DEARBORN, MICHIGAN
I will start with a story which I have heard a number of times over the years from some of the people directly involved in it. It reportedly occurred in Lebanon in the late 1950s. A young Armenian female schoolteacher had a suitor, the elder brother of one of her students. Encouraged by the favorable comments the younger sister had repeatedly made at home about her schoolteacher, the family had concluded that she might end up being a suitable mate for their elder son. The latter, in turn, had very good credentials as a prospective bridegroom - based on social expectations prevalent among Lebanese Armenians at the time. However, the reply from the schoolteacher’s family was a categorical “No!” Thereafter, an intermediary was dispatched to find out from the schoolteacher’s father what the real cause behind this rejection was. “We find nothing wrong in either the young man or his family,” was the explanation given. “The problem is that they are followers of one political party, while we support one of their rivals; every four years, there will be a period of strain in our relations as in-laws.”
For a historian, the shortcomings of this story as a primary source are more than evident. That is why this author followed the anthropological approach - including, the withholding of the names of the people involved - and will analyze it solely from an anthropological viewpoint. The schoolteacher’s father was a devout Hunchagian, sympathetic to the Soviet regime in Armenia. The rejected suitor’s only “fault” - in the father’s eyes - was being a young Tashnag activist. As a Hunchagian, the father disliked the broad lines of Tashnag policy toward Soviet Armenia. However, the contrasting Tashnag and Hunchagian attitudes remained largely unchanged throughout the seven decades of Communist rule in Armenia. Why, then, did the father underline the four-year cycle as the expected timing for at least a temporary straining of relations between the two would-be in-laws from “rival” political camps? That is where the Lebanese component of the equation comes in and makes this story relevant as an introduction to this analysis of the Armenian dimension of the recent parliamentary elections in Lebanon. Political differences among the supporters of the different Armenian political parties in the Diaspora (Lebanon included) are largely static. However, they return to the fore in Lebanon (and may even occasionally damage personal and family ties) at times of elections. There are not many elections of interest to Lebanese Armenians. Elections for Armenian Church and communal bodies have been non-events from around the 1940s and ’50s and they have long ceased to arouse any real interest among the eligible voters. Secondly, Lebanon does not directly elect its president, while municipal elections have been held only on a few occasions in its modern history. That leaves the parliamentary elections as the main forum for the expression of popular preferences. The elections of Sunday, June 7, 2009 were the 19th general legislative elections held in Lebanon since 1922, and the pattern of holding such polls once very four years has largely been observed - except for the Civil War years between 1975 and 1990. Armenians found refuge in Lebanon in large numbers from late 1921. They were granted Lebanese citizenship in 1924 and have regularly participated in all parliamentary elections since 1925.
This author did not hear of any ‘Armenian’ marriages breaking up or matchmaking efforts failing for political reasons in the run up to the recent elections. Hopefully, there were none. However, some twenty years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the worries expressed by the schoolteacher’s father about half a century ago remain surprisingly relevant. Five legislative elections have been held in Lebanon since the end of the Civil War. After two not very successful attempts - in 1992 and 1996 - to forge a common front prior to the elections, old rivalries have resurfaced within the Lebanese Armenian political spectrum. These were the third consecutive legislative elections, which pitted a coalition encompassing the Hunchagians and Ramgavars against the Tashnags for the parliamentary seats allocated to Armenians. The old Soviet Union is no longer in existence. Armenia has long bid goodbye to the Communist-dominated one-party system. “Fighting for Armenia’s independence and against Communism” versus “Supporting the fatherland irrespective of its political regime” may no longer be convincing slogans to mobilize the rank-and-file in the Armenian Diaspora. Moreover, shifting political alliances by the respective branches of these three parties with other (often more influential) political factions in Armenia no longer sustain the traditional “Tashnag versus the others” divide. Nevertheless, entrenched suspicions and lack of mutual trust among the supporters of rival Armenian parties in Lebanon (and possibly elsewhere in the Diaspora) refuse to fade away. Indeed, Armenian party leaders on both sides of the political divide in Lebanon have found in the past decade new slogans to justify the persistence of their old, and by now largely quasi-tribal, rivalries.
Lebanon is not the only country where the Armenian minority enjoys a constitutional right to be represented permanently in the host nation’s legislature. However, the country’s peculiar political system, based on ethno-confessional representation, the prominence its Armenians enjoyed across the Diaspora from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, and the large scale Armenian emigration from Lebanon to the United States, Canada, and to a lesser extent France and Australia during the last three decades make elections in Lebanon of greater interest for the rest of the Diaspora, compared to similar occurrences in, say, Iran or Cyprus. For this particular election, the vast amounts of money spent to lure emigrants from Lebanon (including Armenians) to fly in and vote added another incentive to this already prevailing interest.
THE LEBANESE ELECTORAL SYSTEM
Unlike the given examples of Cyprus and Iran, where Armenians choose their parliamentary representatives without any interaction with voters from the ethnic majority of the host-state or other ethnic and/or religious groups, Lebanon’s complicated electoral system makes the success of Armenian candidates dependent on forging timely alliances with political forces influential among the other communities also voting in the same constituency. At the same time, the chances of success among non-Armenian candidates are also at times conditional on getting a large number of votes from Armenians, particularly in a few constituencies where the latter are registered in large numbers.
Lebanon is a country with 18 officially recognized ethno-religious communities. Since the inception of the Lebanese parliament in 1922, its seats have been regularly pre-allocated to specified numbers of deputies for each of the numerically larger communities, usually in proportion to their overall size and geographical distribution. These quotas have been adjusted from time to time to partly reflect the demographic changes that have occurred since 1922. The existing distribution has been in force from 1992. It prescribes that there should be 64 Christians and 64 Muslims in a parliament of 128 members. Among the 64 Christians, there should be five Armenian Apostolic (called “Orthodox” in official Lebanese documents) and one Armenian Catholic deputies. Armenian Evangelicals are not recognized as a distinct ethno-confessional group in Lebanon. However, ethnic Armenians of Evangelical faith have the right to contest the single seat allocated to the Evangelical community as a whole, on a par with the other, Arabic-speaking members of the same religious community.
Parliamentary elections are conducted in Lebanon through multi-member constituencies, although the number of deputies returned from each of the different constituencies varies greatly because of regional and ethno-confessional considerations. For these elections, the number of seats in the 26 constituencies varied from two to ten. The sizes of these constituencies were also uneven; the smallest had some 45,000 eligible voters, while the largest ones had close to 250,000. Within each constituency, seats are pre-allocated again according to the relative size of the various communities registered to vote inside its boundaries. For example, in the First Constituency of Beirut (hereafter, Beirut I), five seats were allocated on this occasion to represent its 95,200 eligible voters - 25,100 Greek Orthodox, 16,600 Maronites, 16,380 Armenian Orthodox, 12,590 Greek Catholics, 4,790 Armenian Catholics, 10,150 from the smaller Christian communities, 5,800 Sunnis and 1,820 Shi’is. Roughly mirroring this ethno-confessional composition, voters in this constituency were asked to choose one deputy each from the Greek Orthodox, Maronite, Armenian Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Armenian Catholic communities.
Every deputy within this and other constituencies is elected not only by members of his/her own community, but by the whole electorate. In turn, voters can, irrespective of their own ethno-confessional affiliation, cast ballots listing names from their own and other communities, as long as they respect the pre-allocated quota for each community within their constituency. The candidates with the highest number of votes among each of the communities represented would be declared winners. Hence, in reality, in every constituency, candidates from a particular community run against other candidates from their other own community, although the votes each of them gets from the other communities may at times tip the balance. Under these provisions, cooperation among the various Armenian political factions to increase the total Armenian representation in parliament is not an option. Instead, they have to struggle amongst themselves in order to decide who will represent the Armenian community in parliament. Hence, pre-election campaign periods regularly witness intense inter-party rivalry and uncover internal divisions within the community.
Although candidates have the right and sometimes choose to run on an individual basis, it is undoubtedly beneficial to candidates for different communal seats within a particular constituency to run together on a single list as long as they observe the requisite number of seats pre-allocated to each ethno-confessional group. This approach facilitates the exchange of votes among their immediate supporters and increases the overall tally of each candidate on the same list. Legislators and pundits have long argued that the purpose of these multi-member constituencies is to force candidates to cross confessional boundaries and appeal to a broader multi-sectarian group of voters in their constituency. It is thought that this approach encourages the growth of moderation in politics and will eventually help develop a single, “Lebanese” political discourse.
Immediately prior to the elections, followers of rival lists in each constituency usually print the names of their joint candidates on pieces of paper, which are usually difficult to modify due to their small size. They urge voters to simply insert one of these printed lists in the official envelope that each receives from the election officer in the polling booth and drop it unaltered in the box. However, voters are not required by law to vote for “full” lists suggested to them. They can cross out the names of one or more candidates from a list and thus vote for an “incomplete” list. They can also substitute a name on one list with the name of another candidate - from the same religious group of course, but running either on a rival list or as an independent. Other voters prepare at home their own - sometimes, simply handwritten - lists, either “full” or “incomplete,” before going to the polling station. It is this freedom accorded to the voter that results in various candidates on the same lists getting scores different from one another.
The Lebanese electoral system is far from ideal. Its shortcomings are well known, but amending or fundamentally altering it has so far proved impossible because of a curious mixture of vested interests, inertia, and the usual human reluctance to probe into uncharted waters.
Owing to the absence of strong nation-wide political parties crisscrossing ethno-confessional, regional and clan loyalties, the Lebanese electoral system results in the formation of lists centered on a political party with considerable following within the constituency or, more often, a charismatic politician with a strong local base. The latter is usually a member of the landed aristocracy, a clan leader or, more recently, a wealthy businessman, who has made most of his money abroad. In some cases, registered political parties are simple guises for the followers of a charismatic politician or a clan leader, and the position of party leader is more often than not hereditary.
These so-called “chiefs of the lists” aim at forming a broad enough alliance within their constituency to ensure majority support for their list and the success of all its members. The principal criterion these “chiefs of the lists” follow in choosing their running mates is how many votes the latter can each bring with them; issues of ideological affinity are often pushed to the back burner, and the heads of large families or established businessmen are usually preferred as candidates to young idealists. Because of this pattern, successive elections in Lebanon reinstate a high proportion of members from the same large and/or prominent families. This makes the Lebanese parliament something like a closed club, a microcosm of families or clans representing local or communal interests. Very few women make it onto these lists; on most of these infrequent occasions, they represent a prominent family where a suitable male candidate is temporarily missing, usually because of age considerations.
The average Lebanese votes on the strength of personal or family loyalty to a political party, his/her clan leader, or a businessman-cum-politician, whichever has already bestowed his largesse upon the voter or one or more members of his/her extended family or promised them a favor upon his election. Such voters blindly cast the “complete” lists suggested to them by their so-called political idols, thus making the sweeping of all seats by a “strong” list in a given constituency a common phenomenon. If a political party, a charismatic leader, or any mixture of the two, have enough followers ready to vote for his/their “complete” list, a simple majority is enough to deprive his/their rivals of all parliamentary representation. This established trend brings the Lebanese electoral system close - in practice - to the phenomenon of the Electoral College in the United States presidential elections. In Lebanon, the metaphors of a “bus” (which makes you reach your destination if you manage to hop in) or a “steamroller” (which flattens every single obstacle facing it) are often used to underline the shortcomings of this system.
Under these conditions, becoming a member of a “strong” list, led by an influential party or an established political figure, is a cherished prize for any aspiring candidate; rarely can an aspiring, but relatively “weak” candidate run for office, let alone get elected, outside this established system of patronage and factionalism. Many aspiring candidates are therefore ready to obtain that privilege - and probable access to parliament - through paying considerable amounts of cash, adopting the political rhetoric of the “chief of the list,” and/or making pledges of absolute loyalty to the political whim of the latter in the next parliament and hence increasing his bargaining power vis-`-vis political bosses from other Lebanese regions for the next four years.
