The Independent
Beirut: An historic day in the life of my city
Tuesday, 8th March 2005, by Robert Fisk



UST below my local supermarket in Sadat Street - I have been buying my daily cheese croissant - a car pulls up with a man carrying thousands of pictures of President Bashar Assad of Syria. The man marches into the Syrian mukhabarat office, a run-down four-storey building still jewelled with the bullet scars of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.

Inside, I can see several heavily armed men, each one a factotum of Brigadier General Rustum Gazale, the head of Syria’s military intelligence in Lebanon. Three glum Lebanese policemen stand round the corner, watching. The pictures - be sure of this - are for today’s Hizbollah-organised rally in the centre of Beirut, a demonstration demanding the fulfilment of the Taif agreement that ended the war and which called - deus ex machina - for the progressive withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

I remember Taif in Saudi Arabia. That’s where I first met a large, heavily moustached Lebanese-Saudi businessman called Rafiq Hariri who was smoking a cigar. He was dressed in a long dishdash gown and couldn’t take his eyes off a black and white cowboy film on a television in the corner of the room. He wanted to rebuild Lebanon, he said. Some hope, I muttered to myself. And then he became the prime minister of Lebanon and rebuilt Beirut and mocked me for my lack of confidence in his ability.

Just over three weeks ago, he lay dead in the road, his limbs on fire, scarcely 500 metres from my home where I am writing this. The car bomb exploded directly opposite his SUV.

Gazale had once called him up on the phone and insulted him and Hariri hung up. Gazale was never rude again - though he was to other Lebanese ministers - and Hariri continued to walk a neutral path, neither inviting the Syrians to stay in Lebanon nor demanding their withdrawal. That was until he resigned last year and joined the opposition and - so we are led to believe - earned the undying wrath of Bashar Assad.

When Assad spoke to the Syrian parliament on Saturday night, my mobile phone bleeped for hours like a grasshopper. "I have never felt so insulted," a young woman friend shouted at me. "His voice was so patronising. And what are these ’shifting sands’ he was talking about?"

One of them was obviously Syria’s erstwhile ally, the Druze leader and super-nihilist Walid Jumblatt. After a somewhat rakish life, Jumblatt - whose cynicism should merit a PhD - has seized the moment. He has embraced his civil-war Christian enemies, accused the Syrians of murdering his father Kemal in 1977 and - when I call by to see him in his ancestral home at Mukhtara - I find a man waiting for death.

Huge Alsatians prowl the gardens. Armed men are at the gate. Jumblatt sits in his jeans and brown jacket, hands on his knees, looking at the floor. "Yes, I am a target," he says and looks at me mournfully. "Not long before he died, Hariri said to me, ’So which one of us is it going to be?’ I was in my home in Beirut when the bomb went off. I thought, ’It’s Hariri.’ I called the Hariri people and they said they couldn’t reach him. Then I knew. I was wearing a red tie and I thought, ’I should be wearing something more sober - but if I put on a black tie, it will mean that it is certain he is dead.’ And after 15 minutes, I went upstairs and put on my dark tie and I knew he was dead."

Jumblatt’s glorious wife Nora was in a downtown office and the windows crashed around her from the blast. "I thought, ’My God! It’s Walid!’" I look at both of them and realise they now both live with death. Jumblatt went to the American University Hospital where Hariri had been taken. "We all thought he was in the operating room but the senior security officer took me aside and told me he was in the mortuary.

"I saw Hariri’s son and got in the car with him and I said: ’I am afraid the news is bad.’ I had to tell him."

Jumblatt and I talk about his father - he was shot dead on a road near Mukhtara - and I recalled for him a photographic book about Kamal Jumblatt which Walid had given me in December 2000, long before he accused the Syrians of killing his father. "I could be a nihilist," he had written to me on the first page. "Like my father, in a way, who refused, 25 years ago, Syria’s Anschluss."

I drive to Beirut through Sofar - I note, as always, the delicate French mandate railway station perched on the cliffs - and there in front of me is a beat-up rubbish skip with a sleeping soldier in the back, grinding down to Aley.

