Nasrallah Butros Sfeir

All Lebanese citizens have been forced to shoulder a heavy burden as a result of the political class’ failures, but none has been asked to endure as much as Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Butros Sfeir.
The prelate initially refused to be dragged into the country’s political crisis over the presidency.
Only after French mediators prodded, pleaded and provided him with repeated assurances did Sfeir reluctantly agree to play a role in the election of the country’s next head of state.
All of the players and facilitators had agreed in advance--or so it was believed--that Sfeir would draw up and present a list of candidates from which the nation’s next president would be selected.
Although this little exercise temporarily succeeded in restoring a Christian role in the selection of the president (after rival Christian politicians had eroded and even forfeited that role), the initiative ultimately failed when the rival camps vetoed the entire list of candidates.
They have now embarked on a completely new initiative: negotiating an amendment to the Constitution so that the Lebanese Armed Forces commander, General Michel Suleiman, can be elected president--a move that may or may not succeed.
It is no wonder that after being made to play the fool, Sfeir has reacted angrily.
The patriarch issued a fiery statement on Friday (Nov. 30) scolding both camps and asserting that their respective allegiances to foreign powers has made them “prisoners of their position and paralyzed their capabilities.“
The lesson to be gleaned from the entire episode is one in which we have been schooled many times before: Lebanese politics and politicians are governed (if it can be called governance at all) not by statesmen who act out of a sense of responsibility but by foreign powers, personal interests, and often mere whims.
Fortunately, this phase of the crisis appears to be on the verge of being resolved.
But a resolution will not undo the damage that has already been done in terms of slowed progress, ruined livelihoods, lost sleep and other heavy prices that the average citizen has had to pay.
The only recourse available to them is to remember the childish drama that their politicians have forced them to endure the next time that they go to the polls.
The serial crises over the past year have aptly demonstrated that the political system that those “leaders“ are so badly managing is fatally flawed.
The citizens of this country have every right, and indeed a duty, to demand better.
DAILYSTAR.COM.LB

Mazen returned home in Baghdad last week to a bare living room. He had sold his furniture to pay for life in Syria, where he fled in 2003 after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.
Working as a day laborer there had hardly helped him make ends meet. His mother, Um Safaa, sold her jewellery to support him but he eventually ran out of money.
“We were humiliated there,“ said Um Safaa, as she stood next to him and his daughter, who rushed to hug him once he stepped into the flat in southern Baghdad.
Pressed by poverty, Mazen, who did not give his surname, saw a recent drop in bombings and sectarian bloodshed across Iraq as a chance to return home and search for a fresh start.
Thousands of other Iraqi refugees have done the same over the past month, encouraged by the lull in violence, which is partly attributed to a 10-month-old crackdown on militants in Baghdad, and the “surge“ of 30,000 extra U.S. troops who were fully deployed in mid-June.
But some returnees say they face a difficult task trying to find jobs, repair their houses or reclaim homes that may have been occupied by others during their absence.
The sectarian violence, which worsened in 2006, has created almost exclusive Sunni and Shi’ite enclaves in Baghdad, as many from both sects fled their previously mixed neighborhoods.
“We don’t know what to do yet. We don’t even have any stuff left,“ Um Safaa, in her late 50s, said, pointing to a living room furnished only with straw mats and a television set.
As many as 2 million Iraqis have fled to neighboring countries, mainly Syria and Jordan.
The government says around 1,600 of them are now returning every day.
The U.S. military say Iraqi authorities do not have a plan to absorb the influx of returnees.
“All these guys coming back are probably going to find somebody else living in their house,“ Colonel William Rapp, a senior aide to top U.S. Commander General David Petraeus, said this week.
“We have been asking the government of Iraq to come up with a policy so that it is not put upon our battalion commanders and the I.S.F. (Iraqi Security Forces) battalion commanders to figure it out on the ground,“ he added.
But the government has been keen to highlight the number of families coming back to show that the security crackdown is working. It has also set up a committee to provide services to the returnees.
About 375 people returned from Syria in buses that the government provided and were escorted from the border by Iraqi troops and police. After the journey they were taken to a hall at a luxury hotel, where each family received around $800 in envelopes signed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
“You cannot imagine our happiness today. This is a painful strike to terrorism,“ Lieutenant-General Abboud Qanbar, head of the Baghdad security plan, said.
“Your country needs you. We cannot (lead the) struggle against the enemies of Iraq through military work alone.“
But several families said that in order to help Iraq, they need the government to help them first.
“I have two unemployed sons,“ said Samia Jouda Wali, a woman from Basra in southern Iraq, her eyes welling with tears.
“I don’t have a house. I need a place to live with my sons.“
Mohamed Naeem, who fled to Syria from Baghdad more than two years ago, said many returning Iraqis had similar problems.
“Iraqi citizens, especially those who lived in exile, need support,“ he said. “Many houses need reconstruction.“
REUTERS.COM

