Laatste artikel van Michael Young

The speaker outcast - or just disarmed?
By Michael Young
Thursday, January 18, 2007

Spare a sardonic thought for Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri. Only last
summer he was being feted by March 14 for having helped the Cabinet majority
railroad Hizbullah into approving a Lebanese Army deployment to South
Lebanon and endorsing Security Council Resolution 1701; now they're
depicting him as the scoundrel of the moment, increasingly marginalized for
failing to hold a parliamentary session to approve the mixed tribunal in the
Hariri assassination. Oh when that trapdoor opens.

Berri has done himself few favors in recent months. He alienated Hizbullah
and its secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, during the summer war,
but also when he seemed to be trying to open an independent line to Iran
last November. As you might recall, he had just wrapped up a series of
national dialogue sessions and flew to Tehran for a conference. While he was
there the Shiite ministers resigned. Berri initially declared that the
government remained constitutional, but then abruptly backtracked - under
Iranian pressure, some speculated. This angered the majority, and in a
matter of days the speaker was sitting atop the detritus of a failed
dialogue that he had sponsored, with Hizbullah and March 14 united on a
single thing: that it did no good to trust Nabih Berri.

For a time, after the opposition descended on Downtown Beirut in protest, it
looked like Berri might devise a new role for himself. Who else could play
middleman to help break the deadlock? That was too optimistic a reading of
the speaker's capacities. By then, Hizbullah was unwilling to grant him any
of the leeway it had during the July-August conflict. The majority,
meanwhile, was still only interested in seeing whether Berri would summon
Parliament to vote in favor of the Hariri tribunal. Caught in a vise, the
speaker discerned a faint ray of hope in the Arab League proposal peddled by
Secretary General Amr Moussa. And what did the normally cunning Berri do? He
tied a rope around his neck and leapt.

Moussa sought to promote a package deal that, among other things, would have
formed a new government with 19 ministers from the majority, 10 from the
opposition, and one independent. The idea was to prevent the majority from
imposing its writ by a two-thirds vote, while denying the opposition veto
power. The majority also agreed to the creation of a committee of judges to
discuss amendments to the draft tribunal proposal. Berri, not wanting to
oversee a vote in Parliament on the tribunal, set a condition for his
acceptance: that the amended draft be returned to the new government for
approval. This effectively denied the majority a means to pass a proposal
with which the opposition disagreed. Suddenly, Berri became enemy number-one
for March 14, but also angered Moussa and his patrons in Cairo and Riyadh.

That wasn't all. In the period between Christmas and New Year, Berri came up
with a plan of his own to resolve the crisis, one that proved to be dead on
arrival. Walid Jumblatt dismissed it as "the latest merchandise," and Moussa
saw the scheme as an underhanded effort to supplant his own ideas. The Arab
League secretary general reacted by indefinitely delaying his return to
Beirut. It was no coincidence that last Monday the Kuwaiti newspaper
As-Siyassa, citing an adviser to Siniora, spoke of the possibility of Saudi
Arabia's hosting a reconciliation conference on Lebanon, at which Berri
would not be invited. The likelihood of that happening is negligible; after
all, Berri represents Parliament. Still, the leak was designed to warn that
the speaker may become irrelevant.

Berri is a target because the majority views him as the weakest link in
Syria's effort to derail parliamentary approval of the Hariri tribunal.
March 14 politicians will admit he has been threatened - but everyone has,
they promptly add. That Berri remains Syria's man is hardly
surprising for anyone who has followed his decades-long political
gymnastics. But more disturbing for the speaker, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
apparently regard this as a problem when dealing with him. The Saudis are
said to oppose bringing Syria into any discussion of Lebanon. If that's
true, then Berri did himself few favors by telling As-Safir on Saturday,
after meeting with Saudi Ambassador Abdel-Aziz Khoja, that "any efforts
exerted to bring about a breakthrough in Saudi-Syrian relations will speed
up the opportunities for a resolution in Lebanon, before it is too late."

This kind of talk, particularly Berri's recent statement that Lebanon is "a
time-bomb preparing to explode," is open to various interpretations. Some
see the comments as a threat; others, more benignly, assume the speaker is
playing up a sense of impending doom to pave the way for his return as
mediator. The visit by Amal representatives to the Phalange headquarters on
Tuesday lends credence to the latter view. But Berri, like Nasrallah, is
paying a heavy price for his alliance with Syria, and more specifically for
Syria's refusal to grant its Lebanese comrades any latitude to negotiate
what, for the Assad regime, could be a less dangerous tribunal framework.

Difficult times lie ahead for Berri. The parliamentary majority has already
signed a petition asking President Emile Lahoud to open an extraordinary
session of Parliament. The decision is binding on Lahoud, but Berri has yet
to transmit the request to Baabda. If the speaker gets over this hurdle, in
late March he must convene the first regular session of Parliament for 2007.
If a parliamentarian formally asks that the tribunal law be dealt with as
"fast-track" legislation, Berri, at least according to a member of the
Hariri bloc, must put it to a vote. In addition, Article 44 of the
Constitution allows the majority to hold a vote of confidence in the speaker
two years after legislative elections, in the first regular annual session.
If he loses by a two-thirds margin, Berri can be replaced.

These maneuvers are unlikely to change Berri's behavior, get the tribunal
approved, or bounce the speaker. However, they are politically embarrassing.
One thing must be dawning on Berri: It was the March 14 leadership that was
instrumental in returning him to power last year. Having lost the majority's
backing and little trusted by Hizbullah, the speaker must be wondering if
he's gone beyond his expiry date. More pertinently, Berri must sense that he
may be the latest target in a broader effort to dismantle what remains of
the Syrian order in Lebanon.