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My first blog post for this project was back in December.... the first day I arrived in Beirut, the town was shut down for the funeral of assassinated army General Francois al Hajj, the man almost certain to replace General Michel Suleiman who had been slated as the most suitable (read: least divisive) candidate for president.
Lebanon was at that point without a president for just a few weeks and the gaping office sent jitters throughout the country's broken body politic. Since the Taif accords that ended the 1975-1990 civil war, the office of the president (which is reserved for a Christian) has been largely symbolic. Despite this, the symbolic weight of the absence of a president over the weeks and months to come became overpowering (as the government proceeded to fail to elect a president 19 times), representing a deepening fracture in the country';s broken politics and crescendoing of course in the violence and unrest of the past month.
Since I got back form Lebanon, I have been writing a thesis about how Nahr al Bared, exploring the evolution of architecture in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, how that architecture has been used to protect the Palestinians culturally and militarily and how it is being altered now and co-opted by the Lebanese government as a means to stave off the growing threat of Sunni fundamentalist groups there.
Now Nahr al-Bared has cropped up again, in the figure of Michel Suleiman, and in a context that is optimistic and reassuring for the future of Lebanon. Since the consensus on power sharing reached in Doha last week between the Hezbollah-led opposition and the US-allied majority, a Suleiman has been elected to office and, I hear, an enormous shift has occurred on the street. The mood is different. The tent-city, set up in protest by the opposition has been lifted from downtown and Beirutis have their treasured city center back. The Beirut stick exchange is up and people are hopeful.
President Michel Suleiman was the prime candidate for president because he was one of the few public figures who stood on more or less even ground with the polar majority and opposition. Under his command, the army managed to remain one of the few, if not the only, institution to remain uncorrupted by divisive sectarianism in the fall off that followed the assassination of Rafiq Hariri and the "Cedar Revolution" and withdrawal of Syria that followed.
His credibility was also boosted by his feted victory, as then commander of the army, over Fatah al Islam at Nahr al Bared, an event which brought a rare sense of unity to the Lebanese and further consolidated the secularist, non-sectarian substructure of Lebanon's national army.