Lebanon, a House Divided

They catch sight of each other sometimes, at funerals or weddings back in the village, but they haven’t had a conversation in years. The two men share the same blood and the same last name, but in today’s Lebanon they belong to enemy camps, squaring off against each other as a political crisis shudders through the nation.

Suleiman Franjieh is Lebanon’s outgoing interior minister, a dapper 40-year-old who dreamed, they say, of becoming president. He was a teenage war orphan when he knitted his fate with that of the Syrian regime. He did favors. He rose fast. But now the government has fallen, and his name has been cursed by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the streets of Beirut.

His cousin Samir Franjieh is a slight man, a leftist intellectual with a mischievous gleam in his eye. Samir, 59, helped found the opposition movement bent on pushing Syria out of his homeland, long under Damascus’ control. Now he is riding high as one of the opposition’s most visible spokesmen, draped in the flag and heady with the cheers of the crowds.

The story of the Franjieh cousins stands as a reminder of everything that has changed in Lebanon since its civil war ground to an exhausted halt 15 years ago -- and all that hasn’t.

“We are from two galaxies,” Samir says of his cousin.

Except that they’re not, and the resentment between them is both political and personal. In the eyes of his enemies, each man is a traitor not only to the family, but to the entire nation.

The Franjiehs come from a place where government means following orders and trading favors for loyalty; where position is passed from grandfather to father to son. They come from a place where power means Franjieh. But now they are emblems of a split that has come to define postwar Lebanon, as the country asks whether it is ready to govern itself without falling back into war, and what its relationship to Syria should be.

The 15-year civil war left Lebanese with much to forgive. Egged on by foreigners, Christians, Muslims and Druze slaughtered one another until the fighting finally faded in 1989. The price of peace was steep: With a nod from the international community, Syria formally moved in, and in the ensuing years, its grip on Lebanon tightened. Now, questions over Syria’s dominance have cracked the Franjieh clan, their hometown and the rest of Lebanon.

To understand the Franjieh cousins, you have to leave the pulse and glitter of Beirut. Drive north along the coast, past the ruined Phoenician port at Byblos, bridges and a castle that crumbles into hills clotted with green pine, until you reach Zgharta. Both men’s stories wind back here, to an olive tree-shaded hometown at the rim of the glazed blue waters of the Mediterranean.

People in Zgharta like to say that their Maronite Catholic town is like Sicily. It is their way of introducing outsiders to a world where the ghosts of family-to-family warfare haunt the old stone alleyways and the word of the family chief is as good as law.

“In the same way we say the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” said 45-year-old homemaker Wazir Duwayhi, tapping the sign of the cross over her forehead and breasts, “we say Franjieh, Duwayhi, Mouwad” -- the names of Zgharta’s ruling clans.

A mellow afternoon light drenched Zgharta, and young boys sat in listless lines in front of the downtown shops. Duwayhi cast her eyes over the street, where graying worshipers made their way to a 350-year-old church.

“The families have their views, and that’s politics,” she said with a tiny toss of the head. “More than that we don’t speak about.”

Even against a backdrop of war, the clans of Zgharta are famed for their epic, vicious fights. To this day, the town of approximately 25,000 is sliced into distinct family enclaves. The demarcation is a psychological remnant of the 1950s, when neighbor killed neighbor as the town’s most powerful families did battle for political control. Two hundred men were killed in that fighting -- more than Zgharta lost in the 15 years of national civil war.

“It was an apocalypse for me,” said Jabbour Douaihy, a Zgharta-born novelist who was a child when he witnessed the massacre of his family members inside a Catholic church. “It was the precursor to the war in all its aspects.”

When the civil war broke over Lebanon, bloodshed was general. Lebanon’s sects fought one another, but they also splintered along clan and tribal lines -- Christians battled Christians, Shiite Muslims killed other Shiites.

Back then, a hard-boiled Franjieh patriarch ruled Zgharta and, for a time, the rest of the country. That man, Suleiman Franjieh, was the grandfather of today’s interior minister and the uncle of Samir, the opposition leader. He was an old crony of the late Syrian President Hafez Assad, and most civil war accounts hold that he invited Syrian soldiers into Lebanon to protect the Christians during the civil war.

The elder Suleiman Franjieh passed that allegiance to Syria down to his namesake grandson. And for the last 15 years, as Lebanon struggled to forget its civil war, it seemed like a wise alliance. The Syrian soldiers stayed, and the influence of Damascus swelled. They were good years for the younger Suleiman and for other Syrian loyalists.

Mention his name in Lebanon, and odds are that the first thing you will hear, from friends and enemies alike, is that Suleiman was 13 when he was orphaned in one of the war’s notorious intra-Christian massacres.

Suleiman was away at school in 1978 when rival Christian gunmen stormed his family’s summer house in the mountains above Zgharta and opened fire. His father, a popular lawmaker, was killed, along with his mother and 3-year-old sister. Even the family dog was shot dead. Suleiman was yanked out of school and brought back to the village, where he fell under the tutelage and protection of his grandfather and Assad.

In the forests outside town, the boy drilled his clan’s youth brigades, training them in warfare. He was a teenager when he seized power from an uncle and became the head of the clan.

“Suleiman is the symbol of this regime and its big beneficiary,” said Nayla Mouwad, a Zgharta lawmaker and an outspoken critic of Syria. “He has been raised up by the Syrians. He was like the spoiled child of the regime.”

In the first postwar government, Suleiman became minister of state at 26. He later was anointed health minister, then interior minister. The folks at home prospered -- Zgharta locals say that people from the region were installed in government posts, vanity license plates appeared throughout town, and lucrative business deals with Syrian contacts were available.

