Peaking Inside Pandora's Box

It's been a while since my last post, and I apologize for having left on such a somber note. The week following the death of Sheikh Ahmad Abd-al-Wahad, which sparked the Tarek al-Jdideh clashes, was a weird one in Beirut, one that definitely showed a new aspect of Lebanon I had yet to see.

Hamra was uncharacteristically quiet. The usual traffic jams on the neighborhood's main street were conspicuously absent. The parking lot outside of my apartment, usually filled to the brim with haphazardly parked cars, was eerily empty. The café I holed myself in daily to work suddenly got a security person at the entrance. Small details that might have gone unnoticed to someone unfamiliar with my neighborhood, but showed that apprehension was shifting uneasily under the surface.

On a sunny afternoon, as I walked back from some errands down some side street, I saw a civilian with a firearm for the first time. It took a couple of seconds for my mind to register this man in everyday clothing, a Kalashnikov hanging from his side, seemingly standing guard in front of a building I had never even noticed before. Our eyes met. Even though I knew that nothing would happen, I had never been happier in my life to be an unthreatening young woman in a dress.

Lebanese friends joked. "This is how we welcome tourists for the summer," some said, with the drawling bravado of those who have seen it all. I envied their cynicism, their ability to remain so imperviously jaded about the situation when I was still trying figure out just how alarmed I should be. I also felt, somewhat guiltily, that my insecurities were painful reminders of how new and unexperienced I still was. At the same time, their apathy was infuriating. If the prospect of national conflict could elicit nothing more than blasé shrugs and dark humor from them, what hope was there?

Yet I fell into the same over-rationalizing coping mechanisms when  trying to reassure my family back home. A couple of weeks before the events, I had laughed at my father's concerns regarding the events in Tripoli. "This has been going on for months," I told him. "You can start worrying if anything happens in Beirut." I soon regretted that statement after receiving a panicked e-mail from my mother. "Don't worry," I said. "Tarek al-Jdideh is far from where I live. Nothing's going to happen near Hamra."

Oops.

But before I had to resort to "It's okay, Mom, they're only shooting at the building next door!," things went down from a boil to a simmer. Shootings and tire-burnings are still taking place now, albeit with less frequency, and usually in response to electricity shortages or the abduction of 11 Lebanese pilgrims in Syria, not political rivalries. The most reassuring aspect of the May flare-up was the disparate aspect of the tensions. No pattern has seemed to emerge pitting a given community against another. And for once, the political leaders temporarily stopped adding fuel to the flames of communitarianism and have called for calm and national dialogue.

Said dialogue yielded mixed results, depending on which side you asked, but one thing is for certain: none of the major national players have much to gain from the country sinking into civil conflict. However, the resolution to keep out of all external affairs will prove to be a difficult one, as regional politics have a tendency to spread quickly to the porous Lebanese political scene. Saying Lebanon is not going to get involved in the Syrian conflict is fine and dandy, but how do you stop the Syrian conflict from getting involved in Lebanon?

The latest violent event to date was the attack of the al-Jadeed TV station on Monday night after the station broadcast a controversial interview of sheikh Ahmad al-Assir (a Salafi leader who has made a brief appearance on this blog before), in which he blasted Hezbollah, among other outrageous statements. The attacks on al-Jadeed have been widely condemned by all political parties. With no one group claiming responsibility, this raises the possibility that Lebanon's leaders' influence is waning and that they will have a harder time keeping their angriest followers in check.

Although the Lebanese have mostly returned to their daily routine and the insouciance of summer, trouble is still brewing. There is no telling if the Lebanese Pandora's Box has been emptied of all its evils for the time being, but we have caught a glimpse of the ugliness and violence that could yet be unleashed.