The Gathering Storm

"Suddenly the whole area went bright and we started running away. I saw two bodies on the street, one of a woman and another of a man on a motorcycle who was totally deformed."
Ali Oleik, accountant, Lebanon

Lebanon, inextricably drawn into yet another civil war pitting its tribal, ethnic, sectarian demographics against one another. Hard to credit that this was a country once representative of a regional success story in the ability of people to respect each other's differences and appreciate the cultural and social richness they brought to making Lebanon a cosmopolitan and beautiful country beloved of all its residents.

The geography was seen as a tourist mecca, the place where others within the region would visit to enjoy holiday amenities and a lifestyle said to be the envy of surrounding countries with a more rigid view of social parameters and exclusions. The famed cedars of Lebanon, the seaside resorts and the civility of Beirut and its attractions made the country a legend of social harmony and an international tourism destination.

But that was all before the advent of the turmoil that wracked the Middle East with the entrance of a non-Muslim nation making of itself an independent and sovereign country, inciting its Muslim neighbours to threaten its existence and creating the world's most lasting refugee stream of bitter Palestinians whom no other Muslim country wanted to absorb, including Lebanon.

The Palestinian 'resistance' against the existence of the Jewish state resulted in Israeli reaction. No country can exist anywhere in the world that does not react to its borders being infiltrated for constant attacks against its people. The Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat had one purpose; to destroy the State of Israel through violent upheaval from its strongholds in Lebanon.

Israel, understandably, thought it had every right to exist, and it exerted all the means at its disposal through its military to destroy the capacity of the PLO to continue its attacks. Its troops entered Lebanon, as did Syria's in a countervailing mood, inviting the United Nations to send U.S. and French peacekeeping forces into the country, while a generalized meltdown of Christian, Muslim, Druze and sectarian violence ensued.

All of this was contiguous to a growing Islamism within the Arab and Muslim world. Which in and of itself created conflict between the two major Muslim sects and tribal differences leading to a general unravelling of the pluralist society that distinguished Lebanon. With the creation of Hezbollah, the 'Party of God' under the auspices and training and theological embrace of martyrdom by Iran, Lebanon was incontrovertibly transformed into a country divided beyond redemption.

Hezbollah became a nation within a nation, with its own political and social ideology and its own military, refusing, even when it partially integrated into the government through elected representatives, to surrender its superior arms, and meld its hardened militias with those of the country itself. And now, it has, by aligning itself with the revolution taking place in Syria, once again created dire, violent divisions in Lebanon.

Violence has begun to again strike both Sunni and Shiite neighbourhoods, with sectarian tensions running their bitter harvesting course of death and destruction through the country. Communities within the country are lining up with their counterparts in Syria on opposing sides of the conflict. On Thursday a crowded Beirut commercial street in Haret Hreik, south Beirut supportive of Hezbollah was the scene of a large explosion that killed five and wounded over 50 people.

Over 20 kilograms of explosives were placed in a SUV, according to Lebanese army spokespeople. Likely a suicide bombing, as testified by human remains discovered in and around the destroyed vehicle. The mangled wreckage of cars in the street and nearby buildings with their windows blown out of store fronts testament to the deadly force of the blast. Many of those injured were in critical condition, according to the director of the Bahman Hospital.

The aftermath of the car bomb explosion in the Hezbollah stronghold of Haret Hreik in southern Beirut. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

 

But according to Hezbollah's al-Manar TV, though the explosion took place "a few hundred metres from the politburo of Hezbollah" it was not the political office that was the attack  target. Hezbollah's deputy chief Sheik Naim Kassim told al-Manar the blast had been aimed at "the whole of Lebanon."

So it is not the activities of Hezbollah, fighting in Syria alongside the Shia-Alawite regime against the Sunni Free Syrian Army that is responsible for the unsettling of Lebanon, but some darkly sinister outside source.