Political parties or individual bosses influential among the majority ethno-confessional group within a constituency consistently abuse their power by often deciding the fate of candidates from the smaller communities, who have pre-allocated seats within the same constituency. The candidates that they choose benefit from the large number of votes cast by the immediate followers of the “chief of the list” and often win a parliamentary mandate even if most members of their own (minority) community opt for a rival candidate from the same ethno-confessional group.
It should be noted, however, that there have been numerous instances in the past when two or more political parties and/or charismatic leaders have presented joint lists, but they have not honored their public pledges for cooperation on Election Day and have made side deals with individual candidates on the rival lists or others running individually. Such maneuvering has sometimes led to candidates failing to win, when other members of their list were successful. Armenian parties have also not been immune from such charges of collusion.
Another factor, which obstructs the necessary dynamism within the Lebanese electoral system, is the requirement for each person to vote where his family or clan was first registered, often decades ago. For most Lebanese, it is their ancestral village. Transferring the place of registration to a new location - say, the place of actual residence - is permitted under certain conditions. However, it is a bureaucratically cumbersome process, and few people - except newly-married women - attempt to do it. Lebanon witnessed rapid urbanization during the twentieth century, and many Lebanese who still vote in their ancestral villages have lived in Beirut, its suburbs and other urban centers for decades. The requirement to return to the native village on Election Day inevitably lessens the impact of recent socio-economic changes on voting behavior. It also makes the organization and cost of transportation an important factor during elections, both for the candidate and the voter, increasing the latter’s dependence on the former.
The predictability of voter behavior, based on trans-generational loyalty toward a preferred party, a local political boss or a clan (usually from the same ethno-confessional group as the voter) has provided successive governments - from the period of the French Mandate to Syria’s recent fifteen-year domination of Lebanese politics and beyond - with a highly effective tool to manipulate the outcome of elections. Electoral laws have frequently changed in Lebanon; rarely has the same law been in force for two successive elections. However, while changes in the law have not touched the basic principles of vote-casting and vote-counting described above, adjusting the size of electoral constituencies and thus affecting their ethno-confessional make-up has been a persistent ploy used to enhance the chances of candidates favored by the sitting government.
ARMENIAN VOTERS: NUMBERS AND POLITICAL TRADITIONS
The roots of the overall Lebanese social fabric go back to Ottoman times. Armenians, on the other hand, are relative newcomers; they have lived in Lebanon as a large community for less than a century. In political terms, however, this time span has been more than enough for them to adopt many of the established local traditions and adjust themselves to the “Lebanese” rules of electoral politics.
The Armenians of Lebanon have no landed aristocracy with prestige rooted in history; whatever leftovers they had of that medieval institution back in their homeland were wiped out as a consequence of the 1915 genocide. Their sole poles of political attraction remain their party allegiances. Some Armenians brought these allegiances with them from their ancestral lands. Others have adopted them because of the community school they attended or the neighborhood they live in, where one of these parties may be in control. The overwhelming majority of Armenian candidates who have made a serious showing for one of the Armenian Orthodox seats during the past 75 years, and more recently for the Armenian Catholic and Evangelical seats as well, have had the blessing of one or more of these parties. Having their candidates win in parliamentary elections provides these parties with a sense of self-confidence that they are still in control of a substantial following within the Lebanese Armenian community and that they will be in a better position to deliver the services their supporters need. Parliamentary representation may also help the winning party place its members or clients in the very few high-ranking civil service positions pre-assigned as the Armenian community’s quota within the Lebanese establishment. Although the Armenian parties have regularly felt obliged to forge electoral alliances with broader-based and more influential non-Armenian political factions, they have rarely pursued any political goal broader than maintaining their grip over their own, ‘Armenian’ electoral constituency. Moreover, they have never seriously attempted to develop a political vision, an ideology or a program of action on the pan-Lebanese scale. It can be argued that, on the broader Lebanese scene, the Armenian parties have seen themselves not as path-breakers but more as survivors.
Wealthy Armenian candidates have rarely challenged the authority of the Armenian parties; instead they have usually tried to secure places on the party-backed lists through one or more of the following means: (a) making substantial donations for Armenian causes dear to one of these parties and thus gaining prestige within the community at large; (b) making substantial donations to sporting, cultural or other organizations close to one of these parties and hence strengthening the latter’s reach within the community; or (c) committing themselves to cover all the costs of their own electoral campaign and sometimes even the costs of other Armenian candidates on the same list, thus relieving the sponsoring party’s coffers of a huge financial burden.
Women have also consistently been absent from among Armenian candidates since 1934 - with one exception in 1996, when Linda Matar, a Maronite-born candidate married to an Armenian Orthodox man, ran independently of the Armenian parties for one of the Armenian Orthodox seats in Beirut. Matar, a prominent women’s rights activist, received altogether 7,552 votes, or just 6 percent of the total votes cast in this large constituency. Among these 7,552 votes, only some 110 were cast by Armenian Orthodox and another 30 by Armenian Catholic voters. The rest she received from voters from other ethno-religious communities.
Among the three parties, the Tashnags have, over the years, steadily increased their share of Armenian voters, whom they manage to mobilize to vote in their favor. During the last three elections (from 2000 inclusive), over 75 percent of all Armenian voters have regularly followed the Tashnag party’s instructions. This success within the Armenian fold makes the Tashnag leadership aspire to assuming a role very similar to “chiefs of lists” as far as the Armenian seats in the various constituencies are concerned. The Tashnag leadership usually nominates one (or at most two) prominent party members for the up to seven seats Armenians can run for across the country. This leading Tashnag figure acts as the so-called “representative” of the Tashnag-led Armenian Bloc of Deputies and makes sure that all other members of the bloc do not stray from the party’s political line. The other candidates who get the Tashnag party’s support fall under either the above-described ideal category of wealthy businessmen or are public figures, independent of the other parties and usually with very little prior political experience on the pan-Lebanese scene. These chosen candidates have to pledge absolute loyalty to the decisions made by the party leaders during their forthcoming tenure in parliament. In the past, Tashnag invitations to the other two parties or prominent members of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) to take their place among the up to seven candidates approved by the Tashnags has also been conditional upon the latter’s tacit acceptance of following the Tashnag lead in parliament.
However, the last three elections have also shown that the relatively small size of the Armenian population in the country is a serious constraint to the Tashnag desire to be seen as the uncontested leading political force within the Lebanese Armenian community - both at the parliamentary and cabinet level.
Over three million Lebanese citizens - over the age of 21 - were eligible to vote in these elections, including those who live permanently outside the country. Among these potential voters, there were over 88 thousand Armenian Orthodox, some 16 thousand Armenian Catholics, and a lesser number of Armenian Evangelicals. Most Armenians were registered in the 1920s in the eastern sector of Beirut or in the neighborhood of Bourj Hammoud in the district of Metn, just north of the capital. Their descendents continue to vote in the various constituencies of Beirut and in Metn, although there is a continuing drift of relatively well-off Armenians from the poorer neighborhoods of East Beirut and Bourj Hammoud to other neighborhood in Metn, mostly to the north of Bourj Hammoud. The naturalization of some 17 (and perhaps as many as twenty) thousand Armenians in 1994 did not alter this distribution because of behind-the-scenes bargaining between the Tashnag leadership and the then Minister of the Interior, Michel al-Murr.
However, only within the boundaries of two municipalities across the country - those of Bourj Hammoud and Anjar - do the Armenians constitute the majority of registered voters. In these two localities, the Tashnag party hand picks all members of the respective municipal boards. Within Bourj Hammoud, the board also includes representatives from other ethno-religious communities registered in the neighborhood. Because of the continued loyalty of the vast majority of Armenian voters to the Tashnag party, both in Bourj Hammoud and Anjar, these municipalities have rarely seen any electoral contest; for decades, successive municipal boards have been elected unopposed.
The constituencies to elect members of parliament are much bigger, and Armenians constitute a numerical minority even in those constituencies where they are registered in high numbers. The five Armenian Orthodox, the Armenian Catholic and the Evangelical seats were allocated for the 2009 elections in the following five constituencies:
One Armenian Orthodox seat in the constituency of Metn - together with four Maronites, two Greek Orthodox and one Greek Catholic. Armenians constituted about 20 percent of the eligible voters in this constituency.
One Armenian Orthodox seat and one Armenian Catholic seat in Beirut I - together with one Maronite, one Greek Orthodox and one Greek Catholic. Armenians constituted over 22 percent of the eligible voters in this constituency.
Two Armenian Orthodox seats in Beirut III - together with one Sunni and one Shi’i. Armenians constituted about 33 percent of the eligible voters in this constituency.
One Evangelical seat in Beirut III - together with five Sunnis, one Shi’i, one Druze, one Greek Orthodox, one Evangelical and one “Minorities”. Armenians constituted a mere 2.5 percent of the eligible voters in this constituency.
One Armenian Orthodox seat in the Constituency of Zahlah - together with two Greek Catholics, one Maronite, one Greek Orthodox, one Sunni and one Shi’i. Armenians constituted a mere 6 percent of the eligible voters in this constituency.
Hence, in order to win in any of these constituencies, political forces backing rival Armenian candidates had to not only mobilize their own supporters but also forge political alliances with influential political forces outside the Armenian community in order to exchange votes with the latter. Since it is no longer disputed that the Tashnag mobilization power far exceeds that of their Armenian rivals, non-Armenian political factions have a vested interest in obtaining the support of the Tashnag party; the thousands of votes the Tashnags deliver often tilt the balance between two rival lists and affect the final outcome in races between candidates from other ethno-confessional groups. An altogether different tactic the non-Armenian rivals of the Tashnag party have resorted to during the last decade is to gerrymander the constituencies where Armenians are registered in such a way that the so-called “Armenian bloc vote” (i.e. the support base of the Tashnag party) loses its numerical significance in relation to a much larger bloc of voters from other ethno-confessional groups, who are expected to vote for the rival list. This tactic was resorted to in 2000 and again in 2009.
THE LONG ROAD TO THE 2009 ELECTIONS
A little history is evidently necessary to understand what was at stake for the Lebanese people in general and for the Armenians of Lebanon in particular as they went to the polls on June 7.
For the Lebanese in general, an appropriate starting point may be the joint United States-French decision in the summer of 2004 that the time had come for Syria to end its fifteen-year domination of Lebanese politics and withdraw its troops and intelligence apparatus from Lebanon. This was followed in September by a US- and French-backed United Nations Security Council resolution, which formally called for a total Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, plus the disarming of Hizballah, an Iranian- and Syrian-backed Shi’i organization opposed to Israel and operating from south Lebanon.
As western pressure on Syria increased, cracks became visible within the pro-Syrian coalition that had governed Lebanon since 1990. Two important components of that coalition, the largely Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) and Sunni billionaire Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri’s Future Movement broke away in quick succession and gradually forged close ties with the long-established and largely-Christian anti-Syrian opposition. The immediate pretext for this break was Syrian insistence that the presidential term of the incumbent Emile Lahud should be extended for another three years, something which the PSP rejected outright, while Hariri acquiesced, but apparently only under duress.
Regular parliamentary elections were scheduled to be held in the spring of 2005, and it was expected that Hariri would seek to obtain a large number of seats for his followers in the next parliament in order to return as Prime Minister with added strength. This would in turn put Syria under more pressure to withdraw from Lebanon.
Under these circumstances, the assassination of Hariri on February 14, 2005, plunged the country into a real crisis. Hariri’s followers and their Druze and Christian allies openly accused the Syrian government of being behind the murder. International pressure finally forced Syria to withdraw from Lebanon on April 26. The Lebanese political landscape became divided into large political blocs with diametrically opposed views on the country’s political identity and foreign policy orientation. True to established Lebanese traditions, these blocs relied on majority support among different ethno-confessional groups in the country, thus adding to their political disagreements a more dangerous religious dimension. The anti-Syrian (and eventually, by extension, anti-Iranian) alliance brought together the most powerful political factions among the Sunnis, the Druze and Christians (Armenians excepted). As a group, they formally named themselves the “March 14” coalition, after the date of a massive rally they held in downtown Beirut to mark the passing of one month from the assassination of Hariri. At the other end of the spectrum, the most powerful forces within the anti-American coalition were the Shi’i organizations, Hizballah and Amal. The latter openly called for the maintenance of good links with Syria and opposed United States and French meddling in Lebanese affairs.
