Rima el-Husseini is a lecturer in conflict, culture, and negotiation at the Lebanese American University, as well as a lawyer and mediator. She owns the Palmyra Hotel in Baalbek, Lebanon, whose facade opens onto the resplendent Temples of Bacchus and Jupiter in the Roman Ruins of Baalbek. Now the oldest standing hotel in the region, the Palmyra was built in 1874 and hosted such illustrious company over its tenure as that of Oscar Wilde, Jean Cocteau, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Charles de Gaulle. Outside of her work, Rima runs a center for women in Baalbek, while distributing critical medical and food supplies for those left deprived in the wake of COVID-19 and Lebanon’s economic turmoil.
Harvard Political Review: As a negotiator, you had the insightful experience of working closely with your father-in-law Hussein el-Husseini [founder of the Amal Party and former Speaker of Parliament] at the very time he was brokering the Taif Accords [the agreement ending the Lebanese Civil War]. Now that we are witnessing the abysmal decay of the post-Civil War system in Lebanon, how do you reflect on the Taif Accords and its original intention?
Rima el-Husseini: The long process of mediation and negotiation which Parliament undertook during the Civil War, under my father-in-law’s guidance, became the premise of the Taif Accords and our constitution. Freedom of speech and freedom of choice in the God to whom we pray, which are expressed in the Accords, bring us together as a people and give us a political logic from which to form our political institutions. As a people, we were at fault for not memorizing and defending the fundamental tenets of the state guaranteed in the Taif Accords. And after the end of the Civil War in 1989, the emergence of the Gulf War meant that the rest of the world left Lebanon on the backburner, which allowed to this day the five active militia groups of the Civil War to take over governance in the name of consociational democracy. Bear in mind that Article 95 of our constitution made it clear that confessional democracy was supposed to be a transitional step to proportional democracy, and not the end result.
Unfortunately, the Lebanese let this be, and from then onwards I noticed a shift in the culture of the country. Where before it had never been pointed out to me that my Shi’a father had married my Sunni mother, suddenly after the War it was always pointed out. We had grown up in convivial communities which made no fuss of the fact that my aunts had married Maronites. Even my grandfather, who was in the security forces and as such not the most open-minded man, had no difficulty in marrying outside of his sect back then. We changed the image of Lebanon after the Civil War. When I was working with my father-in-law, he used to use the Arabic phrase “aysh al-mushtaraq,” which people assumed in English meant “co-existence.” I always interpreted it to mean “life in common,” which does not denote two separate entities coming together. Rather, every Lebanese family has within its fold members of different confessions, but we did not transform our collective memory of the conflict to acknowledge that. Instead, we resolved the conflict with the Taif Accords and made amendments to the constitution without taking the final step in any conflict resolution of transforming our actions and behavior. With this, it became too easy for the elites to sell the idea of “confessional tribes” rather than the unifying love of country which my work with my father-in-law had nurtured within me.
HPR: Lebanon is confronting its deepest economic crisis since independence and finds itself beset by both the Syrian War and the Western Power-Hezbollah standoff. Domestically, citizens rail in protest against the corruption of a sectarian elite. In such trying circumstances, how do you think of your role as a gatekeeper of a historical artifact which has seen Lebanon at her grandiose best and war-stricken worst?
RH: As you described, the Palmyra Hotel is the story of every Lebanese living through the country’s ups and downs – from its Golden Era to what are now some of its worst days. And now more than ever, the Palmyra Hotel is a looking-glass for me. It is the perfect symbol of cross-cultural communication over time. The Palmyra is the knowledge that my story is bound up in that of the kings and queens who used to visit the Temples of Baalbek on their way to the Terra Sancta, and before them, of the stories of great travelers like Volney and Lamartine. Our livre d’or [registry] tells of visitors – both celebrity and regular – who expressed their love and awe for Baalbek through the Palmyra, and then through their poetry, their calligraphy, and their art. The history of this place does not belong to anyone, and carries the story of everyone while allowing people to keep their identity. People may ask me why I do not renovate the bathrooms or fine-tune the bedrooms, but I would never want to raise the prices to such an extent that I would be denying some people the opportunity to share in the hotel’s heritage and experience.
As for Lebanon’s current situation, I would truly hate to say that this is the essence of Lebanon – these cycles of violence and upheaval. As a teacher of conflict resolution, it pains me to see that for such an educated hub of cultural richness, we are not able to see the situation in Lebanon as it is. While it is true that Lebanon is the victim of international conflict, and that with COVID-19 we now face a humanitarian crisis, at its core this is a conflict felt by every Lebanese national who, even after the Lebanese Civil War, did not rebuild their identity as a Lebanese citizen. We were at fault in not recognizing that the most important component of our recovery from the war was to build a sense of community which would reinforce state and institution building. In this, I refer to my legal studies – which were so meaningful to me – and the idea of a Rousseauvian contract which brings people together on the basis of how we want to live and apply laws to build a community together.
HPR: What is your perspective on the Lebanese protests we are seeing play out in response to the government’s confessional kleptocracy? More specifically, what is your view on both the decentralization of the protests and the broad push for the reform of “the system”?
RH: In my mind, the question should not so much concern the decentralization of the protests as much as the root cause: Lebanon’s lack of common narrative. Until we change our recurring language and behavior, the threat of division will always be present. For example, in Lebanon, people will say that as a Shi’a, I must have an ulterior motive when I express my political opinions. Rather than a harmonizing story of Lebanese citizenship, this is the entrenched discourse. I remember that even when we used to talk about the formation of the Cabinet after the Civil War, the dialogue revolved around individual people rather than the good of the state. The question would always be, “Huwa mnieh?” [“Is he good?”], as if we were talking about personal friends rather than judging people on their merits to channel the national dialogue in the right direction or to secure an independent judiciary.