It carries a triangular military code above the registration and the words "Jesh Suriya" - Syrian Army - badly painted on the tailboard. Here, then, is the monstrous Syrian army of occupation about who President Bush likes to hold forth, under whose Gestapo heel the people of Lebanon have been lying prostrate for 29 years, always forgetting - and this is an essential part of the narrative - that the Christian Maronites invited the Syrians to come here in the first place, to protect them from Yasser Arafat’s Palestinians.

I remember still the day they entered Beirut. With the very first Syrian commandoes, I crossed the old front line below Martyrs’ Square, treading my way with them through a carpet of unexploded shells and grenades, until we reached the smashed façade of the Beirut municipality building from which emerged a bunch of scrawny, unwashed Palestinian gunmen.

They put their weapons on the ground and their arms round the necks of the Syrians and wept like children. The Syrians had descended on Beirut in their thousands, bayonets fixed, their tanks preceded by a young soldier playing a flute. The Pied Piper of Damascus. There were 40,000 of them then. More than 60 per cent have been withdrawn since 2000. There are only 14,000 left today and they live, for the most part, in dank, vermin-infested bombed-out ruins from the war.

Lebanon, for me, is a place where time has stood still. I am still 29 - my age when I first came to Lebanon - and I still work the same streets, live in the same home on the Corniche. From my balcony, I have watched the Lebanese army and the Syrian army and the UN armies and the invading Israeli army and the American Marines and French paratroopers and even, briefly, in 1983, British troops, staring out across the Mediterranean from this same road.

The Israelis left in ignominy, the Americans and French and British in humiliation. I was standing on my balcony in 1992 when a car hit a garbage truck and dragged it across the road with a terrible grating roar.

A few hours later, my mother called to say my elderly father, a soldier of the First World War - the war which created Lebanon out of Syria - had died. And my landlord, Mustafa, and his niece shook hands with me in the way that Arabs express condolences, so much more dignified than the twee hugs we give the bereaved in Britain.

And now I sit in Mustafa’s little shop downstairs and he tells me things are "very, very bad". He has stocked up on water, checked the emergency electrical line. He tells me to take care in the coming days. Ever since I was badly hurt on the Afghan border, his sister lights candles for my safety when I am away from Lebanon. But in a sense, I am never away.

That night in December of 2001, after my beating at the hands of Afghan refugees enraged at the death of the their loved ones in a US air raid, I was lying in bed in great pain, my face stuck to my pillow with blood, when my phone rang. A familiar voice boomed down the line. "Robert. This is Rafiq Hariri. What happened? Tell me from the start!" And, after I had talked for five minutes, he offered to send his private jet to pick me up in Quetta - his friend, Pervez Musharraf, would give immediate landing permission - and bring me to hospital in Beirut. But of course, I don’t take gifts from prime ministers and I turned him down. And two days ago, I stood at Hariri’s graveside, watching Musharraf mourn his friend.

"There is fire under the ashes - we must all take care," an old friend tells me. He used to work for Middle East Airlines. We are watching Hizbollah’s leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, on television. "Only the Lebanese flag will be flown," Nasrallah says. No Hizbollah flags at the Hizbollah rally downtown. All are welcome. They’ll be supporting the Taif agreement - Taif, which calls for a Syrian withdrawal but, unlike UN Security Council Resolution 1559, does not insist on the disarming of the Hizbollah. "We are a resistance movement," Nasrallah says, "not a militia."

So now Hizbollah is fighting for its life and I remember how Nasrallah described to me the mind of a suicide bomber, how the bomber was like a man who is in a sauna and is very hot but knows that in the next room there is air-conditioning, classical music and a cocktail waiting for him. So he opens the door.

We are all praying no one will open any doors in Beirut in the next few days. The Hizbollah will not turn on the Lebanese. But the men who killed Hariri are still here, I am sure, in Beirut. Were they not the same men who tried to car-bomb Jumblatt’s Druze friend, Marwan Hamade last November. "The Syrians will do nothing for the moment, habibi [my friend]," the old airline executive says.