The parliamentary elections, scheduled for May-June 2005, were now held with no Syrian military presence. General Michel ‘Awn, the most prominent anti-Syrian figure in Lebanon, returned to the country less than a month before the polls, after some 14 years of forced exile. His return soon created a schism within the “March 14” coalition. ‘Awn was dissatisfied with the small number of seats his followers were being given on the lists with which the “March 14” coalition would contest the forthcoming elections. He believed that this attitude was the consequence of a conspiracy to marginalize him hatched through an ad hoc understanding among the other factions within the “March 14” coalition, including the largely Christian Lebanese Forces and the Phalanges Party. ‘Awn broke away from the “March 14” coalition. He was forced to forge electoral counter-alliances with individual political bosses and political parties known for their earlier and allegedly continuing close ties to Syria (including the Tashnag party) and, ultimately, he scored a sweeping victory in the Christian-inhabited areas of Mount Lebanon (including Metn) and Zahlah.
This schism between ‘Awn and his rivals in the Christian-inhabited areas would shape the political debate among the Christians of Lebanon for the next four years. ‘Awn claimed, after the 2005 elections, that he was now the most popular Christian leader and that he should assume the presidency once President Lahud’s extended term came to an end. ‘Awn’s claim was challenged by other prominent figures in the Christian, especially Maronite, community. These opponents of ‘Awn were, in turn, backed politically - and, many suspect, also financially - by the Future Movement, which was now led by Sa’d al-Hariri, the assassinated prime minister’s son and political heir.
The coalition government formed immediately after the 2005 elections consisted of representatives of the “March 14” bloc (now minus ‘Awn and his followers), the Shi’i factions, Amal and Hizballah, and ministers appointed personally by President Lahud. At this stage, ‘Awn’s followers constituted the only major parliamentary bloc not represented in the cabinet. However, the balance within the cabinet soon changed as most of the ministers appointed by Lahud deserted him and grew closer to the “March 14” bloc. Thereafter, the Shi’i ministers realized that they had become an ineffectual minority within the cabinet. Ministers representing the “March 14” bloc were being openly encouraged by the United States, France and conservative Arab governments, and they were following policies aiming at the undermining of Syrian and Iranian influence both in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East. This Shi’i feeling of having become marginalized led to two important ministerial crises during the next three years. In December 2006, the Shi’i ministers resigned from the cabinet altogether in order to force its fall. However, the prime minister and the rest of the ministers were determined to continue on their own. They ignored arguments that the withdrawal of all Shi’i ministers from the cabinet was a breach of the constitutional traditions of Lebanese democracy. In return, the Shi’i speaker of parliament now considered the reduced cabinet line-up as unconstitutional, and he declined to invite meetings of the plenary session of parliament if the presence of government ministers was required by law. This effectively shut down the parliament for a period of about a year and a half.
For different reasons, ‘Awn and Hizballah were now both feeling shunned by the “March 14” coalition. Both were independently accusing the sitting government of arrogance and exercising despotic rule. These shared feelings pushed them closer to one another, and, on February 6, 2006, they signed a memorandum of understanding, which became a precursor to ‘Awn’s full transfer from the “March 14” coalition to the newly emergent broad opposition, where Hizballah constituted arguably the most influential component.
In November 2007, Lebanon was also left without a head of state when President Lahud’s extended term came to an end. The parliamentary factions failed to agree on a compromise candidate, and the opposition (including the two Armenian deputies close to the Tashnag party) was successful in denying the parliamentary majority a quorum to convene and formally elect a successor of its own choosing. A few months later, on May 7, 2008, serious violence erupted when the government decided to take measures to tighten the grip against Hizballah’s military wing. Hizballah claimed that these latest government measures were part of an international attempt to weaken its military capabilities against any future Israeli attempt to subdue Lebanon. Together with some of its allies in the opposition, Hizballah retaliated by launching a blitzkrieg against the positions of the Future Movement in Beirut and temporarily brought the capital under its military control. This raid on the Sunni-inhabited sector of Beirut was followed by bloody skirmishes between Shi’is and the Druze in areas to the southeast of Beirut. With Lebanon on the verge of a new civil war, which could ignite a more serious Sunni-Shi’i conflagration in many other potential hot-spots across the Arab world, intervention by the Arab League became more urgent and was carried out more intensely than at any time since the beginning of the crisis in September 2004. The Lebanese leaders were all pressured eventually to leave for Doha, the capital of Qatar, and were not allowed to return until they forged an agreement to end the paralysis of the various constitutional authorities in the country and create a relatively smooth and stable political atmosphere in advance of the next parliamentary elections, scheduled for June 2009.
The Doha Agreement of May 21, 2008 was a temporary measure to bring back some sense of normalcy to Lebanon at least until the next parliamentary elections. It had three components. First, all sides agreed to elect General Michel Sulayman, the commander of the Lebanese army, as the country’s next president. Secondly, a national unity government was formed to guide the country until the next parliamentary elections. Finally, the participants at Doha also hammered out an agreement on the boundaries of the constituencies that would be applied during the said elections. Thereafter, Lebanon, to all practical purposes, entered a pre-election period of wait-and-see, which extended just over a full calendar year.
ARMENIANS AND THE LEBANESE CRISIS OF 2004-2008
In the previous section, a few references were already made to the Tashnag party as one component of the Lebanese opposition from 2005 to 2009. In this section, we will deal with the impact of the Lebanese (and, some may say, the regional/international) crisis on the inner dealings of the country’s Armenian community and its political parties.
For a better understanding of the existing Armenian cleavages, it is advisable to go further back than we did in the case of Lebanon in general. For the Armenians of Lebanon, the year 2000 is probably a more correct starting point. This is when the appearance of unity among the three Armenian parties vis-`-vis the basic challenges facing Lebanon broke down, and it is yet to be restored.
Unlike the earlier and shorter civil war of 1958, when the three Armenian parties had found themselves facing each other across the barricades, in 1975, they decided to stay away from the armed conflict and adopt what was later termed a policy of positive neutrality. All three parties were enthusiastic supporters of the 1989 Ta’if Accords, which ended the fifteen-year-long civil war and, thereafter, they did not challenge Syria’s ever increasing grip over day-to-day Lebanese politics. The Tashnags and the Hunchagians disregarded the Christian boycott of the 1992 parliamentary elections and joined the pro-government list in the capital. The Tashnags also ran candidates in Metn and for the newly created Armenian Orthodox seat in the constituency of Zhahlah. Four years later, direct Syrian intervention obliged the three parties to forge an unprecedented (and to date unique) ‘Grand’ Armenian coalition and deliver about 80 percent of the Armenian votes cast in the capital to the list headed by Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri.
Problems began to surface two years later, when the Syrians imposed Lahud as Lebanon’s next president, against Hariri’s wishes. When the latter refused to form the first government under Lahud and preferred to move to the opposition, the pro-Tashnag deputies (who had been elected on Hariri’s list two years earlier) deserted him and voted confidence to the next anti-Hariri government. Only the Hunchagian and the AGBU (pro-Ramgavar) representatives among the seven Armenian deputies in parliament stayed loyal to Hariri.
At the time of the next parliamentary elections in 2000, the experiment of 1996 could not be repeated. Hariri was now disinclined to give the Tashnags a blank check as far as the Armenian seats in parliament were concerned. Two of his new conditions proved unacceptable to the Tashnags: (a) Hariri’s insistence to have an Arabic-speaking Evangelical person fill that seat, instead of Armenian Evangelical candidates who had served in parliament continuously from 1972 to 2000; and (b) Hariri’s insistence that all candidates (including Armenians) running with him in Beirut should pledge to stick together as one bloc in the next parliament and vote as a group on all issues. The Tashnags rightly argued that this second condition would make the Armenian vote in the next parliament subservient to Hariri’s wishes. Their position was that - according to a practice going back perhaps to 1957 - all Armenian deputies elected with Hariri in Beirut should become members of a separate Armenian bloc of deputies, which would remain friendly to Hariri, but would reserve the right to decide on each political issue on its own merits. This newly emergent rivalry between Hariri and the Tashnags in the three constituencies of Beirut was seen at the time as a microcosm of a broader, nation-wide struggle over influence between Lahud and the former prime minister. With the Tashnags refusing to go along with Hariri’s terms, the latter distributed the four Armenian slots on his lists in Beirut among Agop Kassardjian (Ramgavar), Yeghia Djeredjian (Hunchagian) and two relatively unknown independents, Jean Oghassabian and Serge Toursarkissian.
The 2000 elections showed that Hariri enjoyed the unswerving support of the overwhelming majority of Sunni voters in the capital. Since Sunni voters constituted a plurality in all three constituencies in Beirut, all candidates supported by Hariri - including the four non-Tashnags mentioned above - were elected as deputies. Hariri’s win also meant the loss of an ethnic Armenian deputy in the next parliament - that holding the Evangelical seat.
Although electoral constituencies in Lebanon are mostly multi-confessional, the electoral law has stipulated, since 1960, that, wherever possible, voters from the same ethno-confessional community should preferably vote in separate polling booths, even within the confines of the same polling station. This requirement makes it possible to find out the so-called ethno-confessional distribution of votes received by each candidate. In all three constituencies in Beirut, the candidates proposed by the Tashnag party in 2000 received well over 75 percent of the votes cast by Armenian voters - Orthodox, Catholic and presumably also Evangelical. The winning Armenian candidates on Hariri’s lists had pushed ahead only through the votes cast by voters from other ethno-confessional communities, notably Sunnis. The Tashnag prominence among the votes cast by Armenians was also evident in the constituencies of Metn and Zahlah. The peculiarities of Lebanese electoral law dictated, however, that the party which mobilized some 80 percent of ethnic Armenian voters across the country would hold only two of the six seats allocated to the same community in the next parliament: Sebouh Hovnanian, a prominent Tashnag politician, elected in Metn; and George Kassardji, a Tashnag ally, in Zahlah.
Hence, the six Armenian deputies in the 2000 parliament belonged to two blocs, which did not see eye-to-eye on many issues on the pan-Lebanese scene. The four Armenian deputies elected in Beirut formed part of Hariri’s parliamentary bloc. Hovnanian and Kassardji, on the other hand, declared themselves to constitute the Armenian Bloc (controlled by the Tashnag party), which had previously had up to seven members. However, the nature of this Armenian Bloc in the post-2000 era remained somewhat ambiguous, as both Hovnanian and Kassardji also remained members of the parliamentary blocs with which they had been elected in Metn and Zahlah, respectively. At times it appeared to outsiders that both Hovnanian and Kassardji were members of two parliamentary blocs at the same time.
Post-election developments did not assist any rapprochement between Hariri and the Tashnags. Hariri returned to the prime minister’s office immediately after the elections, and he nominated Hovnanian, the only surviving Tashnag deputy, for his 30-member cabinet. However, this appointment failed to satisfy the Tashnags, and it even put the Armenian deputies in Hariri’s parliamentary bloc in a difficult position. The problem for both was the absence of a second Armenian cabinet minister - either Orthodox or Catholic - which Armenians expected to have in a cabinet of 30 members - according to the power-sharing quotas agreed as part of the package to end the civil war. Tashnag demands that the situation be remedied immediately, from Hovnanian’s initial refusal to assume his ministerial responsibilities to the holding of public rallies and even a three-hour, precautionary strike, did not make any difference. Hariri simply admitted that a mistake had been made and that it would be corrected when the next cabinet was formed. Tashnags came to believe that Hariri was intent on weakening the Armenian community and diluting its specific political identity through the marginalization of the Tashnag party.
