Hazem Saghiyeh

December 30, 2010 

There is no doubt that the Lebanese debate over the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is very important, and we have no shortage of evidence for the enormity of the consequences that could follow, negatively or positively, from its indictment.

On the other hand, if we look further, to the Arab region or beyond to modern Arab history, we find that the tribunal’s importance and symbolism reach far beyond its local significance.

The meaning here is that the effective actors in this region have always been external. This is not due to conspiracies plotted against us, as say the disciples of conspiratorial consciousness, but to Arab societies’ lack of any dynamism for internal change.

Let us remember that Moammar Qaddafi, for example, has ruled Libya continually since 1969, and that the Baath party has ruled in Syria since 1963. Another Baath party ruled Iraq since 1968, and its term did not end until the American war launched in 2003.

There are a number of central truths about our region, the foremost of which is that we entered the modern world with the French campaign led by Napoleon at the close of the eighteenth century. We engaged in what became known as the “Renaissance” with the English occupation of Egypt in 1882. However, the wide sensitivities of our peoples remained governed by support for “community” and religion, and then by the struggle against the foreigner and hatred of him, not by a social subject, ideological matters or the issues of progress and democracy. Thus our region cannot produce strong liberal parties – or even strong communist parties.

When sects, religions, and ethnicities rose in the era of awakening identities, strong communist parties like the Sudanese and Iraqi parties evaporated, as if their strength had merely been a kind of play during stoppage time. Furthermore, several of the very partial reforms in the fields of liberty, education, and women’s rights in some Arab countries were achieved only through American and Western pressure following the crime of September 11.

If we return to Lebanon and we ask what has vanished and what remains of the gift that the March 14 movement represented, we find that what vanished was only caused to vanish by the sects and traditional leaders (our domestic commodities), and what remains is only what the foreign element caused to remain. The STL is in the forefront of what remains.

One could say that the latter, external element could not have done what it did if not for the domestic contribution, and this is certainly true. However, this truth does not void the fact that this contribution was based on a federation of sects, and not on a cross-sectarian popular national front. A truth such as this requires us to expect seasonality, interruption, and even moodiness, in every domestic movement. The fact is that this complicated, inherited historical structure is ours, and requires all those seeking liberty and progress to depend, in the final analysis, on external forces.