"We have a saying when we are angry: that ’our eyes are red’. And, at the moment, we are all looking with red eyes at Syria. Maybe later, something will happen."

And then I am driving through Beirut and a woman who works for Hariri’s Solidere company rebuilding the centre of the city calls on my mobile. "Bashar Assad and Lahoud [the Lebanese president] have just met in Damascus and the Syrians are not leaving this week. In April, maybe. And maybe only to our side of the border."

I walk in to the downtown AP bureau. Two Syrian lorries have been seen at the Mdeirej ridge above Beirut carrying furniture. Furniture? Are the tables being withdrawn as well? And there is Bashar on the screen, flanked by his foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharar, and there is Lahoud, sunburn red and next to him, slumped in a chair, is his elderly and uninspiring prime minister, Omar Karami.

It’s only a few days since ex-President Hrawi, an old friend of Hariri, was asked for his feelings and broke down in tears and wept for three minutes, right there live on the television until, choking on his words, he said: "If Hariri had died when I was president, I would have resigned." And the point was not lost on the Lebanese. Lahoud has not resigned.

I am back downtown, taking coffee with old friends beside the oldest mosques in Beirut and there, across the road, is the municipality building, rebuilt by Hariri, and the same doorway through which Palestinian gunmen emerged in front of me 29 years ago. Half my life ago, I had walked through the shells on this very street with the Syrian commandoes. And now they are taking their furniture home.

On Hariri’s grave there are 30 doves stalking around on the wax of a thousand candles. The Lebanese have written messages of love on walls. Hariri was a tough cookie, a ruthless businessman with political enemies and was also a supporter of the death penalty.

But he was a kind man who had no militia and had no blood on his hands and had, I suspect, become over-confident. I am reminded, looking at those fresh flowers on his grave, of another conversation, long ago, in which the unthinkable question came up. What would happen to Lebanon if he died?

Hariri raised his hands in front of me, open either side of his face. "So keep me alive!" he roared. And of course, we did not.



The Independent
Is Lebanon walking into another nightmare?
Monday, 7th March 2005, by Robert Fisk



EBANON confronts a nightmare today. As the Syrian army begins its withdrawal from the country this morning, after mounting pressure from President George Bush - whose anger at the Syrians has been provoked by the insurgency against American troops in Iraq - there are growing signs that the Syrian retreat is reopening the sectarian divisions of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war.

The first Syrian units are expected to cross the Lebanese-Syrian border at Masnaa before midday and their military redeployment should be completed by Wednesday.

To the outside world, this may seem a victory devoutly to be wished: just two weeks after the murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri - a prominent opponent of the Syrian presence in Lebanon - the army of Damascus is pulling out of the country it has dominated for 29 long years. At last, free elections might be held in Lebanon, further proof that - thanks to Mr Bush - democracy is breaking out across the Arab world. Iraq held elections, Saudi Arabia held local elections, President Hosni Mubarak promises a contended election for the presidency of Egypt. So why shouldn’t Lebanon be happy?

Have we forgotten 150,000 dead? Have we forgotten the Western hostages? Have we forgotten the 241 Americans who died in the suicide bombing of 23 October 1983? This democracy, if it comes, will be drenched with blood - but the blood will be that of the Lebanese who live here, not that of the foreigners who wish to bestow freedom upon them.

Alas, this is a dark corner of the former Ottoman empire - whose First World War defeat allowed the French to create Lebanon out of part of Syria - which rests precariously upon an understanding between its Christian, Sunni, Shia and Druze inhabitants. All factions came together to mourn Hariri. But now, at night, most - though by no means all - of the demonstrators in Martyrs’ Square who have demanded a Syrian withdrawal are Christian Maronites. Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the chairman of the Hizbollah Shia guerrilla movement, a loyal if somewhat unwilling Syrian ally which drove the Israelis out of Lebanon in 2000, called yesterday for a massive demonstration close to Martyrs’ Square tomorrow - to support the "unity and independence" of Lebanon, but also to thank the Syrians for their "protection" of Lebanon. Mr Nasrallah invited Christians and every other religious group to join their demonstration. But most of those present are bound to be Shias - who, like their co-religionists in Iraq - are the largest community in the country.