When the next cabinet was formed in 2003, the situation was indeed corrected in form, but yet again failed to satisfy the three Armenian parties and other active members of the Armenian community. Hovnanian was retained as minister, but the second ‘Armenian’ ministerial portfolio went to Karim Pakradouni, the leader of the Phalanges Party, which has very few Armenian members and cannot be seen as reflecting the Armenian political mood in the country. Pakradouni was born of an Armenian father and was hence registered as Armenian Orthodox. However, he had lived most of his life distant from the immediate concerns of Armenians in Lebanon.
In the meantime, the Tashnag party was continuously questioning the legitimacy of the four Armenian deputies allied to Hariri and trying to downplay their significance as much as possible. The Lebanese electoral law does not require that a deputy representing a certain community in parliament should obtain the majority of votes cast by members of the same community in that constituency; the legality of the election of Djeredjian, Kassardjian and others could not be challenged before the Constitutional Court. However, the Tashnag print media and its radio station, The Voice of Van, consistently ignored these four Armenian deputies, making sure that they would not appear even in group photos in the pages of Tashnag newspapers and that their names would not be mentioned in news reports of events they had attended in their official capacity. Their names would even sometimes be crossed out on paid communiquis issued by other organizations. (In time, this also led to the counter-habit of crossing out the name of the Tashnag deputy in communiquis printed in Hunchagian or Ramgavar newspapers.) Moreover, the control that the Tashnags exercise over the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia (based in Antelias, north of Beirut) and the Armenian Prelacy in Lebanon meant that the links of these deputies with these religious institutions and their elected bodies would remain very formal at best.
Hariri’s influence over the Sunni electorate in Beirut was not waning, however, and the Tashnag leaders realized that sooner or later they had to mend their fences with the prime minister so that the setback of 2000 would not be repeated during the next polls, scheduled for the spring of 2005. In this regard, the municipal elections in 2004 were seen as a positive step in bridging the gap between Hariri and the Tashnags. Unlike for parliamentary elections, there is no requirement in Lebanon that the distribution of seats at the municipal level also be based on ethno-confessional quotas. Hariri was worried that if a serious electoral contest occurred in Beirut, Sunni plurality could easily translate into a new municipal board in the capital where the Christian communities would be severely underrepresented or even missing altogether. Hence, he worked for and succeeded in forming a coalition divided evenly between Christians and Muslims and representing many of the shades of political opinion in the capital. This list was predictably strong enough to win all the seats on offer. As the Armenian candidates on his list, Hariri retained the two Orthodox councilors who had been elected in 1998 - before his break with the Tashnags. He also replaced the Armenian Catholic candidate with a new candidate close to the Tashnag party. In return, the Tashnags worked hard to deliver as many votes to Hariri’s list as possible.
International pressures hampered the further development of this Hariri-Tashnag rapprochement. As the Lebanese political scene became polarized after September 2004 between loyalist and anti-Syrian blocs, the Tashnags were seen by their opponents to be firmly entrenched within the pro-Syrian camp of President Lahud. The Tashnags did not object to the extension of Lahud’s presidential term and, unlike the Hunchagians and Ramgavars, they did not push their followers to attend the March 14, 2005 rally of anti-Syrian forces. In consequence, Sa’d al-Hariri refused to cooperate with the Tashnags during the parliamentary elections of May-June 2005. The Tashnag demands on this occasion had been more modest than in 2000. The electoral law had not changed, and the young Hariri was now even more popular among the Sunnis in Beirut than his late father had been in 2000. The Tashnags agreed to give up any attempt to re-take the Evangelical seat. They also endorsed the candidacies of Djeredjian and Kassardjian, the incumbent Hunchagian and Ramgavar deputies. In return, they only asked to replace Oghassabian and Toursarkissian with two candidates approved by the Tashnag party. Even this proved too much for Sa’d al-Hariri to accept. He was rightly confident of a total victory in Beirut - with or without the Tashnags. Realizing that under these conditions their candidates would inevitably lose, the Tashnags withdrew from the electoral race and declared a boycott in Beirut. The four sitting Armenian deputies allied to Hariri retained their seats unopposed. For the Tashnags, the only consolation was the fact that very few Armenians actually went to the polls; this was proof that the Tashnag party had fully maintained its following among the Armenians of Lebanon, despite its reduced presence in parliament since 2000.
Yet again the only representation the Tashnags would have in the 2005 parliament came from Metn and Zahlah. Hagop Pakradouni (no relation to Karim) replaced Hovnanian in Metn, while Kassardji was returned in Zahlah. Both victories were achieved through a new electoral alliance the Tashnags had just forged with ‘Awn. The anti-Hariri disposition of both ‘Awn and the Tashnags proved sufficient common ground for them to establish an alliance, which survives to date.
The significance of the developments of 2004-2005 for the Armenians of Lebanon is that what had started in 2000 as ’normal’ inter-party rivalry for parliamentary representation and political influence, with mostly local implications, had gradually metamorphosed in an unplanned manner into the diverging of paths among the rival Armenian parties in Lebanon on fundamental issues related to the country’s political identity and foreign policy orientation. In 2000, both Lahud and Hariri were seen to be under the Syrian political umbrella. Despite their local rivalries, the Tashnags (closer to Lahud) and the Hunchagians and Ramgavars (both allied to Hariri) did not feel obliged to make choices related to Lebanon’s (and consequently their own parties’) relations to the United States, Syria and Iran - three countries with significantly large Armenian communities and with important diplomatic, commercial and other links to Armenia. After 2004, however, relations between the Hariri family and the Syrian government were at their lowest. Consequently, by 2005, the pro-Lahud Tashnags had become identified (especially by reductionist foreign diplomats and journalists) as pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian, while, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the pro-Hariri Hunchagians and Ramgavars were now labeled as pro-American, anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian. Echoes of the ideological divide of the Cold War years had returned to haunt the Armenians of Lebanon and partly strain some of their contacts with the Armenian communities in Syria and Iran. However, since the problems facing Lebanon were more of regional, rather than global, character, the new (Lebanese Armenian) ideological interpretations of pre-existing intra-Armenian rivalries did not attain the acuteness of similar divisions back in the 1950s, at the time of the story told at the very beginning of this analysis. The Republic of Armenia and Lebanon are part of different geopolitical regions these days. The implications of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Sunni-Shi’i split, so important for Lebanon, are almost non-existent in the context of politics in Yerevan. The Lebanese are not much concerned with US-Russian and Turkish-Russian rivalries, let alone the implications of Caspian oil and gas politics. Only the US-Iranian rivalry is of sufficient concern to both of these geopolitical regions. Hence, unlike the 1950s, understanding Armenian politics within the Lebanese context today has very little to offer to students of politics in Armenia and vice versa. In order to decide whether this divergence of paths is simply the short-term outcome of discrete political developments or an unmistakable sign of the gradual distancing of Armenian Diasporan politics from homeland concerns and the increased rootedness of Armenian Diasporan communities within their host-states a separate in-depth study is definitely needed.
Back in Lebanon, the Tashnag alliance with ‘Awn was strengthened further immediately after the 2005 elections, when the new prime minister refused to take a Tashnag representative in his 24-man cabinet. The only Armenian minister in the new government was Oghassabian, a Hariri ally since 2000. ‘Awn, in turn, refused to accept ministerial portfolios for his Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) unless his key electoral allies (including the Tashnags) were also represented. This condition made by ‘Awn effectively condemned him to the ranks of the opposition for the next three years. At the same time, it made the Tashnags more reliant on ‘Awn to achieve their political objective of becoming accepted as the main and hopefully the only representatives of Armenians in Lebanon.
After ‘Awn signed the memorandum of understanding with Hizballah and formally joined the coalition in opposition to the “March 14” cabinet, the Tashnags, too, found themselves automatically within the ranks of this opposition. They formally participated in all major actions of protest undertaken by the opposition. At the same time, they consistently opted to keep a lower profile, refraining from harsh rhetoric and avoiding taking part in any act of violence.
Despite the contrasting allegiances of the three Armenian parties after September 2004, a joint delegation representing their deputies in the Lebanese parliament - Hagop Pakradouni, Djeredjian and Kassardjian - regularly took part in all the National Dialog sessions held after March 2006. In May 2008, this same three-man delegation also flew to Doha. The national unity government negotiated in Doha made it possible for Tashnags to return to the cabinet after a hiatus of three years. However, the Armenian star during the deliberations in Doha was Pakradouni. The thorniest issue still to be discussed in depth was the shape of the electoral constituencies for the forthcoming parliamentary elections. Within this context, the subdivisions in Beirut were very critical, and the distribution of Armenian seats relative to the size of Armenian voters in each of the constituencies to be determined was one of the most awkward bones of contention. The opposition nominated Pakradouni as one of its three delegates in the subcommittee to discuss and come up with an agreement on this issue. There were no Armenians among the three deputies representing the “March 14” coalition; Djeredjian and Kassardjian left that task to their non-Armenian allies in the Future Movement and the Lebanese Forces. Members of this subcommittee and the other participants in Doha took it for granted that most Armenian voters would follow the Tashnag party and that the latter would side with ‘Awn. Hence, both Djeredjian and Kassardjian on the one hand and representatives of the Future Movement and other “March 14” factions in the subcommittee on the other hand had a common interest in designing the constituencies in such a way that the elected Armenian deputies would be dependent, as much as possible, on votes to be received from the Sunni community and, at the same time, Armenian voters would not have much influence on the success or failure of candidates from the other communities. After much wrangling, a compromise was struck whereby Beirut was divided into three constituencies (see above). Armenian influence in Beirut III would be minimal; Sunni voters would constitute some 70 percent of all eligible voters there, and it was expected that they would vote dutifully for all candidates proposed by Hariri, including the candidate for the Evangelical seat. That made the “recovery” of the Evangelical seat by the Armenian community during the 2009 elections a near impossibility. Beirut I would be majority Christian, and the Armenian votes would play an important role in deciding the outcome of the expected race between ‘Awn and his Christian opponents in the “March 14” bloc. Beirut II would be evenly divided between Armenian, Sunni and Shi’i voters. However, any real electoral race in this constituency was avoided through a separate gentlemen’s agreement, whereby its four seats were divided evenly between the “March 14” bloc and the opposition; within this framework, one of the two Armenian Orthodox seats would go the Tashnags and the other to their Armenian rivals in the “March 14” bloc. The large number of Armenian voters registered in the neighborhood of al-Mudawwar (which was made part of Beirut II) would be separated from the smaller, yet significant number of registered Armenian voters in the adjoining neighborhoods of al-Rumayl and al-Ashrafiyyah (now both part of Beirut I) and would not influence the outcome of the expected hot contest there.
Overall, the Doha Agreement guaranteed that the Tashnags would recover at least one of the four seats they had “lost” in 2000 - and this without risking an electoral race. The Tashnags also acquired in Doha a fair chance to contest and win two other seats in Beirut I. Since the Doha Agreement did not alter the boundaries of the constituencies of Metn and Zahlah, the overall conclusion of pundits was that the Tashnags could now realistically aspire to five of the six ‘Armenian’ seats on offer. Pakradouni was received as a hero by Tashnag supporters in Lebanon, and soon the party’s Central Committee launched the slogan that 2009 would be the year of the restoration of the Armenian Bloc in the Lebanese parliament.
THE ARMENIAN CANDIDATES AND THE FORMATION OF RIVAL LISTS
Because the electoral constituencies agreed in Doha were much smaller than those of previous elections in the post-civil war era, the overall number of candidates jumped considerably compared to the previous polls. When candidate registration closed at midnight on April 7 - exactly two months before Election Day - 702 candidates had submitted formal applications to run for the 128 seats on offer. Among them were 28 Armenians for the possible seven seats, including the Evangelical seat in Beirut III. Needless to say, there were yet again no women among the registered Armenian candidates. Indeed, throughout Lebanon, the total number of women candidates was miserably low.
