Robert Fisk: A French colonial legacy of despair
They wanted Lebanon’s ‘independence’ – but they wanted it in France’s favour
The Independent/UK
25 November 2006
I couldn’t help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign
minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint
George’s Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted
through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of
murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the
representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last
year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime
minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set
up the tribunal which will – will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? –
try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of
such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would have
felt jealous. "President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of
Lebanon’s sovereignty," he proclaimed. "France is determined … now more than
ever (to) defend Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence." Now I’m not sure I
would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my
greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender "on earth" – funny, isn’t
it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard – and like
the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I’d certainly want to tread carefully
around France’s interest in Lebanon’s "independence".
I hasten to add that – compared to the mendacious, utterly false,
repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra –
Chirac’s dealings with France’s former colonies and mandates are positively
Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after the
First World War was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous
François Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel
of the old Ottoman empire, divided as it was between Shia Muslims and Sunni
Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites – France’s favourite community and
the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel – and the Greek Orthodox and the
Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites
represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller
families than their Muslim neighbours steadily turned the Christians into a
minority which may now number 29 per cent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after
independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime
ministership and the Shias, who are today the largest community, would be
compensated by holding the speakership of parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon’s
"independence" – but they wanted it to be in France’s favour.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming
the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority – the
Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for
this – the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus
rule their country from a position of minority power. After Irish partition, old
James Craig, the founder of Northern Ireland, was a wiser bird than Hayek.
>From the historic province of Ulster, he ruthlessly dispensed with the three
counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan because their Protestant communities
were too small to sustain – and created a new Ulster whose six counties
ensured a Protestant majority for decades to come.
The other Lebanese problem – which the people of Northern Ireland will
immediately spot – is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the
president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern
state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no
longer be Lebanon. The French realised all this in the same way – I suspect – as
the Americans have now realised the nature of their sectarian monster in
Iraq. Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the
experience of being a Levantine in 1946 – and apply it to Iraq. To live in
such a way, Hourani wrote:
"is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to
be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a
certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. … It
is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one’s own. It reveals
itself in lostness, cynicism and despair."
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these
people in the borders and colours in which we have chosen to define them.
Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon – Shias at the bottom and on the
right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians
uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the
same sectarian maps of Iraq – Shias at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the
famous "Sunni triangle" though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the
top.
The British army adopted the same cynical colonial attitude in its
cartography of Belfast. I still possess their sectarian maps of the 1970s in which
Protestant areas were coloured orange (of course) and Catholic districts were
green (of course) while the mixed, middle-class area around Malone Road
appeared as a dull brown, the colour of a fine, dry sherry. But we do not draw these
maps of our own British or American cities. I could draw a map of Bradford’s
ethnic districts – but we would never print it. I could draw a black-white
ethnic map of Washington – but the Washington Post would never dream of
publishing it.
And thus we divide the "other", while assiduously denying the "other" in
ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon, what the British did in
Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq. In this way we maintain
our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge
of territory north of Beirut. Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those
who support the "democracy" to which Gemayel belonged and the Shias, the
people – in every sense of the word – at the "bottom". And the French are going
to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains "i
ndependent".
Quite so. And by the way, when did we ever see an ethnic map of Paris and
its banlieues?