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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-Oct-2019
21-Oct-19 World View -- Massive anti-government street protests paralyze Lebanon

Web Log - October, 2019

21-Oct-19 World View -- Massive anti-government street protests paralyze Lebanon

Brief generational history of Lebanon

by John J. Xenakis

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

Massive anti-government street protests paralyze Lebanon
Brief generational history of Lebanon

Massive anti-government street protests paralyze Lebanon

Protesters in front of the Muhammad al-Amin mosque in downtown Beirut, Lebanon, on Sunday. (EPA)

Protesters in front of the Muhammad al-Amin mosque in downtown Beirut, Lebanon, on Sunday. (EPA)

There have been four days of massive anti-government protests in Beirut, Lebanon's capital city, and in cities across Lebanon. In the country's second largest city, Tripoli, in northern Syria, and in the southern port city of Tyre, the protesters waved the Lebanon national flag, and changed "revolution" or "the people demand the fall of the regime."

These were the largest street protests in Lebanon since 2005, when Rafiq al-Hariri, the father of the current prime minister Saad al-Hariri, was killed by a massive terrorist bomb in Beirut. The assassination was blamed on Syria and on the fact that Hariri opposed Syria's influence in Lebanon. The massive street protests at that time led to the Cedar Revolution, causing the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.

Most popular protests in Lebanon have been highly sectarian, aligned with the Sunnis, the Shias or the Christians. However, the massive 2005 protests cut across all the sectarian blocs.

The same is true of the protests in the last four days. They've been almost completely peaceful, with some violence on the margins. Protesters have been united in criticizing the massive corruption in the government of Lebanon, and the resulting poverty, and a ballooning deficit.

The protests were triggered on Thursday by a proposed fee equal to the equivalent of 20 cents on WhatsApp calls. Making a phone call using Lebanon's antiquated phone system is expensive, so people have increasingly used WhatsApp to make the calls. But the fee proposal triggered the massive protests and the proposal was quickly withdrawn by a desperate government in the hope of ending the protests.

However, the protests continued and grew, and the government is now even more desperate, as it appears that the country will be paralyzed by the protests on Monday. The Maronite Christian Lebanese Forces party is withdrawing from the government, along with its four ministers. The country's main labor union has threatened a general strike.

Hariri has demanded that each government office implement reforms by Monday evening, including a 50% cut in salaries of numerous government officials. Protesters have been mocking these demands, since they know that the government officials will never agree to cut their own salaries. However, if the reforms are implemented, then they will unlock $11 billion in Western donor pledges and help avert economic collapse.

Brief generational history of Lebanon

Girls holding anti-government placards during protests in Beirut, Lebanon, on Sunday (AP)

Girls holding anti-government placards during protests in Beirut, Lebanon, on Sunday (AP)

Although the objectives of the protests are serious, the protests themselves are often playful, unlike, for example, the protests in Hong Kong. That's because Lebanon is in a generational Awakening era, and so the protests are similar to those in the US and Europe in the 1960s. Hong Kong and China are, by contrast, in a generational Crisis era, which means that their protests are likely to lead to full-scale war, which is not likely in the case of the Lebanon protests.

Lebanon had two generational crisis wars during the last century. The first was part of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1908-22).

The second was Lebanon's civil war (1975-90), mainly between Muslims versus Christians, killing some 200,000 people. A major event occurred on September 15-16, 1982, when Maronite Christian militias massacred 2-3,000 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps. This act has haunted Lebanon to this day.

After a generational crisis war ends, the belligerents enter a generational Recovery Era, and the survivors of the war take steps to try to guarantee that nothing so horrible should ever happen again.

I want to take a quick side trip to describe what happened in Iran and Syria.

I've described many times how a country that goes through a generational crisis war that's also an ethnic civil war almost always follows the same pattern. The ethnic group that won the civil war takes power, and the oppresses and marginalizes the people in the losing ethnic group, sometimes resorting to extreme violence.

Iran had a crisis civil war, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, followed by the Iran/Iraq war. The leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, wrote a new constitution that gave himself complete dictatorial powers, in order to prevent a new anti-government rebellion. In 1988, Khomeini ordered the torture, rape and massacre of tens of thousands of political prisoners and political enemies. That's fairly typical of a country's Recovery era following an ethnic crisis civil war.

Syria's last generational crisis war was a religious/ethnic civil war between the Shia Alawites versus the Arab Sunnis. That war climaxed in February 1982 with the destruction of the town of Hama, which killed or displaced hundreds of thousands. This ended the war, but today, Syria's president Bashar al-Assad is still conducting genocide and ethnic cleansing of his political enemies, the Arab Sunnis.

Lebanon's Recovery Era acted somewhat differently. Instead of putting one group (the Shias, the Sunnis, the Christians) in charge of the government, which might have led to the same kind of violence as in Iran and Syria, they tried to write the constitution to balance the three sects.

Lebanon's constitution requires that the three main offices be occupied by specific sectarian groups:

The prime minister, currently Saad al-Hariri, must be a Sunni Muslim.
The president, currently held by Michel Aoun, must be a Syriac Maronite Catholic.
And the speaker of parliament, currently held by Nabhi Berri, must be a Shia Muslim.

This sectarian separation seems to have served Lebanon pretty well, at least as compared to Iran or Syria. But protesters see it as a source of the corruption causing the economic problems.

Each of the sects is in control of a major set of government institutions, controlling the funding and salaries for those institutions. Protesters are being quoted as saying that they can't get any government services without going through the relevant religious sect. Furthermore, each sect skims money from the institutions that it controls. Protesters are calling this the reason for Lebanon's extreme poverty.

Sources:

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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the Generational Dynamics World View News thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (21-Oct-2019) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-Oct-2019 21-Oct-19 World View -- Massive anti-government street protests paralyze Lebanon

Massive anti-government street protests paralyze Lebanon

Brief generational history of Lebanon

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-Oct-2019
21-Oct-19 World View -- Massive anti-government street protests paralyze Lebanon