A number of these early candidate registrations were simply of a tactical nature. For example, the Tashnag party had registered two candidates for the single Armenian Orthodox seat in Metn. Shortly after the close of the registration period, one of them, the businessman Nazaret Saboundjian, withdrew, leaving the incumbent Hagop Pakradouni as the sole registered candidate for that seat. According to Lebanese law, Pakradouni was immediately declared the winner, becoming the first deputy to be elected unopposed to the next parliament.
The Lebanese electoral law gives a further two-week period for registered candidates to withdraw and get back part of their deposit. In addition to Saboundjian, five other Armenian candidates used this opportunity. Four of them were in Beirut II, which was the subject of a side-agreement in Doha, described above. Alain Balian, a former vice-governor of the Lebanese Central Bank and a candidate close to the Tashnags, withdraw to make way for the unopposed election of Arthur Nazarian, the official candidate of the Tashnag party for this seat. In the opposing camp, two registered Hunchagian candidates, Mardiros Jamgotchian and Hagop Gergerian, also withdraw, leaving their party comrade, Sebouh Kalpakian, as the only candidate supported by the “March 14” bloc. The last of the Armenian candidates to withdraw in this constituency was Raffi Madeyan, a political maverick, who had unsuccessfully challenged the Tashnags on an anti-Syrian platform in Metn during the previous three elections - 1996, 2000 and 2005. Since the last elections, however, Madeyan had switched sides and drawn closer to the (pro-Syrian) opposition. His withdrawal should probably be interpreted as a personal gesture to the opposition in general, which was, in turn, playing on Tashnag resentment against the Hariris and hoping that, by satisfying the Tashnags through the ‘Armenian’ seats, it would benefit from ‘Tashnag’ votes in favor of other candidates on the opposition lists. With Nazarian and Kalpakian remaining the only two candidates for the two Armenian Orthodox seats in Beirut II, they, too, were immediately declared winners.
Hence by the deadline of April 22, three of the six Armenian seats in the next parliament had been filled. These were the only three such cases across the country. The other 125 seats (including two Armenian Orthodox, the Armenian Catholic and the Evangelical seats) would all be contested on June 7. The fact that both the Tashnags and their Armenian rivals proceeded into the pre-election campaign period confident that each of them would be represented in the next parliament by at least one or two deputies made the campaign within the confines of the Armenian community less tense than in either 2000 or 2005. Under these conditions calmer than before, Armenian Orthodox clergy were also more restrained in their public statements. Consequently, the usual complaints by the anti-Tashnag parties that some of the higher-ranking clergy openly break the neutrality demanded of them and side with the Tashnags also remained absent on this occasion.
Despite the fact that over 580 candidates were still officially running for the remaining 125 seats, the polarized nature of Lebanese politics since September 2004 made it obvious that only those candidates who would secure a place on either the “March 14” or opposition lists would have a real chance of getting elected. Having two strong rival lists in each constituency became the norm across the country, including the three constituencies where ‘Armenian’ seats were still for the taking.
The Tashnag party was the sole Armenian political organization committed to the opposition camp. It hence enjoyed almost total freedom in choosing its candidates before formally presenting them to the public in a ceremony on March 29. In addition to Pakradouni and Nazarian, the Tashnags sponsored the candidacies of Vrej Saboundjian, an industrialist, for the Armenian Orthodox seat in Beirut I and Gregoire Calouste, the principal of the Armenian Catholic St. Mesrob College, for the Armenian Catholic seat in the same constituency. In Zahlah, George Kassardji, who had held the seat since 1992 and had been a Tashnag ally since 1996, would run again. There would be no challenge to the Tashnag candidate in Zahlah from Karim Pakradouni, the former leader of the Phalanges Party and now a prominent figure in the opposition. Earlier, Karim Pakradouni had not hidden his desire to run for the Zahlah seat, especially when many believed that Kassardji might retire because of poor health. Kassardji’s insistence to run again, coupled with the opposition’s commitment to flatter the Tashnags, probably convinced Karim Pakradouni that he should postpone yet again his aspirations to become a deputy. All five candidates sponsored by the Tashnags pledged that, if elected, they would establish an Armenian Bloc of deputies in the next parliament, which would be guided by the decisions of the Tashnag political leadership and constitute proof of the re-emergence of Tashnag dominance in Lebanese Armenian parliamentary politics.
A few days after announcing the names of its five official candidates, the Tashnag party also partly adopted the candidacy of George Viken Ishkhanian for the Evangelical seat in Beirut III. Ishkhanian had submitted his candidacy independently. Moreover, his chances of getting elected were deemed to be very small in a constituency where Hariri’s electoral base was overwhelming. Toward the end of the campaign period, Ishkhanian attended some of the rallies held by the Tashnag party. However, the latter were almost totally geared toward voters in Beirut I. Unlike the other Armenian candidates running in Beirut I, Ishkhanian did not address any of these rallies. He also did not appear in the official group photo of Tashnag-sponsored candidates.
The selection of Armenian candidates among the “March 14” political factions proved more protracted and received more journalistic scrutiny. In the run-up to the elections, three Armenian political organizations formed an ad hoc electoral alliance and pledged to work together under the “March 14” umbrella. The Hunchagians and Ramgavars were joined by the Free Lebanese Armenian Movement. The latter is a relatively small offshoot of the Tashnag party. Its leaders first disagreed with the Tashnag party’s allegedly pro-Syrian political orientation in Lebanon, then broke away and were formally recognized as a separate political organization in Lebanon in 2007. Together, these three factions contended that all Armenian candidates running on the “March 14” lists across Lebanon should enjoy their blessing.
Among the incumbent Armenian deputies in Beirut - all allied to Hariri - Djeredjian would retire from parliament, but he made sure that his slot on the lists to be supported by Hariri would go to another Hunchagian. Indeed, he was eventually ‘replaced’ by Sebouh Kalpakian, a former principal of a Hunchagian-controlled Armenian school in Beirut and a former chairman of the Administrative Board of the Hunchagian party in Lebanon. He had left for Australia almost a decade ago but returned to Lebanon specifically to ‘succeed’ Jerejian, an old ally in internal party affairs. Reports in Arabic language newspapers talked of internal disagreements within the Hunchagian party on the selection of a ‘successor’ to Djeredjian. Indeed, Sarkis Chapootian, the chairman of the party’s Administrative Board in Lebanon, was replaced at this juncture by Mardiros Jamgotchian. Ararad, the Hunchagian newspaper in Beirut, gave no explanation regarding this change of the guard.
The three other incumbent Armenian deputies in Beirut all wanted to run again. However, since the Doha Agreement had practically conceded one of the Armenian Orthodox seats in the capital to the Tashnags, one of the two sitting Armenian Orthodox deputies had to give way. The unfortunate choice initially fell on Oghassabian, who was now expected to contest the Armenian Orthodox seat in Metn. That slot on the “March 14” lists had become vacant after Madeyan, the defeated “March 14” candidate in 2005, had defected to the opposition. However, the doors of Metn were also soon closed for Oghassabian when influential figures on the “March 14”-supported list in that constituency decided, for tactical reasons to be explained below, not to include an Armenian Orthodox candidate on their list and allow the Tashnag candidate, Hagop Pakradouni, to get elected unopposed.
Things soon got more complicated, though a little rosier for Oghassabian. The “March 14” leadership - more specifically, Sa’d al-Hariri, whose Future Movement was undoubtedly the strongest “March 14” faction in the capital - preferred to allocate the ‘safe’ Armenian Orthodox seat in Beirut II - acquired through the Doha Agreement - to Kalpakian, the new Hunchagian candidate, rather than the Ramgavar Kassardjian. The only option for the latter was now to run in Beirut I. However, Kassardjian faced other difficulties there. In this mostly Christian constituency, the “chief” of the “March 14” list was Michel Far’awn, with whom Kassardjian’s personal relations were reportedly cool, in spite of their political alliance going back to 2000. Far’awn had his own preferred candidate for that same seat: the young Sebouh Mekhdjian, a long-time and prominent staff member in his private office. Kassardjian withdrawing from the race and the Ramgavars adopting Oghassabian as their candidate ended up being the compromise solution. Thereafter, Mekhdjian was quietly asked to withdraw from the race, and Oghassabian’s candidacy was formally supported by Far’awn, the Ramgavars and the Hunchagians.
Serge Toursarkissian, the expected “March 14” candidate for the Armenian Catholic seat in Beirut I, also faced a surprise challenge coming from the mostly Maronite Lebanese Forces. This challenge went beyond the personal rivalries which were at stake with respect to the Armenian Orthodox seat in the same constituency. In this case, a largely non-Armenian organization nominated Richard Kouyoumdjian, one of its ethnic Armenian members, as a candidate for an ‘Armenian’ seat which community-oriented Armenian parties consider as their exclusive preserve. The reaction of the three above-mentioned Armenian political factions within the “March 14” camp was predictably very strong.
Kouyoumdjian’s nomination was not a first in the history of Armenian participation in Lebanese parliamentary elections. The Lebanese Communist Party nominated an Armenian, Haroutioun Madeyan, Raffi’s maternal grandfather, on three separate occasions - in 1934, 1951 and 1953. In all three cases, however, Madeyan ran independently of the stronger lists, where the Armenian parties had their own candidates, and had few chances of winning. In 1996, the Phalanges Party also nominated two Armenian candidates (Karim Pakradouni and Antoine Chader), but they also ran independently of Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri’s list, which had the backing of the three Armenian parties. The eventual failure of these Phalanges candidates was also never in doubt. More problematic was the precedent of Joseph Chader, an Armenian Catholic, who was also the vice-president of the Phalanges Party. Chader’s personal and professional links to the rest of the Armenian Catholic community, as well as its religious and community structures were tenuous at best. Nevertheless, Chader ran regularly for either the Minorities or the Armenian Catholic seats from 1947 to 1972, and he was successful most of the time. His candidacy was never challenged by the Tashnag party before and during the Tashnag electoral alliance with the Phalanges from 1960 to 1972. Indeed when the Tashnags and the Phalanges had their difference prior to forming joint lists both in 1968 and more seriously in 1972, their disagreement centered on the ethnicity of the Evangelical and not the Armenian Catholic candidate. On three occasions in the 1950s, the anti-Tashnag Armenian coalition did challenge Chader with Noubar Toursarkissian, another Armenian Catholic, but with closer ties to the community. On every occasion, however, the opposition list that Noubar Toursarkissian was on lost. It was only after the end of the civil war in 1990 that the Tashnags claimed the Armenian Catholic seat, and they actually held it from 1992 to 2000. Thereafter, the seat passed on to Serge Toursarkissian.
Within the “March 14” bloc, there was a prior consensus that its constituent organizations would contest elections with unified lists in every constituency across the country. This premise predictably opened the door for a lot of give-and-take among the various “March 14” factions on how many candidates each of them would have on those joint lists. By proposing a candidate for the Armenian Catholic seat - held by Serge Toursarkissian, close to the Future Movement - the Lebanese Forces were also increasing their bargaining power vis-’-vis their “March 14” allies elsewhere in the country. Samir Ja’ja’, the leader of the Lebanese Forces, argued that the Joseph Chader precedent had encouraged his organization to push forward with Kouyoumdjian’s candidacy. The latter had until his nomination been a person totally unknown to activists within the Armenian community. The three Armenian factions allied to Hariri now found themselves in a difficult position. Because of the prior agreement to have joint lists in all constituencies, Kouyoumdjian’s formally joining Far’awn’s list in Beirut I had to be blessed by Hariri’s Armenian allies. This would not only force them to abandon an old ally, Toursarkissian, but would also make them liable to charges from their Tashnag opponents that they have no bargaining power vis-’-vis their more powerful partners within the “March 14” camp, particularly Hariri’s Future Movement. Therefore, these three Armenian factions stood their ground. The Hunchagian party formally adopted Toursarkissian as its candidate, and there were hints at a boycott by Armenian voters allied to Hariri in the hotly contested constituencies of Beirut I and Metn if Kouyoumdjian were preferred to Toursarkissian. In case of close races in each of these two constituencies, the one to two thousand votes the anti-Tashnag Armenians would contribute could make all the difference between the “March 14” list winning or losing completely. After protracted behind-the-scenes bargaining, including an unsuccessful offer by the Lebanese Forces to back Toursarkissian if he promised to leave Hariri’s Future bloc in the next parliament and join the Lebanese Forces, Kouyoumdjian’s candidacy was pulled, and Toursarkissian formally became the fifth member of Far’awn’s “March 14” list in Beirut I. (Nevertheless, the Lebanese Forces attempts to co-opt one of the elected Armenian deputies would continue after the elections, as we shall see below.)
