Lebanon in turmoil as it hits 100
Looking back on his childhood in the newly declared state of Lebanon nearly a century ago, Salah Tizani says the country was set on course for calamity from the start by colonial powers and sectarian overlords. Tizani, better known in Lebanon as Abou Salim, was one of Lebanon's first TV celebrities. He shot to fame in the 1960s with a weekly comedy show that offered a political and social critique of the nascent state.
Now aged 92, he lucidly traces the crises that have beset Lebanon - wars, invasions, assassinations and, most recently, a devastating chemicals explosion - back to the days when France carved its borders out of the Ottoman
Empire in 1920 and sectarian politicians known as "the zuama" emerged as its masters.
"The mistake that nobody was aware of is that people went to bed one day thinking they were Syrians or Ottomans, let's say, and the next day they woke up to find themselves in the Lebanese state," Tizani said. "Lebanon was just thrown together."
Lebanon's latest ordeal, the Aug. 4 Beirut port explosion that killed some 180 people, injured 6,000 and devastated a swathe of the city, has triggered new reflection on its troubled history and deepened worry for the future.
For many, the catastrophe is a continuation of the past, caused in one way or another by the same sectarian elite that has led the country from crisis to crisis since its inception, putting factions and self-interest ahead of state and nation. And it comes amid economic upheaval. An unprecedented financial meltdown has devastated the economy, fuelling poverty and a new wave of emigration from a country whose heyday in the 1960s is a distant memory.
The blast also presages a historic milestone: Sept. 1 is the centenary of the establishment of the State of Greater Lebanon, proclaimed by France in an imperial carve-up with Britain after World War One. For Lebanon's biggest Christian community, the Maronites, the proclamation of Greater Lebanon by French General Henri Gouraud was a welcome step towards independence.
But many Muslims who found themselves cut off from Syria and Palestine were dismayed by the new borders. Growing up in the northern city of Tripoli, Tizani saw the divisions first hand. As a young boy, he remembers being ordered home by the police to be registered in a census in 1932, the last Lebanon conducted. His neighbours refused to take part. "They told them 'we don't want to be Lebanese'," he said.
Tizani can still recite the Turkish oath of allegiance to the Sultan, as taught to his father under Ottoman rule. He can sing La Marseillaise, taught to him by the French, from start to finish. But he freely admits to not knowing all of Lebanon's national anthem. Nobody spoke about patriotism. "The country moved ahead on the basis we were a unified nation but without internal foundations. Lebanon was made superficially, and it continued superficially."
From the earliest days, people were forced into the arms of politicians of one sectarian stripe or another if they needed a job, to get their children into school, or if they ran into trouble with the law. "Our curse is our zuama," Tizani said. When Lebanon declared independence in 1943, the French tried to thwart the move by incarcerating its new government, provoking an uprising that proved to be a rare moment of national unity.
Under Lebanon's National Pact, it was agreed the president must be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shi'ite Muslim.