Lebanese labor failure

BEIRUT - Alternative staff

November 2003

Lebanon by far enjoys the most democratic system among Arab countries when it comes to freedom of expression and assembly.

In the only country where an opposition demonstration can legally go out to the streets, and amid a deteriorating socioeconomic situation and a debt-ridden economy, merely 3,000 Lebanese demonstrators marched from the Barbir to the Mathaf area in Beirut to protest their government’s fiscal policies.

The low turnout was not surprising to several observers, however. “Workers, civil servants and students usually comprise the crust of protests,” said Youssef Haidar, a retired civil servant and labor union figure.

“Today, however, authorities succeeded in making students and workers distrust their leaderships,” he added.

According to Haidar, a series of practices showed that the labor and student leaderships only protested upon the instigation of the political factions already represented in the Cabinet and Parliament.

“Last year, the government introduced several tax hikes on salaries and retirements of employees in the public sector,” he said. “But the General Labor Confederation (GLC) refused to participate in anti-government protests leaving teachers in the streets alone.”

In 2002, teachers’ protests succeeded in scrapping items from the 2003 state budget that introduced tax increases.

A year later, the government proposed a budget without any increase in taxes. “The GLC suddenly decided to escalate its opposition.”

Maroun Qahwaji, a labor activist, told Alternative that when the GLC leadership’s behavior is incomprehensible, people would doubt the true intentions behind their opposition.

“In this year’s case, no one believed that the GLC was acting to protest the interest of workers, but was rather working upon the instigation of some politicians in a bid to settle some political scores,” according to Qahwaji.

“That’s why the labor and student movements in the only democratic Arab country are fading away, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel indicating that they would be revived sometime soon,” said Qahwaji.

The participation of several parties aggravated the already low turnout. The participation of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), for instance, was not enough to motivate several leftists who, in a news conference, described the protest as “a political maneuver.”

The several communist participants, holding their flags, did not mean that the leftist movement participated.

“The LCP leadership does not represent leftists anyway. It represents its own will and listens only to the orders it receives from the countries authorities,” said one of the leftists who attended the new conference opposed to the opposition protest.

“This is what we always meant that the Lebanese democracy was never true democracy. It was tribalism hidden behind a failing political life and a consequent failure in student, labor and other workers’ movements,” she added.

“We still have a long way of struggle to go,” the leftist female activist argued.