The Tashnags, being within the opposing camp, were simple bystanders to this struggle between the Armenian factions allied to Hariri and the Lebanese Forces. However, this episode gave the Tashnags an added sense of self-righteousness that only they had the strength, determination and freedom to fight for the preservation of what they saw as Armenian political rights in Lebanon, in this case, the ‘privilege’ of the traditional Armenian political factions to nominate candidates for all positions reserved to the Armenian community in the Lebanese state structures.
Although the phenomenon of Kouyoumdjian had had its precedents, it exercised Armenians still involved in community life more than ever before. Part of this restlessness is tied to the anxieties the hard core of Armenians in Lebanon feels in light of an increased pace toward assimilation at the edges of the community. Among the earlier examples mentioned above, the Armenian Communists - despite their internationalist ideology - were never seen as totally alien to Armenian community life in Lebanon; they actually made important contributions to the development of its literature and culture. On the other hand, Joseph Chader’s mostly unchallenged grip on the Armenian Catholic seat was possible in the 1950s because many among the more numerous Orthodox Armenians still felt some distance at the time from their Catholic kin. Chader’s grip continued in the 1960s only because of the exigencies of the electoral law, which was in place from 1960 to 1975. Once the Phalanges grip over the Arabic-speaking Christian community weakened during the civil war years and, then, the boundaries of electoral constituencies were altered in 1992, the Tashnags felt free to withdraw their previous concession to the Phalanges, and in this they enjoyed the tacit backing of other Armenian political factions. When Chader held the Armenian Catholic seat, the Armenian community in Lebanon was still growing steadily and was gradually becoming more and more confident. Parliamentary seats did not capture the imagination of Lebanese Armenians as much as they do today. In the post-civil war era, however, Armenians have become more integrated into the Lebanese social fabric and are more cognizant of their political rights. At the same time, they have also become very anxious because of the decline in the size of their community - both in absolute numbers and percentage terms - as well as because of creeping assimilation, especially into the Arabic-speaking Christian communities. Privately, it is widely acknowledged that Armenian parties and other community organizations no longer constitute the sole pole of attraction for politically active Armenian youth; significant numbers among them have in recent years directly joined non-Armenian political organizations, particularly the two largest among Arabic-speaking Christians, the FPM and the Lebanese Forces. Kouyoumdjian’s nomination was disturbing because it may be the beginning of a trend whereby non-Armenian political organizations, now having a respectable Armenian following, will venture into what has largely been a preserve of the traditional Armenian parties. (These fears may grow with the possibility of one of the newly elected Armenian deputies joining the Lebanese Forces bloc of deputies, as we shall see below.) With the number of Armenian voters expected to decline in the coming decades, at least in percentage terms, traditional Armenian parties could end up with less and less bargaining power. In this respect, it will be interesting to see if the Kouyoumdjian phenomenon is repeated in the coming parliamentary elections in 2013 and beyond.
While the three Armenian factions within the “March 14” bloc were thus successful in pushing Toursarkissian’s candidacy in Beirut I, they were not that lucky as regards the Armenian Orthodox seat in Zahlah. Their declared candidate was Nareg Aprahamian, a retired high-ranking Lebanese army officer, a former Tashnag and now the leader of the Free Lebanese Armenian Movement. However, he ultimately failed to get the slot. Nicolas Fattush, the “chief” of the “March 14” list in this constituency, insisted that the Armenian Orthodox candidate on his list should be a native of the town of Zahlah. Aprahamian was from Anjar. Fattush’s precondition opened the way for the 35-year-old Shant Chinchinian, the principal of the AGBU Levon Nazarian Elementary School in the outskirts of Beirut. Chinchinian had run as an independent in 2005 and had received a mere 601 votes (compared to 35,065 votes for the winner).
The failure of Aprahamian to make the “March 14” list provided a further pretext to the Tashnag leadership to argue that those Armenians who tie their fate to non-Armenian political groups (in Aprahamian’s case, to Hariri’s Future Movement) fail to realize their expectations. In one radio interview following the announcement of the “March 14” list in Zahlah, Hovig Mkhitarian, the chairman of the Tashnag party Central Committee in Lebanon, used an Arabic language saying to describe what had befallen Aprahamian. “Those who purchase you will also sell you,” he repeated.
Unlike Hariri, Fattush’s personal ties to the Tashnags are not that strained. His brother, Pierre, is a major investor in Armenia; at one time he held the majority of shares of the Vivacell mobile telephone operator. In 2005, Nicolas Fattush was the only deputy among 128 in Lebanon who won by “breaking into” the opposing list in Zahlah, which reaped the other six seats in the constituency. It was then claimed that Fattush had managed to do so partly by obtaining a respectable number of votes through a side-deal with the Tashnags, who were ostensibly voting for all members of the opposing list. The same rumors allege that Fattush had even used the moral authority of former Armenian president Robert Kocharian to seal this side-agreement. It is possible that, in 2009, Fattush avoided having the ‘dissident’ Aprahamian on his list in order not to antagonize his Tashnag acquaintances. He picked Chinchinian because the latter would appear less controversial to the Tashnags. Moreover, Chinchinian’s joining the Lebanese Forces bloc after the elections - and this against the express desire of Fattush - leads one to think that the former were also involved in the political bargaining on the choice of the Armenian Orthodox candidate on the “March 14” list in Zahlah.
A week after he formally made Fattush’s list, Chinchinian was separately received at the headquarters of the Hunchagian and Ramgavar parties during a visit he paid to Beirut on May 25. These two meetings were some sort of belated endorsement for Chinchinian. The Ramgavar newspaper, Zartonk, also printed a full-page interview with him.
Antoine Nshanakian, the defeated candidate of the “March 14” bloc in Zahlah during the 2005 elections, withdrew from the race on this occasion not long before polling day, and he pledged support to the Tashnags and the list headed by Elias Skaf, Fattush’s rival.
THE CAMPAIGN THEMES
The major campaign themes during these elections were the future political orientation of Lebanon and whether Hizballah should be allowed to keep its arms as a resistance movement, independent of Lebanese state structures, against any possible future Israeli armed action aimed at Lebanon. In the polarized atmosphere of Lebanese politics since 2004, all factions and serious individual candidates participating in these elections had to position themselves as regards these two key, but interrelated, issues. The elections were also of immense interest to a number of foreign powers - the United States, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran - each of which backed one of the two rival blocs on the Lebanese scene. The US Vice-President paid an unprecedented short visit to Lebanon during the pre-election campaign period, becoming the highest ranking US official ever to visit the country. In addition to meetings of protocol with the heads of various branches of government, he held a well-publicized pre-election meeting with prominent figures in the “March 14” bloc. Opposition figures were denied such an honor. Soon after the elections were over, Newsweek reported that Saudi Arabia had spent over 700 million dollars to support the “March 14” coalition during the campaign period. If true, this was more than Barack Obama had spent to become president of the United States in 2008. All of this money was presumably meant to bolster the “March 14” bloc. On the other hand, the Iranian president predicted that a victory for the opposition in the Lebanese elections would have far-reaching (and for Iran, positive) implications throughout the Middle Eastern region. It is widely believed that the Iranians were as generous as the Saudis in backing the preferred side, the opposition.
It was taken for granted that most Shi’is would vote for Hizballah and its allies in the opposition. The majority of Sunni and Druze voters were, in turn, expected to vote for the Future Movement and the PSP respectively, two pillars of the “March 14” coalition. The demographic make-up of the 26 constituencies indicated that victory for the “March 14” bloc was certain in the Sunni-majority areas in West Beirut and north Lebanon, the Druze-majority areas in Mount Lebanon, and Bsharri, Samir Ja’ja’’s native region. On the other hand, victory for the opposition was all but guaranteed in the Shi’i-populated districts in south Lebanon and Ba’albak-Hirmil, plus Zgharta, the bastion of the pro-Syrian, Maronite Franjiyeh clan in north Lebanon. Moreover, seats in Beirut II had already been divided by prior agreement between “March 14” and the opposition. The overall success or failure of one bloc or the other would therefore be dependent on the outcome of races in largely-Christian constituencies in north Lebanon, Mount Lebanon, Beirut I and Zahlah. The two constituencies, where ‘Armenian’ seats would be contested on Election Day, as well as the constituency of Metn, where a large number of Armenians had the right to vote, all fell within this last category. In all these constituencies the Tashnags had committed themselves to vote for ‘Awn and his (mostly Christian) allies. This was the reason why some western media outlets described the Armenians as possible kingmakers and warned that their participation in large numbers would enhance the chances of Hizballah, arguably the strongest faction within the opposition and the actor on the Lebanese scene, whose fate concerned the western powers the most.
‘Awn accused his Christian opponents of being subservient to the corrupt system imposed by the Hariris in the post-civil war period. His opponents - the Lebanese Forces, the Phalanges, a few other political parties of lesser following, plus representatives of a number of traditionally influential families, often posing as “independents” allied to the “March 14” bloc - accused ‘Awn of having become a blind follower of Hizballah and its Syrian and Iranian backers. They argued that ‘Awn was drawing the Lebanese Christian community away from its pro-western outlook and traditions and that his policies would further weaken the Christian role in Lebanese politics. ‘Awn’s Christian opponents received open backing from the Maronite patriarch, plus - many concluded - tacit support from President Sulayman.
Unprecedented amounts of money were spent during the election period. Voters were bombarded with nationwide TV and radio talk-shows, billboards, and e-mail messages. Arabic-language TV and radio stations also devoted some of their airtime to interviews with a few of the Armenian candidates. News items and analyses pertaining to Armenian candidates and voters also appeared in the print media. In the run-up to the elections, the Tashnag party set up its own Arabic-language website as well.
Among the Armenian-language media outlets available exclusively to Armenian voters were the newspapers published by the Armenian political parties, two radio stations, and two, half-hour, daily news programs broadcast on two separate nationwide TV stations.
The three Armenian political parties have published their respective daily newspapers in Beirut for decades. Among them, the Tashnag newspaper, Aztag, is currently the richest in content and has the widest distribution. On the other hand, the Hunchagian newspaper, Ararad, and the Ramgavar Zartonk have faced serious financial difficulties in recent years. During the weeks leading up to the elections, however, all three underwent some growth. From March 12, Aztag raised the number of its pages to 12 from the previous 10. Ararad, which had been published on a weekly basis for a number of years, gradually increased its frequency to two and then three issues per week in 2007 and finally returned to its traditional status as a daily in early March 2009. Zartonk, which had ceased publication altogether in January 2007, returned as a weekly in May 2008. It then continued as a semi-weekly from February 2009 and started appearing three times a week from mid-May. The newly established Free Lebanese Armenian Movement also publishes a newspaper, but it comes out infrequently and irregularly; it can be likened to a bulletin rather than a newspaper.
These Armenian newspapers are notoriously secretive. They confine themselves to reporting only about their own parties’ activities, and that to the extent permitted by the respective party’s leadership of the day. In order to make sense of what is really going on, intelligent readers sometimes need to resort to all the skills developed by Kremlinologists in the not too distant past. Moreover, these party newspapers usually disregard any news item pertaining to their rivals, even reports on internal problems among the latter. This approach is justified in the name of keeping harmony within the community. During the election period, all three newspapers confined themselves to reporting about the rallies their own side had held and to statements by the Armenian candidates they were sponsoring. Readers of only one of these newspapers may be excused if they failed to realize that there were other Armenian candidates running in these elections, too. One classic example of this approach was the way the three Armenian newspapers reported the election of both Kalpakian and Nazarian because of the absence of other registered Armenian Orthodox candidates in their constituency at the end of the deadline to withdraw nominations. Aztag and Ararad both reported the election of their own party’s candidate in bold headlines on the front page. Aztag focused solely on Nazarian and never bothered to mention Kalpakian. Ararad faired only a little better: its report concentrated on Kalpakian, while Nazarian was mentioned only in passing, without any additional information besides his full name. For Zartonk, this was not a news item worthy of being shared with its readers.
