'Parking for Maronites only'

By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post Foreign Service, Tuesday, November 28, 2006

BEIRUT, Nov. 27 -- The evening was tense, as most are these days in Beirut, its Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Druze perched imprecisely between war and peace. Malak Beydoun, a young woman, pulled her car into a parking lot in the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh. She peered at a billboard overhead, alarmed and then indignant.

"Parking for Maronites only," it read.Beydoun recoiled. "How did they know that I was a Shiite?" she remembered asking herself.

Part provocation, part appeal -- with a dose of farce that doesn't feel all that farcical -- advertisements went up this month on 300 billboards across the Lebanese capital and appeared in virtually every newspaper in the country.

Thousands of e-mails carried the ads across the Internet to expatriates. Each offered its take on what one of the campaign's creative directors called a country on the verge of "absurdistan" -- cooking lessons by Greek Orthodox, building for sale to Druze, hairstyling by an Armenian Catholic, a fashion agency looking for "a beautiful Shiite face." At the bottom, the ads read in English, "Stop sectarianism before it stops us," or, more bluntly in Arabic, "Citizenship is not sectarianism."

The campaign, designed for free by an ad agency and promoted by a civil society group, has forced Lebanon to look at itself at a time when the country is spiraling into one of its worst political crises in years. The timing was coincidental, the message universal, in a landscape with ever dwindling common ground: The forces that dragged Lebanon into one civil war are threatening another.

Many have praised the ads for asking uncomfortable, even taboo questions about a system in which sectarian affiliation determines everything from the identity of the president to loyalty to sports teams. Some have mistaken the campaign for reality. Across the capital, one in six billboards was torn down, prevented from being put up or splashed with paint, usually the tactic of choice for conservative Muslims irked by lingerie ads.

"They didn't get it," said Fouad Haraki, a 53-year-old shawarma vendor, idly dragging on a cigarette next to a kerosene tank, across the street from billboards that had been defaced. "They just read what was written on top, not what was on the bottom." The result in his neighborhood, he said, was "a sectarian clamor."

It is almost a cliche that Lebanon is home to 18 religious sects -- from a tiny Jewish community to Shiite Muslims, the country's largest single group. The system that diversity has inspired has delivered minorities a degree of protection unequaled anywhere else in the Arab world. But it has left Lebanon a country where individual rights and identity are subsumed within communities and, by default, the personas of their sometimes feudal leaders, who thrive on that affiliation.

By tradition, the president is Maronite, the prime minister Sunni, the parliament speaker Shiite. Other posts are reserved for Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Druze. Boy scouts are organized by community, not country -- the Mahdi Scouts for the Shiites, for instance. Television stations have their own sectarian bent -- the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. for Christians, Future for the Sunnis. Christians are partial to the Sagesse basketball team, Sunnis the Riyadi team.

There are even two Armenian soccer teams -- Homenmen and Homenetmen -- one faithful to Armenian leftists, the other to the community's right wing. Before this summer's war, Sunni soccer fans loyal to Ansar brawled in a stadium with Shiite youths loyal to Nijmeh.

The system, known as confessionalism, dates to long before Lebanon's independence in 1943. But there is a growing sense that the decades-old principles underlying Lebanese politics have grown obsolete. In some ways, today's crisis is about the assertion of power -- a coup to its critics -- by the long-disenfranchised Shiite community led by Hezbollah. Hardly anyone can forecast with certainty how the struggle will end, but almost everyone sees it as a turning point, a crisis that intersects raw ambition with ideology, foreign policy, perspective and history, all awash in sectarian combustion.

"This is today a very explosive situation where you have all those sects being triggered, teased and hammered by all their leaders," said Bechara Mouzannar, the regional creative executive director for H&C Leo Burnett in Beirut, which authored this month's ad campaign. He calls himself "a little dazed and confused."

"Something is about to explode, unfortunately," he said.Added his colleague, Kamil Kuran: "If we keep thinking like this, the future is going to look like this."The inspiration for the campaign came almost by coincidence in their cramped offices, its walls cluttered with ads for L&M cigarettes, a poster for the film "Reservoir Dogs" and memorabilia from last year's protests after the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Those protest signs appear a little dated; " Independence '05" and "All of us for the nation." On one window hangs a handwritten quote: "The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability."

Manal Naji, a 27-year-old senior art director, had glanced at a r?sum? tucked underneath another piece of paper. "Christian," it read. "We were so shocked," she recalled. In the end, it turned out it was the name of the applicant's father, but it gave Naji an idea. "What if it actually existed," she said. "What if it reached the point of putting it on your job application." "We wanted the same shocking effect," added Reem Kotob, a 25-year-old member of the creative team.

This weekend, the two sat with another member of the team, 26-year-old Yasmina Baz, in the agency's conference room, looking over the ads they designed in a burst of energy on that first night and a later session at a nearby bar, Club Social.

