Letter

Of the months-long sit-in in downtown Beirut led by Hizballah, Jim Quilty (“Winter of Lebanon’s Discontents,” Middle East Report Online, January 26, 2007) writes: “This mobilization has been misrepresented in various ways. At least one foreign journalist, seeing the sit-in’s social makeup, has depicted it as a ‘popular uprising.’” I assume that I’m the “foreign journalist” he’s referring to and that he’s citing my article in The Nation (January 8, 2007), “People’s Revolt in Lebanon.”

First, a minor quibble: I’m not a “foreign journalist,” as my name clearly indicates that I’m Lebanese. More importantly, I strongly disagree that my article was part of a “misrepresentation” of the downtown mobilization. I never called it a “popular uprising.”

This is what I wrote: “But the biggest motivator driving many of those camped out in downtown isn’t Iran or Syria, or Sunni versus Shiite. It’s the economic inequality that has haunted Lebanese Shiites for decades. It’s a poor and working-class people’s revolt."

My article made the point that much of the Western press was missing an important factor -- economic inequality -- that was driving many of the participants in the protest’s early days. Some people misconstrued my argument, thinking I meant that Hizballah was motivated to organize the protest and subsequent sit-in out of a sense of economic justice or to change the Lebanese socio-economic system. I never made that argument. Instead, I explained how Hizballah was using these economic concerns (at one point, I described Secretary-General Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah as “ever skillful at tapping into the Shiite tradition of empowering the dispossessed”) as a way to mobilize its supporters and keep them focused on toppling Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government.

Quilty missed a key point about the protest, at least in its early days. Many journalists seem to assume that -- because Hizballah itself was not mainly driven by economic concerns -- somehow those concerns are not valid or worthy of exploration. I concluded otherwise on the basis of long conversations with the protesters.

I was really troubled that, in a 4,300-word essay, Quilty did not include any protesters’ voices. Instead, there was a lot of officialdom. Why didn’t he see fit to give voice to some of the protesters? If he had, he might have realized that a discussion of economic or class-based motivations is not a “misrepresentation” of the protest.

Mohamad Bazzi
Beirut

Quilty responds:

The “foreign journalist” I had in mind was actually a contributor to Socialist Worker in Great Britain with whom I talked about a story he intended to write on the sit-in. I now discover that the putative story did not appear online until February, and that Socialist Worker elected to run the piece as a selection of quotations from people at the sit-in. Hence I was quoting a “story” that never saw print. Mea culpa.

On the substantive point, there’s really no contradiction between what Bazzi writes in his note and what I wrote in my analysis.

He found that most of those he spoke to at the sit-in are poor and look to their political leaders, whether Hizballah or Michel Aoun or Sulayman Franjiyya, to improve their lot. I reckon one could draw the same conclusions about those poorer Lebanese Sunnis who looked to ex-premier Rafiq al-Hariri for leadership and were crushed when he was assassinated. You can’t make generalizations about all the March 14 people being bourgeois and all the present opposition supporters being poor, but it is true that the folks the opposition brings out for their demonstrations are less bourgeois (or appear less bourgeois) than many of those who came out to Martyrs’ Square in the spring of 2005.

What I wrote is that the main political agents behind the sit-in -- Hizballah and Aoun -- lead populist movements that instrumentalize popular frustration with the systemic inequities of the Lebanese economy.

In a country where state neglect of the periphery has engendered the sort of economic disparities apparent in Lebanon, it would be foolhardy to suggest that class plays no role in politics. Much as I sympathize with class readings of Lebanese politics, however, horizontal (class) linkages are segmented by the vertical linkages of sectarian clientelism.

It is a valuable exercise to record the aspirations of the marginal and the dispossessed. When attempting to analyze the political dynamic in Lebanon as it stood when the sit-in began, though, there is more utility in discussing the parties who instrumentalize these frustrations and aspirations.

The main differences between Bazzi’s Nation story and mine are matters of emphasis, no more.