Nothing in the Middle East is as it seems, especially in Lebanon – opinion
The best way to understand Lebanon in Western terms is to look at the former Yugoslavia.
By MICHAEL SUSSMANA DEMONSTRATOR looks on during protests in Lebanon that followed a massive explosion in Beirut last Tuesday.(photo credit: THAIER AL-SUDANI/REUTERS)
In the Middle East, the shuk is located in the center of the city. These bustling bazaars are known as “the beating heart of the city” and symbols of “culture of high significance.”I will never forget my first experience at the shuk with its long, cobbled maze-like corridors; the omnipresent scent of cumin and fresh Middle Eastern spices; hordes of people pushing and wafts of smoke lingering overhead as elderly men sat on low wicker stools smoking hookahs, sipping tea and talking politics.The Middle Eastern market was a far cry from the sterile malls in the United States where I grew up. There, even smoking indoors could lead to a serious fine.Even more astonishing than its aesthetics is the way sales are made. There are no price tags. Instead, sellers invite customers into their narrow market stalls, befriend them with a “special” pot of Middle Eastern coffee, size them up and use cunning fair-market tactics to sell the item for the highest price possible.Like the word used for “minister of defense,” the word for payment in Arabic is “ad’fa,” derived from the word meaning defense. I quickly learned that the wrong strategy would quickly burn a hole in my wallet, or even worse cause me to lose face in the bazaar, a place where honor and shame override everything.Since the horrific explosion in Beirut last week, I have been advising heads of state and senior policy-makers professionally and privately on how they should view this event. My general advice is to remember their experience in the shuk and not be sold by the smoke and mirrors on the surface because, in the Middle East, everything is different from how it appears.One example is told by my friends who advised the US secretary of defense in building Turkish-American NATO cooperation in the 1990s and who still tell stories of the regal state banquets they attended in Turkey’s capital city, Ankara. They were held in lavish ballrooms that belonged to the Turkish monarchy, with prominent verses from the Koran etched into the scaffolding in delicate Arabic calligraphy and heavy gold chandeliers gleaming light in every direction onto Turkey’s most celebrated journalists, generals and politicians, who joked and clinked champagne glasses. On the surface, everything was perfect.Yet, as most Middle Eastern stories go, under the surface an entirely different tale was unfolding. The very next morning clinking glasses were replaced with clinking handcuffs, and the generals had the journalists arrested and put in jail. Yet that was not the final twist.Perplexing the American delegation further was the fact that two weeks later, those very same journalists were back at the lavish banquet hall, making jokes, clinking glasses with the very generals who had them arrested. To the untrained eye, it was as if nothing happened. Yet, the very next day those journalists were arrested again and the process repeated itself every two weeks.VIRTUALLY ALL of the leaders I consulted were encouraged by the tenacity of the protesters in the streets of Beirut following the explosion. Shouting loudly, banging drums and even setting fires, they were not asking for accountability from their leadership but demanding it. Even more encouraging was the fact that the protesters were united across all of Lebanon’s many different groups in what is typically a splintered political landscape.Subsequently, many experts speculated whether this could be “the” event that would end the tyrannical domination of the Hezbollah terrorist regime and restore Beirut to its previous status as the “Paris of the Middle East.”Yet, as one IDF general privately explained, if the Middle East is complex, Lebanon is even more so.Unlike Europe, Canada, the United States and the Western world, which are based on the individual and their rights, in the Middle East, identity and decisions are not made on an individual level but on the basis of groups of clans, families and tribes. In Lebanon, this is even more complex as there are main tribes (two), subtribes of those main tribes, subtribes of the subtribes, and even subtribes of the subtribes of the subtribes.Even by Middle Eastern standards, the ancient Arabic proverbs, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” and “I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world,” take on even more meaning when it comes to Lebanon. Each one of the relative tribes are connected to one another and each one of the tribes is responsible for its own interests.Even more, even competing tribes and enemies (like Hezbollah) do business together (or pay each other off). Those are just the tribes from the same ethnicity and does not take into account the different ethnic and sectarian groups that also all have their own historical ties and claims to the land.As a former Secret Service head explained to me, the best way to understand Lebanon in Western terms is to look at the former Yugoslavia, which prior to its disillusion in 1991 included: Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia and many different ethnic groups within them. Like the ethnic tensions among the groups in Lebanon, we know from the ethnic wars that erupted there that enforcing change against the social structure can be catastrophic. In fact, even the Lebanese government lets the local tribes administer their own affairs.Even more important than recalling our first experience at the bazaar is not letting history repeat itself, and learning from the mistakes of the past. We learned from our experiences in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Egypt – virtually the whole region – that regime change and efforts to depose tyrannical rulers are futile if they do not support the clan-based structure, which centrally unites tribes through fear (Saddam Hussein) or pays them patronage (Muammar Gaddafi).This is because, like at the Middle Eastern bazaar, alluring smoke and mirrors may exist on the surface but nothing is as it appears.The writer is CEO of Sussman Corporate Security and editor of the book Variety of Multiple Modernities: New Research Design.
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