One is a doctor's plate: "Dr. Mohamed Chatila, Muslim Sunni." Another is a three-story banner that reads, "For Druzes, Building for Sale ." A license plate is pictured: "A Shiite car," it says in Arabic, "Shiite" in English. And an ad for a car: "2000 model, in near perfect condition. Owned and maintained by a Maronite. Never driven by non-Maronites."

The team took the ads to Amam 05, a grass-roots group that grew out of last year's protests. The name means "ahead," an acronym of the Arabic for civil society. It states its mission, admittedly ambitious, as "a modern, sovereign state built on non-feudalism, non-confessionalism and non-clientelism." But even its leaders admit to being a little glum, given today's crisis. "Very frustrated," said Nicole Fayad, one of the activists.

The original idea was to actually hang the signs in the city: "Maronites only" in a parking lot, "For Druzes" on the side of a building. But when Asma Andraos, one of the group's leaders, approached the owners, they cringed.

"They called me back, and they said they loved it, that I was crazy, and that there's no way they could do this," she recalled. She shook her head. "If I had a building, I wouldn't have done it, either," she said.

They went instead to newspapers, placing the ads in eight papers for two weeks this month. One printed them for free, the others at a 50 percent discount. A billboard agency agreed to post 300 for free for a week. In all, it cost the group $40,000; Mouzannar estimated it would have cost more than $500,000 commercially.

But before the billboards went up, they had to go through the formality of getting permission from the intelligence branch known as General Security. At first, officials refused; one compared the ads to Nazi-era segregation. It took two hours of face-to-face meetings to reach a resolution, by convincing the officials that the campaign was intended to be ironic.When the billboards went up, 50 were defaced or torn down. Some residents stopped them from going up in the first place. In Lebanon and abroad, e-mails flitted back and forth, some of their authors believing the messages were real."People were seriously panicked," Andraos recalled. "Are there really signs like that in Lebanon now? The mere fact that people think it's possible, that there might be signs like that in Lebanon now, means we're not really that far off."

Members of the group say people have criticized the timing, and the group delayed the campaign's next step after the assassination last week of a government minister, Pierre Gemayel. But they plan to distribute as early as this weekend 15,000 business cards with the same theme at bars and restaurants in Beirut. Each card lists a person's name and religious affiliation. Next, they will send copies of the cards to Lebanon's 128 legislators.

"We want it to be raised as an issue," Fayad said, "but we don't have the pretension to say we have the answer."At a cafe near downtown, Randy Nahle, a 21-year-old student, wondered about the way out. His father is Shiite, his mother Maronite Catholic. The neighborhood he sits in, like virtually every one in Beirut, has its markers: the posters and religious symbols on walls, the muezzin or the church bells that identify its affiliation.

For once, he said, something organized spoke to his rejection of being "categorized or oversimplified."He smiled at his favorite ads, the ones that identified doctors by their sect. "It has infiltrated our fabric so much, almost indelibly," Nahle said. "If I have an earache, an Orthodox doctor will understand it better. It's an Orthodox ear."

He recalled sitting with a Shiite woman at a cafe near the American University in Beirut. She treated him as a fellow Shiite until he revealed his mixed background. She looked at him disapprovingly. It's bad for the children, she said. "They're going to come out confused," she told him.

"I said, 'You know, the problem of this country is we don't have enough confused people. The problem is we have too many people blindly convinced by their political orientation, by their religion, by their community's superiority.' " She smiled, he recalled, and then laughed a little uncomfortably.

Say Cheese ...Arab style?
Got this picture through my cousin in Surinam.
Looks like it was taken in Downtown Beirut or,
a serious case of Adobe Photoshop.

Hikmat Mahawat Khan, derde op de lijst EenNL

Wat beweegt de Surinaams-Hindostaanse moslim Mahawat Khan om zich aan te sluiten bij een partij als EénNL; een partij die dicht aanschurkt tegen het gedachtegoed van Pim Fortuyn? U weet wel, de man van ‘de islam is een achterlijke cultuur’. Ook zijn huidige partijgenoten als Marco Pastors en Ronald Sörenson zijn regelmatig beticht van racisme en xenofobie. Esther Prade en ik besloten het hem zelf te vragen tijdens een seminar georganiseerd door de Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha'at Islam (Lahore) Nederland waar Mahawat Khan een inleiding hield met als thema 'de islam terug van risicofactor naar aanwinst'.

Hikmat Mahawat Khan: een bevlogen moslim die ervoor past om als excuus-allochtoon van de partij te worden versleten, die vindt dat moslims voor een belangrijk deel zelf verantwoordelijk zijn voor de negatieve beeldvorming rondom de islam, die er niet voor terugdeinst om de manco's van zowel allochtoon als autochtoon Nederland te benoemen:

Videofilm Hikmat YouTube of hieronder op de play button van het screenshot klikken.

