Interview with Gilbert Achcar

Last year Hezbollah were the heroes of the hour throughout the Middle East after withstanding the Israeli aggression. Have things shifted back again toward greater division?

YES, THERE has definitely been a shift, but there were also over optimistic expectations or readings into the situation at that time. During the war, the brutality and the terrible fury of the Israeli onslaught had the effect of more or less unifying the Lebanese people in their condemnation of Israel. But, if one had followed things more closely, it would have been clear that there was no radical shift in the political situation. Quickly after the war, due to the internal political dynamics and the attitude of the various leaderships, the divisions that existed before the Israeli onslaught prevailed again-with even more intensity due to the situation created by the war itself.

Washington took over from Israel and is trying to continue the war by other means. If one had to summarize Washington’s policy toward Lebanon as well as toward Palestine, it could be accurately described as “incitement to civil war”: civil war between Palestinians and civil war between Lebanese, not to mention the unfolding civil war in Iraq.

IN THE press there’s been talk of union protests against neoliberal policies and a new agreement in Paris?

HERE WE come to the issue of the January 25 Paris III meeting. It was a meeting of donors, rich donors, both Western and oil countries, gathered to supposedly help Lebanon. The conference was organised by Jacques Chirac, around a classical “Washington consensus” program - the IMF-World Bank standard neoliberal measures that were forced on so many countries during the 1980s and 1990s and are still enforced.

The program of the Siniora government for the Paris III conference is a crude version of that with privatization, and value added taxes instead of progressive income tax. The plan contains all the classical recipes through which the poorest layers of society are made to bear the brunt of measures that are supposed to enable the government to pay back its debt. Lebanon has accumulated a huge debt over the years (currently over $40 billion). The conference was a political tool to enable Chirac, and Bush to give strong support to the Siniora government and the “majority” in Lebanon.

Various forces of the opposition-Hezbollah, Aoun-criticized the program of the Paris III conference, but quite moderately and without rejecting its core logic.

The leadership of the union confederation is actually closely linked to the opposition and to Syria: it is a product of the period of Syrian domination over the country.

The demonstration it called by the confederation on January 9 against the Paris III agenda proved completely ridiculous – with just 2,000 people, in a country now used to demonstrations of hundreds of thousands. That’s because the opposition did not mobilize in any serious manner: fighting neoliberalism is definitely not their real concern. They actually explained that they did not want to jeopardize the Paris conference!

One way you could cut across the sectarian divide would be through political and union organizations that posed a non-sectarian alternative.

THAT’S EXACTLY the point. You’ve got people trying to do that, fortunately. That’s what the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) is trying to do. The LCP did not participate in the sit-in of the opposition since it started in downtown Beirut last December. They stood out of it, stating that they don’t share the opposition’s views, which are aimed at cutting a deal with the majority. The communists said, “That’s not our program, we don’t think the way out in Lebanon will come through a deal between sectarian leaderships. What we are ready to fight for together with the opposition are democratic demands-a new electoral law, new elections. But we don’t want to be involved in a fight for a deal between sectarian forces that would end up forming a joint government.”

This interview by Paul D’Amato first appeared in International Socialist Review (US).