Lebanon: Airport shut, at least 10 injured as mobs do battle in capital

BEIRUT: A General Labor Confederation (GLC) strike turned political and violent on Wednesday when supporters of the opposition took to the streets and blocked the main road leading to Beirut's international airport in protest at the government's recent decision to sack the facility's security chief, General Wafiq Shoucair, and counter Hizbullah's private phone network. 

A well-informed opposition source told The Daily Star on Thursday that the opposition would not stop its protest action unless the Western-backed government reversed its decisions.

"Our movement will not stop and will change to become civil disobedience until our demands are met," the source added. "After rejecting Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri's call for dialogue, the government made a number of provocative decisions. Our movement is the result of these decisions."

After an Amal Movement meeting that was headed by Berri later on Wednesday, the party held the Lebanese government responsible for the current escalation.

Hizbullah's leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, is due to hold a new conference on Thursday to react to the government's recent decisions.

Youth and Sports Minister Ahmad Fatfat told The Daily Star that the Lebanese Army and security forces would not hesitate to open the airport road in a timely manner.

Rima Abushakra

Agence France Presse

BEIRUT: The usually bustling streets of Beirut were almost deserted but tense on Wednesday as tire-burning protesters blocked roads for a general strike in which economic and political woes collided. Soldiers, many dressed in riot gear, were deployed in force throughout the Lebanese capital where protesters burned tires and overturned garbage bins in the streets barring traffic from passing through.

The road to the airport was blocked impeding travellers from making their flights.

Three army tanks and several army vehicles stood in between supporters of rival camps along the Corniche al-Mazraa thoroughfare, as groups of youths from the ruling bloc and the Hizbullah-led opposition chanted political slogans and traded insults.

"This is not an economic protest. This is an attempt to overthrow the government," said Osman, 27, a supporter of the government. "If they are trying to overthrow the government, then this is the start of the civil war. We need to protect our neighbourhood."

On the other side, opposition protesters painted a different picture of why they were taking to the streets.

"The prices are too high. We can't make a living and need to take a stand," said Ali, 21. "They [the majority] get more money than we do.

"A can of baby's milk used to cost 17,000 [Lebanese] pounds  and now it costs 31,000 pounds," he added.

While the main thorough-fare to Rafik Hariri International Airport was blocked off by protesters, the coastal highway stretching from Ras Beirut to the northern border in the Akkar region was mostly clear and free from incidents.

Schools and universities in North Lebanon opened their doors as usual, though attendance varied according to the overall adherence of smaller districts to the strike.

The Zghorta area saw observance carried out in a peaceful manner, but the call for a strike was not adhered to in Batroun, Jbeil and Kesrouan, or Minyeh-Dinniyeh. Tripoli witnessed mild observance.

A Batroun shopkeeper told the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation that "none of us in Batroun are observing the strike ... We are sick of closures of any kind."

When asked why the Batroun area seemed to be ignoring the GLC call, another business owner said that "this is a political strike," stressing that "we should open whenever we choose to, just as anyone may close down if they prefer - all we ask is that protests are carried out peacefully."

Businesses, schools and universities in Aley, Antelias, Bikfaya, the Chouf Mountains and Dhour-Choueir remained open for the day, with activity in the area being described by National News Agency (NNA) correspondents as "largely normal."

Strike participation also varied in South Lebanon, with the port city of Sidon and its environs, the Jezzine qada and the southeastern Hasbaya area ignoring the union's call for closure almost entirely.

Once we accept that this week's alleged labor unrest was only the latest phase in Hizbullah's war against the Lebanese state, will we understand what actually took place yesterday. And once we realize that cutting the airport road was a calculated effort by Hizbullah to reverse the Siniora government's transfer of the airport security chief, Wafiq Shouqair, will we understand what may take place in the coming days.

Since last January, when Hizbullah and Amal used the pretense of social dissatisfaction to obstruct roads in and around Beirut, the opposition has, quite openly, shown itself to be limited to Hizbullah. Michel Aoun, once a useful fig leaf to lend cross-communal diversity to the opposition, has since become an afterthought with hardly any pull in Christian streets.

Long ago we learned that Hizbullah could not, in any real sense, allow the emergence of a Lebanese state free from Syrian control. Soon after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the party tried to suffocate the 2005 "independence intifada" in the egg, realizing that Hizbullah had no future as an autonomous armed group in a state that would seek to reimpose its writ after decades of subservience to Damascus. That effort failed on March 14, 2005 - mostly useful as an event in showing that a majority of people would not be intimidated by Hizbullah's rally of March 8.

Hizbullah's anxieties were understandable. As the party saw things, without a Lebanese state embracing the idea of open-ended conflict against Israel, and Hizbullah's sovereign, vanguard role in that conflict (and what state truly independent of Syria would ever want to choose so reckless a path?), Hizbullah would not be able to justify retaining its weapons