"ashsha'b allubnanyy"

The quietest day in Beirut since Wednesday. I think i could count the machine-gun outbursts that floated over from the West on one hand.

Unfortunately, those few outbursts were enough to further stoke the embers of the crisis at hand: shooting at the funeral procession of one of those killed in the fighting of the last few days. Two more lives wasted in what, despite the misleading calmness of today compared to yesterday and Thursday, is still only the beginning.

The beginning of what? Nobody knows.

Today, for the first time since what is being described on Western websites as Hizbullah’s “coup” in West Beirut on Thursday, the Prime Minister Fouad Siniora appeared on television... I think he should fire his speech-writer if it took the guy 48 hours to compile a sensical response to the events. So now most of the leaders have had their say: Geagea and Jumblatt did their bit last night.

And for all of their proclaimed ideological or religious differences, every single “leader” in this country recycles the same nationalist rhetoric in their speeches. The phrase “ashsha’b allubnany” (the Lebanese people) repetitively rings out like an ironic chorus from their mouths. They have greatly abused that phrase, and are guilty of laying claim to some imaginary Lebanese unity of peoples, some overriding nationalism, in order to legitimise their own skirmishes for power.

According to different statistics, the death toll of recent events lies between 13 and 25. But there is one entity that refuses to die, that is obsessively resurrected from the ashes again and again, only to be gunned down by the shallow promises of another politico: Ashsha’b alLubnanyy. That concept in itself, however fragile and optimistic, is being dealt a death-blow every time it is uttered…