Hikmat Mahawat Khan werd op 15 juni 1960 in Suriname geboren. Als 18-jarige verliet hij zijn geboorteland om in Nederland Luchtvaart- en Ruimtetechniek en Business Administration te gaan studeren. Hij vervulde diverse functies in de luchtvaart, onder meer bij Air Holland, debis Airfinance en KLM. Momenteel is hij Business Consultant in de luchtvaart.


Sinds 1999 werd Mahawat Khan voorzitter van de Haagse Lahore Ahmadiyya moskee en later ook van landelijke koepel Unie van Ahmadiyya Lahore moskeeën. In 2004 zat hij de Contact Groep Islam (CGI) voor, waarvan hij mede-oprichter is. Vanuit deze organisatie voerde hij overleg met de regering over onderwerpen die met moslims in Nederland te maken hadden. Gedesillusioneerd door de ‘oeverloze discussies’ met de overheid hield Mahawat Khan het in september 2006 als voorzitter CGI voor gezien. Vlak daarna werd bekend dat hij een derde plek had gekregen op de kandidatenlijst van de nieuwe partij EénNL voor de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen 2006.

Foto links boven: Twalieb Hassenmahomed
Video: Esther Prade

Politics of fear and control

Conference War & Peace: all talk…?

Text and photos by Sharida Mohamedjoesoef for the Amsterdam Weekly

You are either with us or against us’. In these unequivocal terms US president George W. Bush made it quite clear in September 2001 that he expected full support for his so-called War on Terror. Five years on: fierce fighting in Afghanistan, a full-out (civil) war in Iraq, an upsurge of violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories, not to mention the piles of smoking rubble in Lebanon after the drums of war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Only three weeks ago General Richard Dannett of the British forces sparked a row, saying that UK troops were making matters worse in Iraq and should withdraw soon. Would the same be valid for Dutch troops in Afghanistan fighting off the Taliban instead of rebuilding the country? The question is reason enough for organisations like Stop the War Coalition and political party GroenLinks to initiate the national conference War & Peace that was held at Felix Meritis last Sunday.

The circular neo-classical hall was packed with some 150 people who had come to listen to a great number of speeches of, for instance, Hajo Meijer, Auschwitz survivor and secretary to A Different Jewish Voice, and Tariq Shadid, Dutch-Palestinian representative of the Palestinian Community Netherlands.

First-rate crowd-puller, however, was Dyab Abou Jahjah, the charismatic, articulate Lebanese-born president of the Arab European League (AEL). Jahjah is known for his fierce defence of Muslim migrant interests in both Belgium and the Netherlands.

This time he decided to take his captive audience for a stroll through history, illustrating recurrent patterns when it comes to the erosion of civil liberties in favour of the so-called the greater good. Jahjah intones: ‘During the Red Scare communists and sympathisers were victimised in a way that is comparable to the criminalisation of Muslims now. And let’s not forget about one of Europe’s most notorious terror groups: the German Baader Meinhof Gruppe. The German government felt compelled to adopt a series of anti-terror laws that seemed to clash with the democratic principles of post-war Germany in the same way as the anti-war measures are imposed now. The Red Scare has swapped places with the Muslim Threat.’

‘Quite right,’ says Ben Hayes of Statewatch, a British organisation that has been documenting UK laws on policing since 1991. According to Hayes, the British government is taking all kinds of measures under the pretext of security, varying from phone taps to fingerprinting pupils at some 5,000 schools throughout the country: ‘politics of fear and politics of control, two sides of the same coin, and now a complete generation is growing up with the notion that all this surveillance is totally normal.’ Both Hayes and Jahjah feel that Muslim – Arab migrants in particular are bearing the brunt of anti-terror measures after 9/11. The end is nowhere near in sight, Hayes points out, as ‘the UK police model is gradually being rolled out in the rest of Europe.’

‘Don’t expect the Dutch government to turn the tide,’ says senator Anja Meulenbelt with disappointment. She is one of the few politicians present and is not afraid of apportioning blame to all left-wing political parties, including her own Socialist Party. ‘We have failed to stand up against the victimisation of fellow Muslim citizens.’

‘What on earth can we do to bring about change?’, was a frequently heard question in the audience. Surprisingly enough, few, if any, clear-cut answers were given. Jahjah firmly stuck to his guns saying that grassroots activism should do the trick, while Hajo Meijer stressed the importance of exercising maximum pressure on ‘our American puppet government’.

Although their statements were sounding off to an overall sympathetic audience, some dissonant cords were heard: ‘all talk, no action’ and ‘no opposing views from the right-wing camp’. Whether this was due to an unwillingness on the part of the organisers to invite them or ‘typical ostrich behaviour on the Right,’ as some claimed, remained unclear.

Yet, while some speakers did not seem to mind the absence of the Right, others like Tariq Shadid did, Shadid even quoted legendary US president Roosevelt:

‘We have to face the fact that all of use are going to die together,

or we are going to live together.

And if we are going to live together, we have to talk.’