There is a bar called 1975 in Christian east Beirut, close to the former green line, that is built to look like a checkpoint from Lebanon’s civil war.
A photograph on a wall pocked with mock bullet holes shows a line of burning cars next to a sign in Arabic stating ”forbidden to go backwards”.
The barman, a 24-year-old Christian, is not so sure.
”This war is an illusion,” says Charbel Nahed. ”Outside, however, we are living through a new cold war.”
On the day of Lebanon’s first election since the departure of Syria’s occupying army, Christians are bitter, frightened and divided over what they say has been their ”betrayal” by both the Cedar Revolution — which sprang up earlier this year after the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri — and by their own leadership at the moment of the country’s ”liberation”.
It was not supposed to be like this. After 15 years of war — from 1975 to 1990 — followed by 15 years of a poisoned peace overseen by the Syrian army, the departure of the occupiers was supposed to herald a new era. But once again Lebanon’s competing factions are eyeing each other suspiciously across the religious divide. And the Christians are calling foul.
Most bitter are the former fighters of the Christian Lebanese Forces once commanded by Samir Geagea, the militia’s jailed leader.
Danny Shami (35) sits outside the office of the Lebanese Forces that has been set up in the neighbourhood for the elections. He first picked up a gun when aged 11, and fought for nine years through the war. He explains the Christian complaint in fluent English, the broken cross of the Lebanese Forces hanging from his neck.
”We paid the worst price,” he says. ”They say we are the guys of war — the allies of Israel. It is true that we have a heritage of mistakes. But Samir Geagea has paid the price more than anyone else. He is in prison while the rest of the wartime leaders are living in villas — and, in our young men, that has bred a sense of injustice.”
And while Geagea’s personal history of malice and murder makes for unpleasant reading, they are not alone in suspecting that his long imprisonment was politically motivated. Even Amnesty has questioned his trial conducted in the era of Syrian domination.
Geagea’s fate has become the rallying cry for Lebanon’s divided Christian society — the one issue on which even the Lebanese Forces and the secular but almost exclusively Christian former prime minister General Michel Aoun, recently returned from exile in Paris, can agree.
Although Aoun has recently visited Geagea in prison and called for his release, most supporters of Geagea still regard Aoun, who fought to disarm his fellow Christians in the last months of the war, as a ”traitor”.
If Aoun once split the Christians through conflict, his decision now to fight the election on his own terms has left the Christians again in disarray.
In this vacuum of leadership, dark undercurrents have begun to emerge among the young hotheads who follow Geagea.
Following a spate of bombings aimed at Christian targets, young men describing themselves as ”vigilantes” have appeared in the wake of the attacks, leading some to fear a revival of the old Christian ”Phalangist” militias — and the memories of the slaughter that they perpetrated.
To journalists, the young men of the Lebanese Forces sell an emollient line — insisting that the time for violence has passed — but to other Lebanese Christians some tell a different story, suggesting that they would relish a new fight.
What was hailed as the Cedar Revolution — as millions turned out on the streets to protest at Hariri’s death in a car bombing on February 14 blamed on Syria — has run into the sand.
The Syrian military may have left after 29 years of occupation, but for Lebanon their departure has not freed the country from its past or from the actors in it.
Even if Saad Hariri wins, as expected, the political landscape will still be dominated by many of the same former warlords who have staked a permanent pitch in the country’s politics: even the absent Geagea, by implication.
All that is new is that a long-suppressed Christian resentment is noisily re-emerging on the back of Aoun’s return and the campaign for Geagea’s release.
”We glued the pieces of the broken glass back together again after the war, but with the divisions ensuing from the current political crisis, we won’t be able to do the same — you can’t fix a broken glass twice,” a Lebanese historian and leader of a civil society movement recently confided to Beirut’s Daily Star. ”I am extremely concerned about the present … because the situation has become so polarised.”
It is a polarisation — as Danny Shami admits — fed by a mutual fear of Muslim and Christian.
”They fear us because they are worried Israel might invade Lebanon again with our aid,” says Shami. ”What we are afraid of is that Hezbollah still retains its weapons and may use them against us.”
But for now the most bitter anger on the Christian side is saved for the terms on which Sunday’s first round of elections is being fought, leading many Christians again to voice aspirations for an end to Lebanon’s fragile political settlement and to renew demands for a federal state with more autonomy for Christians.
The central issue is that it is being fought under an election law drawn up in 2000 under Syrian tutelage.
This, the Christians charge, is unfair as the electoral boundaries mean that only 15 of the 64 seats reserved for Christians in the country’s ”confessional system”, which allocates seats by faith, are elected from Christian majority areas, while 49 other ”Christian MPs” will actually be returned from areas that have a Muslim majority. Their real voice, they say, will continue to be diluted.
It is an issue raised by Aoun on Friday in his villa over looking the sea in the hills outside Beirut. The elections are free, he says, but not fair. Lebanon’s electoral system, he complains, is an exercise not in democracy but ”influence trading”, from which he does not exempt even Hariri’s son.
Aoun’s solution is an end to the confessional system. Instead he would secularise all aspects of Lebanese society. Even if it were possible, he admits, it would take a generation.
At the Umari mosque in Beirut’s centre on Friday, Khalid, a 30-year-old artist, and a friend — both wearing the broken cross — watched as about 1 000 northern Islamic fundamentalists demonstrated against the United States over alleged desecration of the Qur’an at Guantánamo Bay.
”I don’t want there to be another war in 10 years,” says Khalid. ”But I feel the Christians are in a weak position in Lebanon. We have been betrayed by the election law, and cannot have our own representation. I don’t think this country is viable the way it is. I would support anyone who raised the idea of have a new federal arrangement. Otherwise the tensions will just continue to rise.”
At the Lebanese Front office in Sin al-Fin, Danny Shami has another idea: to confine all those from the war era to the dustbin of history, himself included.
”We need a new generation to lead us,’ he says. ‘Those who do not have blood on their hands.” — Guardian Unlimited Â