Standing His Ground

The grand sérail, seat of the Lebanese government, is a magnificent 19th century Oriental palace. The stone façade, geometrical courtyard and ornate chambers were originally built as an Ottoman military barracks. Though beautifully restored, the structure was gutted at the start of the 15-year civil war — a wound on Lebanese history that is never far from the mind of the Grand Sérail’s occupant since 2005’s Cedar Revolution: Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

Recently, that wound threatened to rip open. One evening in December, thousands of protesters from the Shi’ite Muslim group Hizballah and other factions threatened to storm the gates of the Sérail, calling the Western-backed Siniora a traitor for allegedly undermining Hizballah during its war with Israel four months earlier. Only a week before, masked gunmen had assassinated one of Siniora’s Cabinet colleagues, Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel. For hours, nobody knew if the mob would overwhelm the guards, enter the building, drag Siniora and his ministers from office — and perhaps ignite a new civil war.

Hizballah and its allies thought Siniora could be intimidated; instead, they got the measure of a man undaunted. Siniora phoned various Lebanese leaders and declared he was standing his ground. “They wanted us to evacuate,” recalls Marwan Hamadeh, Siniora’s Telecommunications Minister. “He said, ‘I will only go out of here dead.'” As Siniora remembered the standoff during three hours of interviews with Time in his office and over lunch in the Sérail: “I have never had that degree of serenity in my life. Despite the risks, which I am aware of, don’t think at all that I am troubled.”

The protesters backed off; Siniora had saved the gains of the Cedar Revolution, when, after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, a million Lebanese in Martyrs’ Square demanded the withdrawal of Syrian military forces that had dominated the country for three decades. Lebanon remains deeply divided, however, a fact made plain in January on what some are calling Black Thursday, when a cafeteria shoving match between Sunni and Shi’ite students at a Beirut university set off a day of clashes that tore across the capital.

It is crucial for Lebanon, the Middle East and the U.S. that Siniora succeeds in safeguarding Lebanon’s independence and guiding its political and economic reconstruction. In a struggle between a rare Arab democratic movement supported by the West and parties backed by authoritarian regimes in Syria and Iran, his defeat would shatter a model for other Arab states to follow and dash the Bush Administration’s only realistic hope for a Middle East success story. Victory for Iran, Syria and its allies, on the other hand, would probably doom the country to future conflicts with Israel and trigger a new exodus of educated Lebanese.

Siniora’s December defense of the Sérail may well have been a turning point in that struggle. There are signs that the crisis has cooled, at least temporarily. Hizballah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has retreated from his militant rhetoric and called his people from the streets. His main political ally, ambitious former Lebanese army commander Michel Aoun, who is popular with a significant bloc of Christians, has become publicly worried about future opposition protests out of apparent concern they could trigger Christian-on-Christian fighting.

Arab commentators who praise Nasrallah as a hero for fighting Israel have been slow, not surprisingly, to commend Siniora’s stand for freedom. But he has won the hearts of many Lebanese and enjoys broad support among Sunnis, Druze, Christians and some Shi’ites. When he sneaks from the Sérail for a rare meal outside, surprised restaurant patrons drown his arrival in applause. “He is a source of pride,” says Elie Khoury, a leading pro-democracy activist who created the “I Love Life” advertising campaign to perk up Lebanese spirits. “We have a Prime Minister who is not performing like a politician.” Adds Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a staunch Siniora ally: “He has proved to be a statesman. The coup d’état would have meant that the Lebanese dream of an independent Lebanon, a prosperous Lebanon, would be over.”

Siniora’s statesmanship seems to work even beyond Lebanon’s fragile borders. In January, he scored a political coup by persuading 41 countries at a donor conference in Paris to pledge $7.6 billion for Lebanon’s reconstruction. He is also pushing for an international tribunal that will put on trial anyone accused by an ongoing U.N. investigation of political assassinations in Lebanon. The killings of Siniora’s boyhood chum Hariri, and of journalists Gebran Tueni, Samir Kassir and a dozen others since October 2004, have been widely blamed on the Syrian regime. The point of the investigation, he explains, “is not only to get to know who committed these crimes, but to protect democracy. It is not a vendetta. It is a duty to the Lebanese people.”

