the tribe or the religion loyalty is more important that the country itself even if the Lebanese pretends otherwise. The ideal solution for Lebanon as I have mentioned before is the Switzerland example but until the Lebanese people reaches such maturity, we need an interim system that preserves the rights of the different sects. The solution is to rotate the power at the helm, meaning the presidency, which is the most important symbol especially for the Christians as they have been giving the position since independence. The solution is for the parliament to elect a representative of each sect, Muslim, Maronite Christian, Shiite, etc for one six years term. Right now the parliament does this function but elects only a Maronite Christian. The rest of the positions in the government should be left to the elections and to the winning party personnel as in all democratic systems. The system now allocates the presidency to a Maronite Christian, the premiership to a Muslim Sunni, and the speaker of the parliament to a Muslim Shiite. This current system is unfair and unrealistic. The fact is that the majority of the population is Muslims contributes to the need to change the system. Having said that, Lebanon is kind of a unique system in the Middle East, almost, now Iraq looks like Lebanon when it comes to sects fighting over power, and Lebanon needs to relax the fears of the Christians from losing their privileges. Another issue is the presence of almost 300,000 Palestinians who live in Lebanon and where the idea of giving them citizenship status creates a nightmare for the Lebanese in general and the Christian Lebanese in particular. However I think that those Palestinians that most of them were born there need to have the Lebanese citizenship and needs to move on with their lives. Those people will not go back to their original land in Israel and Palestine and any way it does not make sense to keep talking about the right of return. Palestinians in the Arab world need to be nationalized with the citizenship of the country they live in.

The Begining of The End Of The Ba'ath In Syria

The Security Council resolution 1636 calling on the Syrian regime to cooperate with the UN special investigator regarding the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Al Harriri is not the beginning of the end of the Ba’ath Regime in Syria. The beginning of the end of that regime started with the fall of the other Ba’ath system in Iraq led by Saddam Hussein. Both branches of this ideologue party came to power in both Iraq and Syria almost in the same period. In Iraq in 1968 and in Syria in 1970. Both embody the same theory on how a group of people, well organized, not necessarily related to the majority of the country they are in can rule that country effectively. It's what I call the dictatorship of the few. In Iraq, a group of the minority Sunni that did not even belong to the elite sunnie ruled a country of a Shiite majority for almost 40 years; the same in Syria, where a group of a sect called Alawite, kind of a Shiite on the fringe, ruled the country of a sunnie majority. I do not think this would have been a problem had these parties ruled their countries in a democratic fashion or if they had reached power through democratic means. The similarities between the two Ba’ath regimes in Syria and Iraq are great. Both were chapters to this so called pan Arab party that was created by a Christian Syrian by the name of Michel Aflak. After the fall of Saddam, Things have changed for The Baath; it became a strange body in an area that is changing rapidly into open political systems though not yet fully democratic. The assassination of Rafik Al Harriri came to expose Syria and its military regime and helped to escalate the departure of its forces under domestic and international pressure especially from the United States. Recently the former Syrian vice president Khaddam who happened to be a Sunni Muslim defected to France and aligned himself with the banned Syrian Muslim Brotherhood which is a Sunni organization though they would never admit it, and created a front to topple the regime of President Bashar Al Assad. The exact way of the end of the Ba’ath regime in Syria is difficult to predict but the continuation of this regime as it is now is almost impossible. We just need to look at Iraq, though the end might not be similar.