Among the many Armenian language radio stations that had sprung up during the anarchy of the civil war, the Tashnags managed to legalize their station, the Voice of Van, through the Audiovisual Broadcasting Law adopted in 1993. The Hunchagians had to close down their own station, Radio Nayiri, under the same law and, for years, the Voice of Van was the only legal Armenian-language radio outlet in the country. However, in 2007, when the opposition was boycotting the cabinet sessions, the “March 14” government, which was hostile to the Tashnags, gave permission to a rival Armenian-language station, Radio Sevan. Owned by Hariri, this new station is staffed predictably by members and supporters of Armenian political groupings affiliated with the “March 14” coalition. Both stations have permission to broadcast political news and programs, and they used their capacities fully to spread the views of their respective owners and their allies.
Among the television stations, Hariri’s Future TV established a 10-minute Armenian language news bulletin prior to the 2000 elections. In 2007, when the same corporation established Future News, a 24-hour news channel, the Armenian, English and French news bulletins were transferred to this new channel and given longer, 30-minute slots. The Tashnag ‘retaliation’ was the establishing from April 24, 2009, of a similar 30-minute Armenian language news bulletin on Orange TV, owned by the FPM. Unlike Future News, Orange TV has no English and French language news bulletins; it broadcasts only in Arabic and Armenian. There is a lot of overlap in the staff, who work simultaneously at Radio Sevan and Future News on the one hand, and at the Voice of Van and Orange TV on the other. News of immediate concern to Lebanese Armenian politics broadcast on both channels is mostly partisan. Moreover, both news bulletins are broadcast at exactly the same time of the day, forcing the viewer to choose only one of them.
Pictures of the various Armenian candidates - those elected unopposed before June 7 and those still running - were posted in various neighborhoods in and around Beirut, where Armenians live in considerable numbers. The territorial control that the Tashnags and the Hunchagians exercise on some of these neighborhoods prevented the possibility of pictures of rival candidates appearing in close proximity to one another. Much bigger panels were used widely and very imaginatively by marketing agencies working for the rival camps outside the Armenian community. Among the Armenian parties, however, only the Tashnags made use of such panels. Then again, their use was very selective, and the quality of their artistic composition lagged far behind panels hosted by other non-Armenian parties; they simply consisted of a group picture of the five candidates formally proposed by the party.
Arguably the most common means used by the rival Armenian factions to help their message reach their own followers was the organizing of public rallies. Due to their smaller size, the Hunchagians and Ramgavars confined themselves to one rally each, both within Beirut city limits. The Tashnags, on the other hand, held around a dozen such events in Beirut, in some of its heavily Armenian-populated outskirts and even in Jubayl (Byblos) and Anjar. Earlier, the Tashnag party had also organized a series of receptions, where their leaders had spoken to invited Armenian audiences from specified professional groups - businessmen, engineers, schoolteachers, college students and others. The audience in such gatherings tends to be a little more diverse than those attending party rallies. The only face-to-face ‘Armenian’ debate during the pre-election campaign period was that between Hagop Pakradouni and Jean Oghassabian. It was organized in mid-May by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, arguably the most popular TV station in Lebanon. This author believes that this face-to-face debate was probably a first in the history of Armenian participation in Lebanese elections.
The campaign themes emphasized by the rival Armenian camps were different. The Tashnags insisted on the necessity to reestablish an Armenian Bloc of deputies in the next parliament. They already had two deputies in the parliaments elected in 2000 and 2005, who acted under this label. The slogan “Reestablishing the Armenian Bloc” in practice meant increasing the number of Armenian deputies willing to cooperate with the Tashnag party leadership. Tashnag orators argued consistently that their party was the best suited to defend Armenian interests in the country; it was free to take decisions on their own merit. They also claimed that the incumbent Armenian deputies in the “March 14” coalition had been ineffective and lacked freedom even to criticize the participation of a Turkish contingent in the expanded UNIFIL forces, which took position in south Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 2006. Tashnag leaders informed their audiences that they had, nevertheless, suggested to the two other parties to work together to reassemble the Armenian Bloc and, despite the much larger Tashnag following, had had the magnanimity to offer them a seat each in that projected bloc. However, the other parties had rejected the Tashnag offer. Tashnag orators explained this rejection as due to the prior commitments allegedly made by their Armenian rivals to Hariri and hence their inability to make independent decisions. Speeches by Tashnag orators, as reported in Aztag, did not refer much to broader issues in Lebanese politics and avoided talking openly and at length about the thorny issue of the weapons of Hizballah. They also did not raise issues of social justice or propose measures to raise the efficiency of the state machinery, even though this was a favorite theme for their principal ally, the FPM. The only concrete pledge this author came across in the news reports of Tashnag rallies was the promise to work in the future so that the Evangelical and ‘Minorities’ seats would be transferred away from constituencies with a Muslim majority. In one radio interview, Mkhitarian avoided pledging that the expanded Armenian Bloc in the next parliament would ask for the withdrawal of the Turkish UNIFIL contingent from Lebanon.
The agenda of the anti-Tashnag candidates during their campaign speeches was altogether different. Only two of the rallies they addressed were organized for an exclusively Armenian audience, and this peculiarity probably affected the themes that they preferred to dwell on. These were the general slogans of the “March 14” camp, including sharp criticism of Hizballah and calls to safeguard Lebanon’s established historical and cultural identity, which they believed was being threatened by the pro-Iranian Shi’is of the country. Themes peculiar to Armenians were almost non-existent in their speeches. Only toward the end of the pre-election campaign period, did Ararad publish a few articles critical of what was being said during the Tashnag rallies. On the issue of the Armenian Bloc, the argument of the anti-Tashnag parties was that the Tashnag offer to re-establish such a bloc lacked clarity about what policies it would pursue as regards the fundamental political identity and foreign policy orientation issues, which have deeply divided the Lebanese since 2004.
Violence has often accompanied pre-election campaigns in Lebanon in the past, and unfortunately it has not been alien to the Armenian community as well. Fortunately, during the polarized political atmosphere throughout the country, there was only one reported instance of serious intra-Armenian violence. Hrag Akian of the Free Lebanese Armenian Movement was heavily wounded and paralyzed by a shot fired by a Tashnag supporter during a heated encounter in Bourj Hammoud in late January. The police released the initials of the suspected attacker, but he has so far evaded arrest.
FREE TICKETS TO BEIRUT
The Lebanese electoral law does allow citizens living outside the country to vote in parliamentary and municipal elections but only if they appear in person at their designated polling station in Lebanon on Election Day; absentee ballots and voting in embassies or consulates abroad are not options. During the past few elections, a few candidates had sponsored a handful of expatriates to return and vote for them. This trend had not affected supporters of the Armenian parties, however, although a few Armenian voters had benefited from such ‘services’ offered by non-Armenian parties and organizations. The elections of 2009 broke all records in this domain, and all sides were engaged in this novel effort. None of the parties involved has provided any figures as regards the number of voters they were able to attract from abroad. They have also not acknowledged the fact that they usually paid for the air travel of their expatriate voters. However, it is estimated that some 120 thousand expatriates actually returned briefly and voted. Among them were a few thousand Armenians, especially from North America, France, Australia and Armenia.
Within the North American context, both Hunchagians and Tashnags worked openly to bring former Lebanese Armenians who had migrated since the 1970s to vote in these elections. They both used their transnational networks to organize this effort. The Hunchagians started putting announcements to this effect in their weekly, Massis (Pasadena, CA), as early as January 2009. There were no such announcements in the Ramgavar weekly, Nor Or (Altadena, CA). However, the local networks of both parties were active in hosting Oghassabian, the minister representing the Armenian factions of the “March 14” bloc, when he visited the Los Angeles area in late February in order to address a commemorative gathering hosted by the “March 14” bloc on the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri. However, Oghassabian was also the guest of honor at a banquet organized by local Hunchagians, and he visited a number of Armenian religious and educational institutions within the circle of Ramgavar and Hunchagian influence. His visit was predictably ignored by the Tashnag daily in California. The said announcements to encourage willing Lebanese Armenian expatriate voters continued to appear in Massis for a number of weeks, but, eventually, the Hunchagians brought very few, if any, voters to Lebanon on June 7.
The overwhelming majority, if not all, ethnic Armenian expatriates who returned to Lebanon for June 7 had to thank the Tashnags for both their efforts and their generosity. The first visible step the Tashnags took in this regard was dispatching in December 2008 Mkhitarian and Hagop Pakradouni to address the annual celebration day of the Tashnag party in Montreal and Los Angeles, respectively. During their respective sojourns, these two prominent Tashnag politicians began preparing the public mood, and soon a corresponding ad hoc infrastructure was set up across North America. Working under the name “Electoral Office for the Re-establishment of the Armenian Bloc of Lebanon,” its goals were to locate and encourage potential Lebanese Armenian voters to make the trip to Lebanon, ensure that they had the proper documents (a valid Lebanese identity card or a passport) to vote in the elections, and reserve their airplane tickets to Lebanon and back. From mid-February 2009, the Tashnag party’s Armenian-language newspapers in Boston, Los Angeles and Montreal all printed full-page ads calling on readers “to defend the rights” and “support the just cause” of the Lebanese Armenian community. For those interested in this venture, telephone numbers were given in Glendale, San Francisco, Fresno, New Jersey, Montreal, Laval, Toronto and Vancouver. A website was also established, where those interested could read and download information and application forms. In cities, where the number of Armenians was smaller, the task to locate, encourage and assist potential expatriate voters was given to specific Tashnag party activists. It was stated in advance that priority would be given to voters in the constituencies of Beirut I and II, Metn and Zahlah. Most returning voters admitted in private that the Tashnag party had paid for the renewal of their passports (if that were necessary) and for their airplane tickets. Since most expatriate voters who came to Lebanon still have relatives in the country, paying for their lodging did not constitute an additional cost to their hosts. Nevertheless, the returning voters were told that short-term arrangements for their lodging could also be made if they had no place to stay.
Since all sides were engaged in this novel activity and none are disclosing how many voters they were each able to bring in, it is difficult to assess to what extent it affected the outcome of the elections, particularly in a number of key, marginal constituencies. Simply subtracting the number of voters during the 2000 or 2005 elections (plus the expected natural growth) from the total of actual voters on this occasion will not do the trick since there was also a noticeable increase in participation among those living inside the country.
The issue of expatriates is very sensitive in Lebanon; this small country has continuously ’exported’ its ‘surplus population’ in the last 150 years or so. Christians have regularly insisted on respecting the political rights of expatriates and including them in population statistics. Up until the past couple of decades, the vast majority of expatriates were Christian. Including them in official statistics would soften the gradual demographic decline of the Christian communities inside Lebanon proper. Moreover, successive Lebanese governments have tried to tap into expatriate resources both as investors and as tourists. Finally, all Lebanese factions and individual candidates have for years spent a lot of money at home to provide transportation to their supporters who live away from the polling stations where they are registered to vote. In this case, only the distances and the means of transportation used were different.
All candidates praised the participation of expatriates in their public speeches, although the opposition in general claimed that the “March 14” bloc had spent more money and thus lured more expatriates to come and vote for its candidates. One newly elected FPM deputy claimed that of those who returned, some 90,000 were brought by the “March 14” forces and only some 20,000 by the opposition. Most Armenians fall into the latter group.