Siniora’s opponents can hardly be blamed for initially underestimating him, since little in his background prepared him for becoming the guardian of Lebanese democracy. He is an accountant and banker by profession, and he holds the position of Prime Minister as a Sunni Muslim, as the country’s constitution requires. But he is not a sectarian warlord or family patriarch of the sort that usually ascends to the dangerous business of being a top Lebanese politician. He grew up in Sidon, an enthusiastic Arab nationalist like Hariri, who tapped him to be Finance Minister during Hariri’s remarkable reconstruction of war-battered Beirut in the 1990s. As Hariri’s son and political heir Saad was inexperienced in politics, Siniora agreed to accept the appointment as Prime Minister after Hariri’s Future Movement triumphed in elections two years ago.

Although the mild-mannered Siniora seemed destined for finance, Hariri’s assassination, the Cedar Revolution it triggered and the exit of Syrian troops inevitably drew him into the regional struggles that have long made Lebanon a political battleground. Hizballah resigned from Siniora’s government in November, accusing it of becoming a U.S. pawn that had reneged on promises to rule with Hizballah’s agreement. The tipping point was the government’s vote to proceed with the international tribunal over Hizballah’s objections. “Our fear is that politicians will take advantage of the tribunal to get at us and others in Lebanon,” Hizballah deputy secretary-general Naim Qassem told Time. The group is also wary of eventually being pressured by the government to disarm. It argues that as the guerrilla group that ended Israel’s 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, it needs to stay armed to defend against future Israeli attacks. Clearly, Hizballah is also worried about losing influence if it becomes solely a political party.

Today, as in the past, Lebanon is also a keystone in the broader struggle for power and influence across the Middle East. While President Bush hailed the Cedar Revolution, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei recently declared that Iran would defeat America in Lebanon. Besides vying for sway in the country, Washington is jousting with Tehran and Damascus over everything from Iran’s nuclear program and Iraq’s future to Arab-Israeli peace. “You have the desire of the Iranians to establish, I wouldn’t say a satellite state, but something of that sort,” Siniora says. “And you’ve got the Syrians. They are not shy about [opposing] the international tribunal. What is happening in Lebanon is because of turbulence coming from the outside, using Lebanese. We don’t want to be a battlefield.”

Although Siniora welcomes U.S. support, he bristles at opposition taunts that he is America’s agent, in part because his relationship with Washington is not always an easy one. Apart from criticizing what he terms Washington’s “one-sided” support for Israel, Siniora became angry during the Israel-Hizballah war last summer when the Bush Administration rebuffed Siniora’s expectation that the U.S. would support an immediate cease-fire. He calls Israel “a killing machine” that used Hizballah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers as a “pretext” to re-occupy Lebanon. Though opponents mocked Siniora for kissing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s cheek during her shuttle to Beirut, behind closed doors the two sparred over how to end the war. At one point, Siniora says, he retorted to a Rice aide: “This is my position. Even if they are going to shell the Sérail, I am not moving.” Siniora says he welcomes American support, like Washington’s pledge of $1 billion in aid, so long as it doesn’t compromise his country’s rights. “I’m a pragmatic man,” he says. “I want to deal with the Americans. I know there can’t be a real solution if we don’t engage with the Americans. But not at the expense of my principles, my country and our pride.”

In the end, the U.S. relented on Siniora’s refusal to allow U.N. peacekeeping troops to use force, and on his demand that a U.N. resolution call for Israel’s withdrawal from the disputed Shebaa Farms territory, which he insists “is Lebanese land and they should withdraw from it. I cannot go and ask Hizballah to surrender their arms while my country is still occupied.” He wants the U.S. to do more to pressure Israel to pull out, but so far Washington prefers not to add to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s burdens.

Siniora did help persuade Hizballah to accept a cease-fire that required the Lebanese army to take control of southern Lebanon, Hizballah’s main base of operations, for the first time in 30 years. Soon afterward, however, Hizballah plunged Lebanon into its December crisis by sending its supporters into the streets to demand more power. Though Siniora refuses to step down, he has shown flexibility. He has offered to expand the Cabinet to include more opposition figures, and to discuss limiting the scope of the U.N. investigation in light of Hizballah’s fears that the tribunal might judge past acts of terrorism blamed on the group, like the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Thus far, however, negotiations with Hizballah remain unscheduled.

Despite the obstacles, Siniora is optimistic about Lebanon’s future as he stands on a balcony of the Sérail, with nary a protester in sight, looking out over Beirut below, the Mediterranean Sea to the west and Lebanon’s snow-capped mountains to the east. “We have the benefit of past experience, which was a deadly experience,” he says. “There is no other option for Lebanese but to understand that they have to live together.” Perhaps his own combination of steely will and flexibility will show the way to that elusive goal.