SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT SAMI GEMAYEL?

Michael Young

Daily Star
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Lebanon

It’s the kind of person that Amine Gemayel is that he had two sons,
one who channeled his father, the other channeling his brother. In
other words, one son, the regretted Pierre, sensitive to the rules
of coexistence with Muslims, as was his namesake Pierre Gemayel;
and the other son, Sami, who seems impatient with those rules, like
his uncle Bashir, his priority above all being the Christians, their
unity and power, who has allocated only an anteroom for Muslims in
his impetuous reflections.

Sami Gemayel often appears to prefer his Christian adversaries to his
non-Christian allies. No sooner had he won a seat in the Metn, than he
congratulated the Armenian supporters of the Tashnag Party for their
exemplary unity – a unity all Christians would do well to learn from,
he added. Last week, Gemayel drove north to meet with Sleiman Franjieh,
the Marada leader, another step in bringing the Christians, and the
Maronites in particular, closer together. All this, it seems, is a way
of ensuring that "no one steps on the Christians anymore," as Gemayel
fervently declared in a hometown rally after his election victory.

I admit to having voted for Gemayel, but without conviction, primarily
to guarantee that Michel Aoun’s candidates would lose. However, the
joke was on us. In essence Gemayel is little different than Aoun and
his followers. All embody the return to a rural Maronite insularism
very different than the composite ideology that made modern Lebanon –
an ideology of the mountain and of the city, to paraphrase the late
historian Albert Hourani. As Hourani explained, modern Lebanon is
the fruit of tough, independent rural insularism, mainly associated
with the mountain communities, softened by the openness of the urban
communities. These characteristics have endured, so that even during
the civil war this valuable amalgam was never really threatened.

Much has changed. An alarming number of Maronites today appear to have
lost any sense of the collective nature of the Lebanese state. The
Aounists, Sami Gemayel, Nadim Gemayel, even Sleiman Franjieh, have
shown an inability to come to grips with the sectarian contract of
1943, the National Pact, and its successor, the Taif Accord. Taif is
the real culprit to them, documentary proof of Christian decline –
a decline they have all received with bitterness, even if their
responses have differed.

For the Aounists, Taif handed Maronite power to the Sunnis, hence
their effort to reverse this by allying themselves with another rural
community, the Shiites, to regain what was lost. For people like Sami
Gemayel, the solution lies in greater Christian unanimity against
the outside, which when you peel away the layers is really just a
strategy bound to enhance Christian isolation. For Franjieh and not
a few Aounists, the way out is through an alliance of minorities,
with the Alawites in Syria and the Shiites in Lebanon, against the
Sunni majority in the Middle East. Each of these notions is foolish
in itself, an avenue toward communal suicide, and all have one thing
in common: antagonism toward the Sunni community.

There is no small amount of historical irony, and hypocrisy, here. For
decades the Maronites took pride in saying that they were the true
defenders of "Lebanon first." Now that the Sunnis have adopted the
slogan as their own, too many Maronites have reacted as if this were a
threat to the Lebanese entity because Sunnis are extensions of an Arab
majority. Ultimately, the message this sends is that the Maronites
only defended a "Lebanon first" option when the Lebanon in question
was one they dominated. Now that the community feels it is losing
ground, the preference is for Christians to envelope themselves in
a tight defensive shell.

When Sami Gemayel speaks about the Christians "being stepped upon,"
what does he mean? This is the language of demagoguery, and in
some respects of war. Who has stepped on the Christians? Judging by
Gemayel’s actions and statements, the simple answer is "the Muslims"
whoever that may be. Yet being stepped upon is a very different concept
than accepting the reality of Christian numerical regression. It
is very different than grasping that Taif, the hated Taif, hands
Christians representation well beyond their real numbers. When
one feels stepped upon, the world looks like the bottom of a shoe,
and it becomes very difficult to follow a sensible path away from
one’s resentments.

Sami Gemayel may seem easy to dismiss, but one should be careful. He
is a true believer and has adopted the mindset of Bashir Gemayel,
which may bring on powerful approval if Christian frustrations
rise further. There are differences: Bashir saw the finality of his
actions in the context of the Lebanese state; Sami is alienated from
the state. However, both see strength in unity, a concept that some
of us regard with trepidation. Unity can be shorthand for imposed
uniformity, and such an aspiration sidesteps that the wealth of the
Christians lies in their pluralism. True believers are infused with
hubris; they dislike variety, dissent, and feel they have a superior
sense of what is best for their followers. They are also hardnosed
about things, believing that their higher goals justify difficult
compromises. That is why Sami Gemayel was able to meet with Sleiman
Franjieh, the ally of his own brother’s assassins.

Where are the Muslims in all this? The only antidote against
Christian irrelevance is to develop a new relationship with
Muslims, all Muslims, to define together a more consensual Lebanese
polity. For that to happen, Christians must indeed unite around
a common reading of their role in Lebanon, one that is positive,
that advocates neither isolation nor perennial aversion toward
their non-Christian partners. Such negative reflexes may seem to
be a consequence of Christian reaffirmation; in fact, they only
confirm Christian marginalization. Resentment, bitterness, isolation,
hostility, communal self-absorption are qualities of a community mired
in mediocrity, with no sense of the constructive long-term impact it
might have on its environment.

It would be unfair to blame all this on a young Sami Gemayel. But in
many ways he seems far more credible an embodiment of the Christians’
future than the opportunistic politicians around Michel Aoun. He
believes and the Christians want to believe, which is why we should
watch him closely.
From: Baghdasarian