Leftist students flex a muscle as they retain most student seats of AUB’s USFC

January 2003

BEIRUT - Leftist students flexed a muscle at the American University of Beirut (AUB) as they succeeded in sweeping the majority of seats of the University Student Faculty Committee (USFC).

Unlike the victory impression that other groups such as former Army Commander General Michel Aoun Free Patriotic Movement ‘s (FPM), the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) and the Amal Movement gave once the first round of results was announced in November, these groups lost their bid to the USFC.

Some 7,000 AUB students elect their 92 delegates to six Student Representative Committees (SRC), who in turn elect 17 representatives to the USFC whose membership also includes seven faculty members and is headed by the university’s President John Waterbury.

Former Beirut MP Najah Wakim’s People’s Movement, the independent leftist No Frontiers group and the Progressive Youth Organization (PYO), a branch of Chouf MP Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party, successfully joined efforts to form a leftist bloc, whose aim was to block the way for pro-government right wing groups such as Amal and the SSNP to representative posts.

The leftist bloc’s stance on the FPM was to keep them out of the way, since according to leftist activists, it was not feasible to cooperate with the Aounists after they supported the US Congress’s Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act, while at the same time they did not intend to confront them.

Consequently, leftists swept some 10 USFC seats leaving the FPM with three seats, independents with three seats while the SSNP controversially won a seat in the Faculty of Medicine and School of Nursing despite the failure to attain a quorum in the faculty’s SRC.

“It’s a defeat for us,” said FPM’s Jad Asmar, who won his bid to the USFC. “We were expecting more than three USFC seats, but some PYO supporters who promised to vote for us in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture changed their mind after Walid Jumblatt pressured them,” he said.

“Anyway, for us it is better to see leftists winning the council than to see SSNP supporters doing so,” he added.

But according to PYO’s newly elected USFC representative Wael Mansour, Jumblatt never interfered in AUB’s electoral battle. “Some PYO members were willing to vote for the FPM, but we threatened to suspend their membership if they did so,” he argued. “This is what party commitment is all about,” he said.

According to Wael Mansour, the PYO intended to promote “a third political line in AUB, a leftist one. Therefore, we had to choose between the rightist alliance of SSNP and Amal on the one side, and the FPM on the other side.”

Mansour said that alternatively they opted to cling with the two other leftist poles in AUB namely the People’s Movement and No Frontiers. “And we instructed all our members and those who were elected to SRCs to behave in light of this policy.”

This year’s success represents the seventh consecutive victory for the left in AUB since 1996. Reasons for this success, according to a veteran No Frontiers activist who preferred to remain anonymous “is that we do more than we talk.”

“We don’t have off campus leaders to dedicate our victory to or to receive instructions from. We are an independent student movement and we behave accordingly,” the activist argued.

“After SRC elections, every political party pretended that it swept the AUB elections. Media, for its part, inflated the minor victories of their preferred groups,” he said, adding that the fact of the matter was that the leftist bloc “won the majority of seats, but we were willing to conceal the victory until the end of the battle, that is after USFC elections.”

–         Courtesy of The Daily Star