What I have appreciated about the Revolution [protests], is that the protesters have shed their “outer skin” so as to be recognized as a Lebanese first and foremost. As for “the system,” corruption had invaded it to such an extent that its pillars were collapsing from beneath us. The phrase that was shouted in Tunis and Egypt during the [Arab] Spring was “Al ashaab yureed isqaat al-nithaam,” or “Down with the system.” But in our case, I am always trying to tell the protesters that we should be yelling “Up with the system!” We have a parliamentary democracy and history of elections which dates back to 1864 at the municipality level, an education rate unparalleled in the entire region, and a cohesive feminist movement. The question of how we fell so far is one of implementation, and our revolution should be – as the word was originally intended – a restoration of the system at its best, rather than a bloody war. That said, our current economic collapse and the compounding factor of COVID-19 makes this process of restoration hard.
HPR: As was true of the Arab Spring, the challenge and critique of decentralized uprisings in times of crisis is that they are often unified against the status quo, rather than being unified for a specific vision of the future. What is the path forward for consensus-building and compromise amidst protesters, in your view?
RH: I think you are right in saying that our political behavior is so often reactive rather than creative. The narrow entrypoint for us is a leadership style whose principles are clear and steadfast, and then a people who understand and defend their own constitution. This is a people who push for the independence of the judiciary laid out in the constitution, who understand that the purpose of their government is to be an agent of society-building rights rather than merely of punishment. As an example, we are now into the third month of our COVID-19 lockdown – which was imposed earlier than most countries not because of better foresight, but because the Lebanese already had no jobs to return to even before the pandemic – and our government is yet to distribute any aid to people in their homes. And this is not because the money does not exist. I would watch the television as millions would pour in from different fundraising efforts, all of them private initiatives. I remember thinking to myself, “How are people even withdrawing these sums of money to donate in the first place, given the capital controls on banks?” This is a misdirected sense of camaraderie, where people are out for their own success and as such, government officials are allowed to shirk their responsibility. The Lebanese private sector has become a personalistic substitute for the state’s poor governance.
Lebanon faces other challenges to its cohesion. The mentality is one of both confessional and regional stereotypes. For example, the stereotype of Baalbek is that it is violent and hashishi [a reference to “drug money”]. On CNN, you will see these outlaw, Robin Hood-like young people being interviewed with their guns and all, people who have no place serving as role models, and yet they influence the perception of the region. Despite how many successful people our country has, we lack role models in the public eye. When I provide emergency food supplies to the underserved in Baalbek, I am not making it about me, Rima. Instead, I link with other NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] who have more capacity, and rather than delivering the food boxes myself, I create focal points within villages with people who know their communities better than I do. As you know, in Lebanon we are so used to the patron-client relationship, in which you get things by knowing the right people, that we lose the focus on the community. This ties into the charity work I do and even into the Palmyra Hotel: I cannot be successful in a story which has no elements outside of myself, and the story of the hotel is Baalbek’s, not mine.
HPR: The Palmyra has borne witness to such a profound demographic shift in the region of Baalbek-Hermel in recent years, which is now known as a Hezbollah stronghold. How have you internalized the perceived rise of Hezbollah in the region?
RH: The perception of Baalbek has always been that it is outside of Lebanon; it does not look like Lebanon, and the violence of its people is always underlined. And in truth, Baalbek is different from the other regions of Lebanon in having a tribal legacy. The violence associated with the region emerges from this almost Mafioso honor code of tribalistic vendettas. Hezbollah is not so much a hallmark of Baalbek as it is of the South, where Shi’a peasants rose up against the feudal likes of Ahmad al-Assad. However, the dissipation of powerful tribal and familial links in Baalbek paved the way, in my opinion, for Hezbollah’s grassroots mobilization of smaller, disconnected families. In a country which always maintained that Beirut and Mount Lebanon are the essence of Lebanon, Hezbollah generated a resistance movement around those deprived of their basic rights including education, employment, and infrastructure. The rise of Hezbollah in this region is not a result of its arms or its power projection, but of the vacuum it filled in a region which – given the Temples and its fertile soil – should be one of the most prosperous in Lebanon. Because of the tribal reputation of Baalbek, we have always been blamed for ills against the West like the Lebanese hostage situation, although it predominantly took place in Beirut. As a result, Westerners who come here think they will be walking into a militarized, terrorist zone; it is both gratifying and frustrating for me to contribute to debunking the myths around Baalbek when we host tourists at the Palmyra.
In all honesty – and this is not at all an endorsement of them as a political force, but my socioeconomic diagnosis of them as a community – Hezbollah has a place in Baalbek. They constructed a shrine here, generated religious tourism around the mosques – even continuing to permit tourism around the monasteries and pagan Gods like Bacchus in the temples here – and they established a narrative for themselves which does not deny traditions like the Baalbek Festival. Their party formation even found a place for women, who are subject to Lebanese patriarchal forces at the familial and socio-political levels. I had formed a center for women as a safe space for women in Baalbek, who, despite being strong, would not dare to venture out given the absence of civil legal protections and secure public spaces. Hezbollah has built solidarity by telling women that they are an “ukht” [sister] of the organization, and are therefore protected by a more powerful structure than merely their mother or father. For women who were afraid of khataf [abduction for the sake of marriage] by the sons of powerful clan leaders, or of retribution if they refused a powerful suitor, Hezbollah’s promise of security was meaningful. The West is always asking me to be a better Shi’a than the followers of Hezbollah, but what resources do I have to set a better example or to draw people as they do? Again, this is not to say that I support Hezbollah, but that they have not “taken over” Baalbek as much as sociologically embedded themselves within it.
Image Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation / Cherine Yazbeck
