Aoun and the Blunt Sword of Naturalization

In his latest television interview, General Michel Aoun addressed the naturalization of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon at length, presenting his interpretation of the issue, which the Lebanese have agreed to reject, including their stance in the preamble to their constitution (Paragraph “I”).

In that same interview, the General refused to grant Palestinians residing in Lebanon civil and social rights, including the right to work, because this would according to him inevitably lead to their naturalization. Thus the Palestinians are not allowed to practice a profession of any kind, because this would make them demand, in a future that might not be so distant, to obtain Lebanese citizenship. They must therefore remain besieged and contained in their refugee camps, eaten away by unemployment and the cells of organizations with obscure goals and motives, among them spreading the plagues and diseases of ghettos packed with disappointments and with personal and communal tragedies.

And if an insane adventure has destroyed one of these sad refugees camps, the scales of justice of the FPM (Free Patriotic Movement) led by Aoun stand demanding that this camp not be rebuilt, because the Phoenician-Aramaean city of Orthosia lies underneath, and not a stone must be replaced in the Nahr El-Bared camp until proper excavations supervised by experts and archaeologists have taken place. The least that can be said about this is that it is a righteous cause being used for malicious ends. At the same time, Aoun and his followers grow adamant in combating Palestinian acquisition of real estate and land in Lebanon, as such acquisition confirms intentions of naturalization.

In the 1990s, those who were in power in Lebanon exploited the issue of naturalization to keep the Christians in the grip of fear. The imbalance in the number of Lebanese inhabitants to the benefit of Muslims is no secret. Thus excessive talk of naturalization is only a way to increasingly terrorize the Christians from the Muslims in order to ensure their loyalty to their greatest leader. The reality is an entirely different matter, summed up by the fact that no one wishes to naturalize the Palestinians in Lebanon, especially those Palestinians who have tasted the bitter Lebanese cup after forcing the Lebanese to sip the bitterness of their own cause. Moreover, those Palestinians, after years of political and social pressures which many a side took upon itself to subject them to, are but the shadow of what their numbers were in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the only issue that has withstood the test of time is the ability of different parties to exploit the fear of naturalization that the Christians have, in order to keep them hostage to loyalties and fears that benefit those whose voices rise highest in warning of naturalization.

A debate addressing the awareness that shapes the convictions of the General and his companions would be meaningless. Indeed, the issue does not reside in principles and ideas or in interests, as much as in a vision that deems it permissible to resort to weapons – which have gone blunt from overuse – in an internal battle, even if it comes at the expense of the dignity of a people that has grown tired – and has tired the world – of calling for their right to return to their occupied land. Yet as it seems, there is no one to hear their calls.

There is one point that calls for even more sadness and frustration, regarding the complete silence observed by those who raise the banner of “marching to Jerusalem, war until victory” and those who decree the inviolability of the “auspices of the Holy City” in terms of negotiating over it. Those with whom Aoun shares an “understanding” see nothing wrong in his public and implicit contempt for the suffering of the Palestinian people in Lebanon, which has been ongoing for many decades, and care not what the man says about the inhabitants of the Holy City, who hold demonstrations supporting them in the face of Israeli threats, as long as Aoun provides them with the cover they seek in the fields of politics and in other fields which those well-informed know of. Indeed, such a stance seems even worse than that of the General and even more harmful to the Palestinians and to their right of return, upon which there is no compromise.

* Al-Hayat, 2009-10-04