Thousands of Lebanese now fear that when the Syrians do leave, they may be asked to pay a price for this: that in the absence of these "sisterly" Syrian soldiers, civil conflict might suddenly - mysteriously - return to Lebanon.

On Saturday night, a few dozen members of the Lebanese Baath party turned up in the Christian Sassine Square area of Beirut and two shots were fired in the air. The Lebanese army quickly suppressed this apparently pro-Syrian demonstration (no arrests were made). Was this because their leader happens to be the Lebanese - and equally pro-Syrian - minister of Labour?

How swiftly a Middle Eastern country which had become a bedrock of financial stability and security - even for thousands of new Western tourists - can fall into the abyss. Within 24 hours of Hariri’s murder, hundreds of Saudi landowners were closing their properties in Lebanon - after paying their condolences to Hariri.

The Central Bank has announced that the Lebanese pound is secure; but it has spent almost $2bnsupporting the pound, at 1,500 Lebanese pounds to the US dollar, in the past fortnight - and Lebanon has a $32bn (£17bn) public debt which only Hariri’s international reputation might have salvaged. Then there came Syrian President Bashar Assad’s speech to the parliament in Damascus on Saturday evening in which he referred to those Lebanese who were loyal to Syria and those who were on "shifting sands".

Did the latter include Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and erstwhile Syrian ally, who suddenly departed for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia on Saturday, and who personally told me that he was probably next on Syria’s hit list after Hariri?

A UN team is investigating Hariri’s death - Hizbollah’s Nasrallah gave them his full support yesterday - and the Lebanese government insists it has searched every nook and cranny for evidence of the culprits. Problem: three more bodies have been discovered at the scene of the bombing in the two weeks since the attack. Hungry cats and the stench of death revealed two of them; which doesn’t say much for the detective work of the government authorities so keen to solve the murder.

President Assad said that 63 per cent of Syria’s army in Lebanon had been withdrawn since 2000 and that the "international media" had paid no attention to this. He was right. Mr Nasrallah, in his press conference in Beirut yesterday, said the American demands for the withdrawal of the Syrians and the disarmament of the Hizbollah itself were "a photocopy" of Israel’s plans for Lebanon. He, too, was right.

But here is the real problem. The Syrians and Hizbollah say that Syrian forces are withdrawing from Lebanon under the terms of the inter-Arab 1989 Taif agreement which ended the civil war here.

This called for a Syrian withdrawal from Beirut - already accomplished by the Syrian army but not by its intelligence services - to the Mdeirej ridge in the mountains east of Beirut, and then to the Bekaa Valley and, after talks with the Lebanese and Syrian governments, to Syria itself.

UN Security Council resolution 1559 calls for pretty much the same - but also for the disarmament of the Hizbollah guerrilla movement in southern Lebanon, which still attacks the Israelis in the Shebaa farms area, which belonged to Lebanon under French mandate law but which has been occupied by the Israelis since 1967.

Tomorrow, the Hizbollah will be supporting Taif because it called for national unity and arranged for an orderly Syrian withdrawal - but didn’t mention the disarmament of the guerrillas. The Hizbollah will be against their own disarmament. They will be against UN resolution 1559. And they will be only 500 yards from the Hariri demonstrations. The Hariri protesters, who at the least deserve to know who killed a man who wanted to rebuild Lebanon and who never had a militia - in other words, he never had blood on his hands - will stage yet another demonstration tomorrow, from the crater of the bomb which killed him, to his grave before the ugly mosque he built in central Beirut.

But yet again, Lebanon risks becoming a battlefield for the wars of non-Lebanese.

