Morals come into question as Syrian fallout drifts towards Lebanese border

Syria's private sector is finally running out of patience with the status quo. But it may be too little, too late.

Michel Aoun, the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, offers the most curious example of Levantine moral bankruptcy. AFP

I was speaking to a monumentally successful Syrian businessman in the lobby of a Beirut hotel a month ago, who told me that for one of the few times in his life he faced a "moral dilemma".

He recognised that the uprising in his country was legitimate but the leadership, he had to admit, had created a stable environment for prosperity, part of the so-called unwritten contract between the ruling Alawite-Baathist party and the Sunni, and to a lesser extent Christian, mercantile class.

If that were to fall, he feared for his substantial investments. Would there be a vacuum? Would there be instability or even retribution meted out on a private sector that had been in benign league with the regime?

He had a point. As the world watched Syria lurch from bloody crackdown to bloody crackdown, with no clear "winner", it was the so-called silent majority, the name coined by the media for the business class, like the businessman in the hotel lobby, that waited to see which way the battle swung before committing to the fray.

More than 100 days into the uprising, the private sector is finally running out of patience. It feels that if Bashar Al Assad, the president, can't sort out the "problem" (if demanding democracy and human rights can be called a problem) then he should, to quote one man who spoke to The New York Times, "leave it to others". But it may all be too little too late.

Sorting out the problem is looking increasingly unlikely. The Assad regime would have to do a massive U-turn and actually implement genuine democratic reform - something it is loathe to do because it would spell its end.

In the meantime the economy, not to mention the Syrian pound, is in freefall. The tourists have gone elsewhere and the anticipated billions of dollars worth of foreign investments are quite naturally on hold. Turkey, once a potential ally, has almost run out of patience and even Qatar has abandoned the regime. Its only friend in the region is Iran.

But leaving it to "others" also throws up uncomfortable scenarios for the business class. For should Syria, for the first time in nearly half a century, find itself free of the Baathist jackboot, who would the "others" be, and would they be predisposed to a business community that not only sat out the revolution but would have been equally content had the other side prevailed?

Across an increasingly tense border in Lebanon there is no such moral dilemma for those backing the Assad regime. Instead there is hypocrisy by the truckload. Local support for Damascus falls into two groups. Hizbollah, Amal, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and the Marada Movement, quite naturally don't want their sponsor to disappear. They are unashamedly pro-Syrian. (This support does fly in the face of Amal and Hizbollah's stated commitment to champion the oppressed, but why let ideology get in the way of business?)

But it is Michel Aoun, the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, who offers the most curious example of Levantine moral bankruptcy. The former army commander, interim prime minister, political exile and now self-styled anti-corruption czar, is behind a regime that has reportedly murdered 1,300 of its own people, while at the same time championing a new Lebanon, one founded on justice and the rule of law.

Mr Aoun, who justifies his support for Damascus because he fears apres Assad the Salafist deluge, wants to set about the accounts of the finance ministry stretching back to 1993, one year after the late Rafik Hariri became Lebanon's third post-civil war prime minister and embarked upon his famous, and still ongoing, reconstruction project.

It was an era, his enemies say, that almost bankrupted Lebanon and one that contributed to the bulk of Lebanon's current US$55 billion (Dh202.01bn) public debt.

His target: his former political enemies in the former majority March 14 bloc, especially those close to Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik and a former premier himself, who he blames for almost all the country's problems. Last week Mr Aoun even cheekily suggested that a new wing in Lebanon's notorious Roumieh prison would be ready just in time to welcome members of Mr Hariri's entourage.

It is impossible to comment on these allegations. No one is naive enough to believe that Lebanon has only isolated pockets of corruption. Mr Aoun must surely know that the accounts of his own party and those of his political allies would probably wither under similar scrutiny, while his insistence that his son-in-law retain his ministerial portfolio hardly paints him as a model of probity.

He is tilting at windmills. Backing the Syrian regime (we'll forget his controversial support for Hizbollah) hardly makes him the ideal poster boy for promoting the good offices of the state. But logic, it appears, is not required in this neck of the woods. We have a tale of two countries and of two broken moral compasses.

Michael Karam is a communication and publishing consultant based in Beirut