Thousands of people demonstrate in Paris, Nov. 20.

The nine-day transport strike had just ended on 23 November 2007 when French president Nicolas Sarkozy was confronted with a new upsurge of violence in Paris’s banlieues (suburbs).
Two years after the violent riots of November 2005--in which the then interior minister’s rhetoric played an inflammatory part--hardly anything has changed in the banlieues for the better.
Villiers-le-Bel, where the latest riots started on the night of 25 November after an incident where two young men died in a collision with a police car, is still waiting for a police station; more generally, yet another “Marshall Plan for the banlieues“ remains more of a slogan than a reality, as a great deal of the money promised has still not been delivered.
November’s high-profile war-dance between the president and the trade unions has been read in at least five different ways:
* as the old left’s losing fight against modernisation and globalisation (the most favoured explanation, inside and outside France)
* as a watershed triumph for Sarkozy’s self-proclaimed crusade for long overdue economic and social “reforms“
* as part of the French public’s slow shift towards a common-sense outlook, after having so many times shown their opposition to the government of the day by going on strike
* as a stalemate, a compromise between government and unions
* as the first hiccup in the most media-friendly presidency in French political history.
To come to an independent view of Nicholas Sarkozy’s policies or action is a challenge, as his main strategy is so media-saturated: evident in both his almost daily initiatives or speeches, and his efforts to pamper or coerce the media into silencing conflicting opinions.
Most prominent newspapers, magazines and TV channels are owned or controlled by friends of the ElysŽe presidential palace; in mid-November, Sarkozy even leaked to journalists of the business daily Les Echos--who had been strongly opposed to the Financial Times’s sale of their paper to the tycoon Bernard Arnault--the name of their new editor.
In addition, Sarkozy has not abandoned his strategy of flattering his conservative--and extreme-right--supporters by making bold and even provocative promises.
These include, for instance, supporting DNA tests for immigrant families (usually non-white) who are applying for a visa; even though the president knows full well that such measures would be reduced to insignificance by parliament or the constitutional council.
But in reading between the lines of this constant media barrage, it seems clear that the transport strike can also be seen as “Sarko’s“ first stumble since he moved into the ElysŽe in May 2007.
True, in opposing the strike he could count on support from a public resentful of the workers’ modest pension privileges in the name of equality, and unhappy at being forced to walk to the office for nine days; union members from the private sector also wanted to end the public-sector’s entrenched favours.
But Sarkozy’s tactics--proclaiming, Thatcher-style, that he would hold firm on his reforming path, that nothing and no one would be able to stop him, before making concessions to the unions to convince them to negotiate--hardly square with the swashbuckling image he likes to project.
The strike ended, as trade-union leaders knew it had to, with a compromise.
But these leaders have learned a valuable lesson: if the president’s strategy of negotiating in front of TV cameras is a key to his popularity, the fact that he cannot afford to fail in front of the same TV cameras creates a weakness--and a pressure on him to concede ground.
The same process was apparent when fishermen, strangled by the ever-rising cost of oil, threatened to block harbours if they didn’t receive a financial lifebuoy.
Sarkozy stopped over in Brittany en route to visit George W Bush in Washington intending to give fishermen a 10 million euro handout; he ended by promising thirty.
The outcome of the transport strike was less advantageous than the president’s rhetoric might have suggested.
The state transport corporations might even have to pay more in the end than the government will ever save as a result of the deal: a sum of 100 million euro per year for fifteen years has been mentioned.
The unions’ power has not been broken and the public-service pension system remains different from that of the private sector.
All this did not stop Sarkozy--after a near- fortnight of embarrassing silence, the longest such period since his election--grabbing a microphone and claiming victory.
OPENDEMOCRACY.NET