For 30 years, America has tolerated - even supported - Syria’s military presence in Lebanon. In 1976, both the Israelis and the Americans wanted Syrian troops in Lebanon - because they would be able to "control" the 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon - but now Mr Bush’s real concern is Syria’s supposed support for the insurgency in Iraq.

The irony is extraordinary: 140,000 American troops occupy Iraq - we shall leave the Israeli occupation forces in Palestinian lands out of this equation - while their President demands the withdrawal of 14,000 Syrian troops from Lebanon.

Democracy indeed!

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The Independent
Half a million gather for pro-Syrian rally to defy vision of US
Wednesday, 9th March 2005, by Robert Fisk



T was a warning. They came in their tens of thousands, Lebanese Shia Muslim families with babies in arms and children in front, walking past my Beirut home. They reminded me of the tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims who walked with their families to the polls in Iraq, despite the gunfire and the suicide bombers.

And now they came from southern Lebanon and the Bekaa to say they rejected America’s plans in Lebanon, and wanted - so they claimed - to know who killed Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister murdered on 14 February, and to reject UN Security Council Resolution 1559 which demands a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarmament of the Hizbollah guerrilla movement, and to express their "thanks" to Syria. This was a tall order in Lebanon.

But only 100 yards from the Lebanese opposition protests, the half-million - for that was an approachable figure, given Hizbollah’s extraordinary organisational abilities - stood for an hour with Lebanese flags, and posed a challenge to President George Bush’s project in the Middle East. "America is the source of terrorism", one poster proclaimed. "All our disasters come from America".

Many of those tens of thousands were Hizbollah families who had fought the Israelis during their occupation of southern Lebanon, been arrested by the Israelis, imprisoned by the Israelis and feared that American support for Lebanon meant not "democracy" but an imposed Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty.

There were Syrians in the crowds - indeed, I saw buses with Syrian registration plates that had brought families from Damascus - but almost all the half million were Lebanese Shias and they wanted to reject 1559 because it called for Hizbollah to be disarmed. They were perfectly happy to see the Syrians leave (who now remembers the Syrian massacre of Hizbollah members in Beirut in 1987?) but, bearing in mind Syria’s transit of weapons from Iran to Lebanon, Hizbollah wanted to be regarded as a resistance movement, not a "militia" to be disarmed. What the Shia were saying was that they were a power, just as they said when they voted in Iraq. In Lebanon, Shia Muslims are the largest religious community.

Syria is run by a clique of Alawis - who are Shia - and Iraq is now dominated by Shia Muslims who voted themselves into power, and Iran is a Shia nation. So when President Bush said "the Lebanese people have the right to determine their future free from domination of a foreign power", the power the Shias were thinking of was not Syria but the United States and Israel.

And 100 yards away, the demonstrators who have bravely protested against the murder of Rafik Hariri have become factionalised, courtesy of the Syrians. At night, the opposition protesters are largely Christian. Yesterday’s Hizbollah rally, while it contained the usual pro-Syrian Christians, was essentially Shia. And their message was not one of thanks to President Bush.

"The fleets came in the past and were defeated; and they will be defeated again," Hizbollah’s leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, said in reference to the Americans. Ironically, President Bush was to refer within hours to the killing of 241 US Marines in Beirut in October 1982, as if their deaths were the responsibility of al-Qa’ida. To the Israelis, Nasrallah said: "Let go of your dreams for Lebanon. To the enemy entrenched on our border, occupying our country and imprisoning our people, ’There is no place for you here and there is no life for you among us: Death to Israel’."

Nasrallah’s take on the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war was predictable. The crowds were meeting on the front lines that had separated the Lebanese during the civil war; indeed, on the very location of the Christian-Muslim trenches of that conflict. "We meet today to remind the world and our partners in the country," Nasrallah said, "that this arena that joins us, or the other one in Martyrs’ Square, was destroyed by Israel and civil war and was united by Syria and the blood of its soldiers and officers."

This was an inventive piece of history. Israel certainly killed many thousands of Lebanese - more than the Syrians, although their soldiers took the lives of many hundreds - but the half million roared their approval.

