The army attacked

After my last post, Lebanon had trundled into a state of stasis. All parties had pretty much agreed on who the next President was to be (General Michel Suleiman, head of the Lebanese Army), they just couldn't agree on how he was to become President. Arguments ranged back and forth on technicalities about amending the constitution and who the next PM was to be and whether the government should resign after the President was elected (which is the usual order of things) or before (which some said they should do as the opposition says the current government is unconstitutional) or whether there could be elections at all as it's all unconstitutional... anyway, you get my drift. It was all rather boring and technical and, frankly, embarrassing as Lebanon is the only country in the world without a head of state bar Somalia, I think.

But this morning events have given even more urgency to getting the politics sorted and trying to bring some normalcy to Lebanon. Francois El-Hajj, a likely candidate to succeed Suleiman as head of the Army, should Suleiman become the next President, was assassinated. It's just getting crazy now. The Lebanese Army has a lot of support from all factions - and its chiefs are generally considered to be pro-Syrian, or at least amenable towards Syria, while still being very patriotic. So it makes the 'Syria did it' theory a little harder to believe, this time at least. Also, targeting the one insitution that is liked by nearly all Lebanese is a departure from the norm. Previous attacks on anti-Syrian figures, while still heinous, at least fit a pattern. Maybe this is a return to May/June, when random bombs were exploded in parts of Beirut.

Today, people seem to be going about their business - traffic is chock-a-block outside the window and the Christmas Nativity Scene has been built in Sassine Square (looking less like the tented city than it did last year, thankfully). Hopefully this assassination will be the last, but I am not hopeful...