In the expensive Makati district in Manila, soldiers on trial for an attempted coup in 2003 stormed out of the courtroom and took over the luxury Peninsula Hotel on November 30. Their leader, Antonio Trillanes, had been elected from behind bars to the Senate this year.
Six hours later the standoff and the poorly planned not-quite-a coup was over. The call to remove President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from office by jump-starting another “people’s power“ movement failed even before it started.
This bizarre event is one of many of the shocks the Philippines has endured over the last year. The litany of coups, bombings and murders of political candidates and journalists in the troubled southern province of Mindanao have happened so frequently under the leadership of the petite economist president that it is almost impossible to differentiate one shock from the next.
Just this month alone there has been a coup, a political-motivated bombing in the town of Basilan, a UN report on the political killings by the Philippine military and a typhoon. While the most lives were lost due to the natural disaster, the weakening of democracy and rising violence has been man made.
Elected to the presidency in 2004, Arroyo has steadily lost legitimacy since assuming office.
The election itself was clouded with calls of rigging which have continued to shadow her tenure. She won by one million votes, the same amount that was called for by a woman in a recorded telephone conversation with the election commission.
While it was not proven that the call originated from Arroyo, many believe that it did. The corruption scandals around her husband--allegedly including a $330 million deal with a Chinese telecommunications firm (later cancelled)--has added to Arroyo’s woes.
Her personal troubles have been compounded by her inability to manage the economy.
While growth is estimated to reach over 5% this year, the gains (driven primarily by sales in commodities to China) have not reached society as a whole and, most importantly, not matched the demand for jobs driven by the demographic push of younger Filipinos entering the workforce.
Unemployment remains rampant, especially in Manila.
The violence in the south has not stopped, despite the intervention of peacekeepers from Malaysia. Talks for a political resolution have been stalled--arguably for the past three years since Arroyo assumed office.
The current Philippine president has failed to deliver in the areas where she has needed to. The end result has been a massive drop in public support, a legitimacy crisis for the president.
The sad thing is that no one has emerged to replace her. The Philippine opposition is weak.
Arroyo has mastered the strategy of survival by giving the military free reign to engage in political killings. Trillanes’s political stunt in the Peninsula Hotel shows that the military does not offer the calibre of alternative of former president Fidel Ramos.
To protect herself, Arroyo has also strategically allied herself with part of the political oligarchy--the 60 or so rich families in the country that dominate politics--splitting the power holders into pro--and anti-Arroyo camps in a savvy divide-and-rule move that she has reinforced with patronage. Driven largely by personality, political parties are weak and have yet to offer a viable candidate.
The middle class is weary of yet another “people’s power“ movement that fails to deliver real change. From the political ranks to civil society, there is disdain, disappointment and frustration.
To make matters worse, the country has been held hostage by a standoff between the speaker of the lower house, Jose de Venecia Jr, and Arroyo. Last month the House of Representatives started impeachment proceedings against Arroyo.
The process has stalled, leaving behind an oligarchic stalemate that appears to be more about a personality squabble than about principles.
GUARDIAN.CO.UK