Forty years after the start of Lebanon’s civil war, the wounds of war have not yet closed. The country today is still desperately unstable, rocked both by the civil war next door in Syria and its own internal politics – politics that are in many ways the legacy of the civil war.
As The National reported yesterday, there is still no closure for many thousands in Lebanon. Approximately 17,000 men and women are still missing – their families unable to mourn and their parents, if they are alive, still waiting for any proof of life or death. The emotional toll on tens of thousands of Lebanese is enormous and continuing.
It is worth recalling that reality as we contemplate the endless, grinding war in Syria. Too many have been quick to wash their hands of the conflict. They argue, with callous indifference to human lives, that the war needs to “burn itself out” – the logic being that, as with the Lebanese civil war, it will take years of conflict before the various parties are ready to lay down their arms and talk peace.
Behind that language of burning is a reality of bodies, buildings and the future of millions being destroyed. And even beyond the bloodshed is the intangible emotional toll of the conflict and its aftermath – just like in Lebanon, there are many disappeared, some in the dungeons of the Assad regime, some in the mass graves of ISIL. Can we really accept a similar timeline – that by 2050, there will still be Syrian families unable to discover what happened to their children?
That is why the region needs a more assertive solution for Syria. As with Yemen and as with far too many conflicts in our region, there is an indifference to the reality of lives in the Middle East – as long as these conflicts are “contained”, as Lebanon’s civil war was, the world appears content to wait. But we in the region should not be content with waiting. A “Lebanese solution” was not good enough for Lebanon in the 20th century – it is certainly not good enough for Syria in the 21st.