So what did all this prove? That there was another voice in Lebanon. That if the Lebanese "opposition" - pro-Hariri and increasingly Christian - claim to speak for Lebanon and enjoy the support of President Bush, there is a pro-Syrian, nationalist voice which does not go along with their anti-Syrian demands but which has identified what it believes is the true reason for Washington’s support for Lebanon: Israel’s plans for the Middle East.

The Beirut demonstration yesterday was handled in the usual Hizbollah way: maximum security, lots of young men in black shirts with two-way radios, and frightening discipline. No one was allowed to carry a gun or a Hizbollah flag. There was no violence. When one man brandished a Syrian flag, it was immediately taken from him. Law and order, not "terrorism", was what Hizbollah wished. Syria had spoken. President Bashar Assad’s sarcastic remark about the Hariri protesters needing a "zoom lens" to show their numbers had been answered by a demonstration of Shia power which needed no "zoom".

And in the mountains above Beirut, still frozen under their winter snows, few Syrians moved. There were Syrian military trucks on the international highway to Damascus but no withdrawal, no retreat, no redeployment. The Taif agreement of 1989 stipulated that the Syrians should withdraw to the Mdeirej heights above Beirut, which they have now agreed to do, 14 years later than they should have done.

The official document released by the Lebanese-Syrian military delegation in Damascus suggests this is a new redeployment and that in April the Syrian forces, along with their military intelligence personnel, will withdraw to the Lebanese-Syrian border.

But the question remains: will they retreat to the Syrian side of the frontier, or sit in the Lebanese-Armenian town of Aanjar, on the Lebanese side, where Brigadier General Rustum Gazale, the head of Syrian military intelligence, still maintains his white-painted villa?

Either way, Lebanon can no longer be taken for granted. The "cedar" revolution now has a larger dimension, one that does not necessarily favour America’s plans. If the Shia of Iraq can be painted as defenders of democracy, the Shias of Lebanon cannot be portrayed as the defenders of "terrorism". So what does Washington make of yesterday’s extraordinary events in Beirut?

sid , i would like to read your comments about those last robert fisk's article , note how much he talked about himself !!



from harry's place blog

Past versus future in Lebanon
Posted by Gene

Robert Fisk, an icon of the anti-imperialist Left, knows where he stands.

Writing from Beirut, Fisk predicted that Bush's call for Syria to withdraw from Lebanon would only hurt the Lebanese.

"Have we forgotten 150,000 dead?" he asked referring to the estimates of the number of people killed in the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1989. "Have we forgotten the Western hostages? Have we forgotten the 241 Americans who died in the suicide bombing of 23 October 1983? This democracy, if it comes, will be drenched with blood -- but the blood will be that of the Lebanese who live here, not that of the foreigners who wish to bestow freedom upon them."

(Contrast his thinking with that of Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab and Lebanon Daily Star editor Rami Khouri.)

I fervently hope that Lebanon does not spiral down into another bloody conflict. But if it does, the fault will surely lie more with Hezbollah and Syria than with Bush. Does Fisk really prefer continued Syrian-enforced "stability" to a struggle for genuine democracy?

And can someone please tell me when favoring the former over the latter became a hallmark of the Left?

Update: I found a free link to Fisk's March 7 piece in The Independent. Nothing there changes the meaning of what I quoted above.

3 posts in a row in your own thread Blue. Oh, shit, don't let me interrupt. In fact, Im still calling you Creek. You tarnished that name with your wily Zionist ways. With it, we all know where we stand.

I'm far too polite as I should be ignoring this rubbish, but here's a reply for you.



In one article only, isn't a veteran journalist allowed to reminisce and show off his credentials?

If these articles prove anything it's that the Americans and the Israelis should shut their mouth about Lebanon for their own sakes. As usual the neo-cons are giving Hezbollah all the propaganda they need but are too stupid to know it.

Four articles and from what I can see, no comment on your part creek/blue... this isn't going to be much of a discussion if you hide your point of view.

