Elections, Assassination, and Independence

AUB Student Elections
Originally uploaded by marcynewman.

Elections, Assassination, and Independence
I was showing Jafar Panahi's film The Circle in my Sexuality in the U.S. and Middle East class today. I stopped the film at about 4:30 PM to have discussion when all of a sudden my students' phones were flooded with SMS messages stating that Pierre Gemayel had been assassinated. Unlike other assassinations in recent years in Beirut this one was carried out with guns rather than bombs. It was difficult to try to carry on with the lasts fifteen minutes of class; one of my students left the room in tears as her family apparently has close ties with the Gemayel family. I could hear students pouring out of their classrooms to the area in front of West Hall, the student union at AUB, which is just outside my classroom. The mood was tense. Lots of theories being spouted about who might have been responsible for this crime: Mossad? Syria? CIA? Take your pick.

Within the hour the story of Gemayel's assissination made it to the headline story of the New York Times on their website. Curiously, when providing a brief historical context of Gemayel and his family, the Times fails to acknowledge the Gemayel's family's history within the Phalangist party in Lebanon: it's responsibility, with Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Occupation Forces, for the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982. Certainly it is possible that the Phalangist party has changed its tune over the years, but it is not a part of its history that should be erased.

A few hours before all of this, at noon time, AUB, like many other places in Lebanon had a modest Flag Day celebration in front of the student union. Tomorrow is Lebanese Independence Day and it will be interesting to see what kind of independence gets celebrated at a time when there is so much tension in the air. Thus far Lebanon has seemed to be somewhat unified, but with the resignations from the cabinet and now this assassination who knows what tomorrow will look like.

Just last week AUB held elections on its campus for student body representatives. The photo above is taken just outside AUB's main gate on election day. The poster above the street of Rafik Hariri is one of many posters that have popped up in the last couple of weeks--in many places replacing billboards that used to have the Hezbollah Divine Victory posters. But if you look closely you will see trucks full of riot police who stood outside campus for two days. The first day there were fears that violence would break out so the faculty postponed the ballot counting until the following day. The final count which was 50 to 45 went to the March 14th anti-Syrian coalition consisting of Current for the Future, Progressive Socialist Party, Phalangist/Kataeb Party, and the National Liberal Party among others and the remaining ballots went to the March 8th coalition which is a collective of the Free Patriotic Movement, Hezbollah, Amal, and the People's Movement. There has been some controversy over whether the ballots were properly counted or not and there were many people who worried about whether or not this election would be conducted peacefully. Like student elections in Palestinian universities, where the campus parties also mirror the general political parties of the country, here, too, there seems to be a lot at stake for the students. Though for all of the hours of missed classes and organizing I really wonder what they will achieve on campus let alone in society more generally. AUB, like many college campuses, does not seem to be a campus that is really dedicated to student empowerment in any meaningful ways. Needless to say, the last couple of weeks have been quite eventful.

In the midst of all this I had time to catch a few cultural events in Lebanon. Last week I saw a colleague's play entitled UNAcceptable, which was a critique of the United Nations focusing on its corruption. It was an interesting play, but could have engaged with the themes of corruption in the UN in a less obvious way; the characters were a bit too flat. On the other hand, the Lebanese film festival "Docudays" closed with Lina Makboul's riveting film Leila Khaled, Hijacker which is a must see.

In the meantime I find myself watching CNN International (which, thankfully, is not the same as CNN in the U.S.) and listening to John Bolton (which barely allows me to keep my dinner down) who is now making huge claims about how the U.S. supports Lebanon as a democratic state and deplores this "terrorist" act. Interesting. The U.S. wasn't too interested in supporting Lebanon when Israel was bombing the hell out of it a few months ago, nor was it ever acknowledging that Lebanon had a democratically elected government. The twisted logic and hypocrisy that come from the U.S. make my head spin. But of course CNN's emphasis on Gemayel's Christian identity, as well as his anti-Syrian politics, make him quite the Lebanese figure to support at this moment. This is not to take away from whatever role he may have played in Lebanon, but it is to say that it is deeply disturbing to watch the way that the American media spins the story.