As Suleiman’s power grew, his supporters in Zgharta began to whisper that he was in line for the presidency, a post reserved for a Christian under Lebanon’s system of sharing power by doling out government jobs according to religion. Whether for benefit or ideology -- or simple clannishness -- most of the family fell in line behind Suleiman.

But on Valentine’s Day this year, a tremendous bomb in Beirut brought Suleiman’s rise to an abrupt halt. The assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri upended the political order throughout the country, and swelled into a career disaster for Suleiman. People in the streets blamed Lebanese intelligence failures and Syrian conspiracies. In other words, they blamed Suleiman Franjieh.

The day after the blast, he appeared before television cameras, speaking of a mysterious suicide bomber and rejecting calls for an international investigation. When he talked to reporters a few days later, the muscles in his face worked.

“If fate had it that this happened to a key player in the country, it wasn’t our fault,” he said tersely. “We do not accept responsibility for the blood of Rafik Hariri.”

The tremors had already reached his hometown. In Zgharta, those who opposed Syrian domination had begun to speak up; some ventured to Beirut to join the protests against the government. The interior minister’s loyal followers grew nervous about his future.

“Once the Syrians leave, everybody will come back to their normal size, and the rules of the game will go back to the old rules,” said Mouwad, the Zgharta lawmaker. “And that will be a shock to him. He is with the losing side.”

Now Suleiman is refusing to join the government -- analysts say he is keen to distance himself during an international probe into Hariri’s assassination and the hypersensitive drafting of election laws for this spring’s parliamentary polls. Suleiman is expected to run.

For Samir Franjieh, Zgharta is a weekday memory, a place to savor on weekends. He still counts himself a member of the clan, but his ideas were born in the bullet-scarred libraries of Beirut, not in the alleyways of Zgharta. Samir believes that one of Lebanon’s central struggles is to balance history and future, to find a way to maintain family pride without sacrificing patriotism. He should know: It’s a fight he has been waging for years.

“You can’t say I’m not from the north, I’m not a Christian, I’m not Maronite, I’m not Franjieh,” Samir said. As twilight settled over the coast and traffic crawled along winding streets, he perched on a sofa in his apartment in a crowded Shiite neighborhood in West Beirut.

“The clan identity is part of you, but it’s not all of you,” he said. “You must take it into consideration, but within very defined borders. You must work to put all the identities together, to find a common identity.”

In a divided Zgharta, hard-line loyalists of the interior minister speak of Samir as somebody who left home, spent most of the war living among the Muslims in Beirut and emerged as a leftist, a word that’s uttered with a curled lip by many of the men who share his name. They say he doesn’t spend enough time in the village. They speak of him as a stranger.

But to the anti-Syrians in Zgharta, Samir is a long-suffering hero finally basking in the acclaim he deserves. They are gleefully aware that if the opposition triumphs in this spring’s parliamentary elections, it will be Samir, and not Suleiman, who will be closely intertwined with the national power structure.

Samir has the wronged air of a man who has lost his birthright -- he reminds a reporter that his father was in line to lead the clan, but fell ill, clearing the way for Suleiman’s side of the family to take charge. He tends to refer to his cousin with a cold distance, either as “Suleiman Franjieh” or simply “the interior minister.” He insists that there are more members of the Franjieh family on his side than his cousin’s -- that despite appearances, Franjiehs long for independence.

“My family, they’re not loyalists to the Syrians,” he said.

Samir argues that Lebanon’s woes are the fault of Syria, and speaks of the Syrian withdrawal as if it were a balm potent enough to calm his homeland.

He almost trembles with excitement as he describes today’s political instability as a great moment of catharsis for Lebanon. Sects are uniting, he says, and women and young Lebanese are finally coming into their own. He believes the opposition movement -- his movement -- represents the psychological end of the civil war.

This sort of optimistic vision troubles Syrian loyalists.

“In Zgharta, nobody wants the Syrian army in Lebanon, but we refuse what’s happening now in Lebanon, these demonstrations,” said Estifan Franjieh, a Maronite priest and loyal ally of the interior minister.

“You can’t change the geography. The Christians in Beirut, they live in another world. They want to live like they’re in Europe or the U.S.A., and it’s impossible.”

It was Good Friday, and the songs of Christ’s Passion piped over the main drag of Zgharta. The face of Suleiman Franjieh still papered the streets. But outside the John the Baptist cathedral, worshippers who spilled onto the bleached stones of the courtyard gave a more nuanced understanding of the shifting politics of Zgharta.

In a town where talking politics used to be a faux pas and criticizing Syria was taboo, churchgoers were keen to elaborate on the debate rolling over their country.

“The Franjiehs aren’t the only line in town. There’s also the other Franjiehs,” said Barbar Araji, a 63-year-old trader. “Even within the Franjieh family, there are those who follow Samir and the opposition, and those who follow Suleiman and the Syrian side.”

He was interrupted by his nephew, a burly, 39-year-old truck driver.

“As the young people of Zgharta, we like freedom and independence,” Antoine Shahid Araji said. “We are against every person who is allied with Syria.”

“Why are you saying that?” bellowed Barbar, his uncle, furrowing his brow and casting a fearful glance at the nearby worshipers. “Are you trying to cause trouble for us?”

But the younger man held his ground.

“For 15 years, the Syrian line has been the dominant line,” he said firmly. “But now [Suleiman’s] power base is decreasing. Before, nobody would speak the truth, but in the end people are going to speak their minds.”

Soon the last Syrian soldier will march over the border. The military withdrawal is supposed to be complete by the end of the month. The two Franjiehs are biding their time.

“He’s always been in the Syrian school, and now his tutors have left the country,” Samir Franjieh said of his cousin. “That’s his problem now.”