“They are the martyrs. You are the witnesses.” Thus proclaims one of Beirut’s ubiquitous political billboards overlooking the vast plaza now known as “Martyr’s Square.” Lebanon is filled with political signage that would give civics teachers mixed feelings, since much of it praises notorious terrorists. This poster, though, is sponsored by the country’s anti-Syrian “March 14th” coalition, and features the faces of ten men who became martyrs in the truly valiant sense of that word: they didn’t die as perpetrators of suicide bombings, but as targeted victims in the quest to free their country from foreign vassalage. All ten—their profiles etched in black against a blood-red background—were murdered in the last four years, most likely by the Syrian government or its accessories in Lebanon.
In mid-February, in this square overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese gathered in force to commemorate the murder of one of those men: former prime minister Rafik Hariri, who died in a massive car bombing four years ago. Days after his assassination, about 1 million people—a quarter of Lebanon’s population—camped out in the plaza to protest the three-decade-long Syrian military occupation of the country. The force from this “Cedar Revolution” (along with external pressure from the United States, France, and the United Nations) convinced Damascus that its control over Lebanon had become untenable, and on March 14, 2005, Syria withdrew its 15,000 soldiers and uprooted its intelligence apparatus. To honor that achievement, the coalition of Sunnis, Druze, Christians, and liberal Shi’a who had taken to the streets named their impromptu political alliance after this momentous date. (The New Opinion Group, a Lebanese nonprofit sympathetic to the March 14th movement, sponsored my recent visit to the country with several other journalists.)
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