Am I supposed to draw the conclusion that you like/don't like Fisk? Or the Independent? Give me a clue?

its a service . sid asked them cause the independent charged for them , i found a site which post them for free . that's all.

Ah, I see now.

FWIW Robert Fisk's articles occasionally appear on www.zmag.org/weluser.htm as well if anyone is interested. It's certainly the only reason I visit that site.

The Independent
The people make a stand over the lies of Lebanon
Tuesday, 15th March 2005, by Robert Fisk



NEVER before have we seen anything like it in Lebanon. Never before have we seen anything like it in the Arab world.

Almost a third of the population of Lebanon was there; they walked many miles through the city to Martyrs’ Square, they arrived by bus from the far north and from Sidon in the south, most of them young, many of them children.

This was not just a game of power. Nor was it, per se, a democratic revolution. It was an insurrection by the people against the lies and corruption of government as well as the foreign control they have lived under for so many decades.

Yes, they wanted the Syrian army out - they are leaving anyway - but they also wanted President Lahoud of Lebanon to resign. They wanted no more compliant Lebanese governments led by weak old men; and most of them - to tell from the lapel badges they wore - were demanding the truth about the murder of the former premier Rafik Hariri on 14 February.

There was an ocean of Lebanese banners. And never before had those flags, used with such cynicism and so much derision in the past, appeared so magnificent. It wasn’t just the green cedar tree in the centre - always so refreshing after the black stars and governessy eagles that grace the flags of so many Arab regimes - but the fact that it was raised in protest at dishonesty and murder. It was the young of Lebanon, so often courted by the elderly and guilty men of this country, who were using their flag to get rid of them.

Up in the palace at Baabda, President Lahoud and his entourage seem as isolated from their country’s mood as the Americans and their appointees in the Baghdad "green zone" do from Iraq’s tragedy. Indeed, from the Baabda "green zone", there had emerged one of those spectacularly inappropriate statements that only exiled presidents usually make. "Any small firecracker could lead to a catastrophe," President Lahoud said.

But what did this mean? Was it a threat? A warning? Did he know something the Leban-ese did not? Or was he merely showing his concern for the million who want him to step down - or, in the words of Lebanon’s now-returned opposition leader Walid Jumblatt, to leave with the Syrians.

But no, it turned out he feared that Hariri’s murderers might throw a hand-grenade into the crowd. "What will become of our children?" he asked.

But it was for their children that so many hundreds of thousands of Lebanese protested yesterday. And one could not fail to notice so many hopeful aspects of their demonstration. They were happy and smiling and laughing; some even brought picnics or marched to trumpets and drums.

Many were the children whose parents had sent them abroad to be educated in Geneva, London or New York in the dark years of the civil war, returned now and anxious to rid themselves of the sectarian past. The Lebanese troops who stood around the square pointedly wore their rifles reversed over their shoulders, barrels pointed to the ground. They were not going to harm their countrymen.

Of course, there were some wearying signs: Christians tended to keep to the east of Martyrs’ Square and Muslims to the west - their ethnic locations when the square was the civil war front line

There was a large and cruel cartoon of the Shia Hizbollah leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, one of his arms tugged by Lebanon, the other by Syria, with the words "Make up your mind!" written above. And yet that is the question all Lebanon is asking. For if Nasrallah remains loyal to Syria, he will cut off much of the Shia community from their fellow citizens.

There was a clutch of secondary speakers at the rally: Nayla Mouawad, widow of the assassinated president Rene Mouawad, and old Mikhail Dagher and the smart opposition MP Ghenura Jaloul who vainly tried to present Mr Lahoud with opposition demands last week. But Mr Jumblatt stayed away in his Moukhtara castle, unwilling to risk assassination on the road to Beirut. Hariri’s two sons had already fled the country.

Now all await the United Nations’ detailed report on Hariri’s killing. Who did it? That was the question they were asking yesterday in their tens of thousands. And still Mr Lahoud remains silent.

My God, Blue, is the Middle East so dangerous that even the emoticons need shudder in fear?

i put that icon when i delete a post , thanks