The phenomenon being very novel, there is no specific restriction in the current electoral law on how much money a candidate can spend to fly in voters from abroad, especially if the respective air tickets are paid for before the formal registration of his/her candidacy. However, there is an ethical side to this ‘right’, which the current law does not distinguish, but which eventually has to be taken into consideration. Not all Lebanese expatriates can be dumped together in the same basket. Among them are tens of thousands of youth who work abroad, mostly in the Gulf region, but maintain quasi-daily contact with their extended families back home. Many of them may yet return, establish families and work in Lebanon. However, there are also countless others who have migrated farther, to the Americas, France and Australia; they have become naturalized citizens of their adopted countries and have no intention of returning full-time. Among the voters lured back to Lebanon for the elections many were in the latter category. They had been away for decades and had no intricate knowledge of what was really at stake for these elections. In almost all cases, people in this category voted dutifully according to the wishes of the party which arranged and paid for their airline tickets. More than the elections, the people enjoyed long overdue reunions with relatives and old friends, and then they returned to their new homes abroad, perhaps hoping for another such opportunity at the time of the next elections in 2013.
Among the ethnic Armenian voters flown in by the Tashnag party there were a number of die-hard party activists, raised in Lebanon and now filling party or party-related Armenian community positions abroad. However, the vast majority falls into the category of “political tourists,” for whom this was an opportunity to meet relatives and old friends whom they had missed for years, or sell some property they had left behind, finish up some lingering government paperwork, even undergo dental or medical treatment, because those are cheaper in Lebanon compared to North America. These “political tourists” often brought with them their young children, who had left Lebanon as babies or toddlers or had been born abroad but had inherited Lebanese citizenship from their fathers. Having gone to school outside Lebanon, these young men or women went to the polls without even being able to read in Arabic their names on the voters’ register. Tashnag leaders tried to justify the “interest” shown by Lebanese Armenian expatriates by the alleged deep feelings they continue to nurture toward Lebanon or by the centrality of Lebanon in Armenian Diasporan thinking. It is doubtful, however, that these arguments convinced many. All that can be said is that the whole of Lebanon became entangled in this novel game, and the Armenian political factions, as an integral component of the country’s political landscape, could not remain outside, especially when their political constituency has - in percentage terms - one the largest expatriate communities.
A relevant question, which will probably go unanswered, is the source of financing for these thousands of free airplane tickets. Their total can easily be estimated to have amounted to a few million dollars, and this, without taking into consideration other types of inevitable expenses incurred during any pre-election campaign and on voting day. For the Armenian community in Lebanon this is a huge sum, needed dearly for the improvement of its various institutions, particularly schools, sporting and cultural associations. In the fall of 2006, when the representative of the US-based Lincy Foundation brought a one-off contribution exceeding four million dollars for Lebanon’s Armenian community schools in the aftermath of the most recent Israeli war against the country, he was received as a real-life Santa Claus.
Even before 2009, election campaigns in Lebanon had the reputation of being among the costliest in the world. It has become accepted in Lebanon that candidates practically “buy” votes by offering services to their potential voters and their neighborhoods (paying school fees, covering medical costs, asphalting village roads, etc.) or by showering various organizations with large contributions to influence the votes of their members. Most of these contributions are not declared to the public. The new election law did introduce for the first time a certain mechanism to check pre-election spending. However, specialists argue that it still has many loopholes and candidates are under no obligation to report large amounts of pre-election spending (including the buying of airline tickets) if those transactions were carried out a considerable time before Election Day.
It is widely assumed, and sometimes privately acknowledged, that Armenian organizations also receive donations at times of elections either from rich Armenians who aspire to a parliamentary seat on a slate supported by one or more of these parties, or from non-Armenian candidates who form joint lists with one or more of these Armenian parties. There are clear indications in recent works on Lebanese history that at least in the 1957 and 1960 elections Armenian parties also received some contributions from foreign states like the United States, Iran and perhaps the Soviet Union. On this occasion, however, the amounts spent, particularly by the Tashnags, far exceeded anything done before. It is unlikely that the Armenian sides - Tashnags or their rivals - will ever be under real pressure to disclose the full range of sources of the money they each spent on this occasion; no party or individual candidate in Lebanese history has done that in clear terms. In the case of the Hunchagians and Ramgavars, most people will continue to believe that they relied, as before, on cash injections from the Hariri family and, by extension, from foreign states which backed the Hariris and their allies. On the Tashnag side, many sympathizers privately surmised that it was possible the ultimate source of some and possibly all of the party’s funding could also eventually be traced to the coffers of one or more foreign states interested in a victory for the opposition. In any case, if this trend to fly in voters from abroad and pay for their tickets will continue in the coming elections, it will inevitably put all Armenian political factions under increasing pressure to look for additional sources of funding from outside the community and make them more and more dependent on their non-Armenian funders.
VOTING DAY: PARTICIPATION RATES, RESULTS AND REPERCUSSIONS
This was the first time since 1951 when elections throughout Lebanon were conducted on the same day. Previously, they had been held across three or four successive week-ends. The Ministry of the Interior carried out this complicated task relatively adequately. This included an unprecedented level of use of technology to monitor the application of the electoral law both before and on the day of the elections. Despite the polarized state of Lebanese politics, the elections were conducted in a relatively calm atmosphere, and all sides quickly accepted the results. Those, who had misgivings said they would resort to the Constitutional Court, which has the sole right to review applications to quash results and has actually done so on a few occasions since its formation at the end of the civil war.
The final results were a disappointment to the opposition, which was hoping to gain a slight majority in the next parliament. The vast majority of voters cast their ballots in favor of “complete” lists - either in the “March 14” movement or in the opposition - and most constituencies returned the same political forces which had gained in 2005. The opposition only added the constituencies of Zgharta and Ba’abda to what it already had, but it also lost Zahlah. In the final tally, the “March 14” bloc and its so-called “Independent” allies had 71 seats, while the opposition bloc had to be content with 57 - almost the same as the ratios that had prevailed before these elections. The three Armenian seats which were still contested on Election Day all went to anti-Tashnag candidates within the “March 14” bloc. The Tashnags, who again received around 80 percent of the votes cast by Armenians, were once more left with an Armenian Bloc of Deputies consisting only of two members. Hence, it was dij` vu on all fronts, and this partly explains why interest in these elections faded quickly after the results were announced. It was enough for the western powers and conservative Arab (Sunni) regimes that Hizballah would not pull the strings behind the next Lebanese cabinet.
In Beirut I, voter participation was around 40 percent, a number of percentage points higher than what pundits had expected. The “March 14” list, led by Michel Far’awn, received over 19,000 votes, out of a total of 37,284 ballots cast. The Armenian Orthodox candidate on this list, Jean Oghassabian, and his Armenian Catholic list-mate, Serge Toursarkissian, were both elected to the parliament for the third consecutive time. Since their candidacies had been backed in the run-up to these elections by the Ramgavars and Hunchagians respectively, it is now being said that the Hunchagians will be represented in the next parliament by two and the Ramgavars by one deputy. Previously, both Oghassabian and Toursarkissian had claimed to be independents within the Future Movement. The Tashnag party’s electoral office claimed that out of the 6,740 Armenians who had voted in this constituency, just over 5,000 had preferred the Tashnag candidates, Vrej Saboundjian and Gregoire Calouste, and their list-mates from the FPM. However, the whole opposition list gained close to 17,000 votes and all its members lost to their “March 14” rivals. The ratio of votes received by Tashnag and anti-Tashnag candidates for the Armenian Orthodox and Armenian Catholic seats in Beirut in 2000 and those in Beirut I on this occasion has remained mostly unchanged. If most Lebanese Armenian expatriate votes went to the Tashnags, then the anti-Tashnag candidates probably added the number of Armenians who voted for them either by working harder to bring their supporters to the polling stations or by convincing the occasional floating Armenian voter from the “other” side, probably by playing on fears that Lebanon would lose its pro-western outlook to Iranian Islamism if the opposition won. Nevertheless, the Tashnags can still rightly argue that yet again their rivals were elected through votes obtained from outside the Armenian community. However, on this occasion, these non-Armenian votes were mostly from other Christians (Maronites, Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics) and were not overwhelmingly Sunni votes as was the case in both 2000 and 2005, when the boundaries of electoral constituencies in Beirut were different.
In Beirut II, the contest over the two Armenian seats was over before Election Day. Elections went on only for the Sunni and Shi’i seats, but the result was again never in doubt. The sides that had agreed in Doha to divide the seats in this constituency respected their undertaking; supporters of the Future Movement, Amal and Hizballah exchanged votes to assure the elections of their respective candidates. Compared to the other two constituencies in the capital, the percentage of voter participation was much lower here - at 27 percent. There was only one serious challenge to the Sunni candidate proposed by the Future Movement. He was opposed by a Sunni member of the opposition, who argued that Sunnis in the opposition were never part of the compromise reached in Doha and were hence under no obligation to refrain from challenging the Future Movement. He received just over 8,000 votes, compared to the over 16,500 votes obtained by the winning candidate. Under these circumstances, the interest shown by the large number of Armenians eligible to vote in this constituency was very timid. Indeed, in a number of cases, voters flown in from abroad to cast their ballots in this constituency were told on Election Day that they would not be taken to the polling station by their Tashnag hosts because Beirut II had ceased to be a priority.
Armenian interest in Beirut III was confined to the Evangelical seat. This large constituency had more eligible voters than Beirut I and II put together and it would return ten out of the total 19 deputies allocated to Beirut. Sunni voters formed some 70 percent of those eligible to vote in this constituency. Since it was a foregone conclusion that most Sunnis would cast their votes for the list backed by Hariri, the expectation that the incumbent Arab-speaking Evangelical deputy would be returned easily came true. Like all other members on Hariri’s list, he received some 76,000 votes. He had two ethnic Armenian challengers, including the Tashnag-backed George Viken Ishkhanian. He found himself on the rival list, which ran a campaign imbued with Arab nationalist themes, reminiscent of the era of the Egyptian leader Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir in the 1950s and ’60s. The list members, including Ishkhanian, received around 21,000 votes each. The second Armenian candidate for the Evangelical seat, who ran as an independent, received only 71 votes.
Although the fate of the Armenian Orthodox seat in Metn was the first to be settled, and that a full two months before Election Day, Armenian participation in this largely-Christian constituency was very intensive and provided the most controversy (as far as Armenians were concerned) after the polls had been closed.
The traditionally Armenian neighborhood of Bourj-Hammoud is part of the Metn constituency. The territorial control that the Tashnag party exercises over this neighborhood and to a lesser extent over its newly-emerging ‘settler colony’ in Mezher near Antelias makes it even stronger among the Armenians registered here than in Beirut. Tashnags have usually controlled up to 90 percent of the ‘Armenian’ votes cast during past elections in Metn.
From 1964 to 2005, one regular feature during all Metn elections was the alliance - better to say the ‘marriage of convenience’ - between Michel al-Murr, a local political boss, and the Tashnag party. Murr’s influence grew in Metn and the entire Lebanese political scene during the Syrian era (1990-2005), and the Murr-Tashnag alliance was crucial throughout this period to keep most of Syria’s opponents in Metn out of parliament. Murr’s anti-Syrian opponents held the Armenians in general responsible (sometimes even in what amounted to racist rhetoric) for maintaining Murr in power and hence strengthening Syria’s hand in Lebanon through the large number of votes they cast in favor of Murr’s lists both in 1996 and 2000.
Developments in 2005 drastically changed the picture, at least temporarily. Immediately prior to the elections, the Syrians left and the anti-Syrian forces coalesced under the umbrella of the “March 14” movement. It would have been very difficult for both Murr and the Tashnags to stop the anti-Syrian tide together had ‘Awn not broken away from the “March 14” coalition not long before polling day. Looking for allies to challenge the “March 14” bloc in Metn, ‘Awn’s FPM first forged an electoral alliance with the Tashnags, who, in turn, had just been shunned by Sa’d al-Hariri in Beirut. Thereafter, the Tashnags were instrumental, probably with others, in bringing former rivals ‘Awn and Murr together. ‘Awn consented to a formal alliance with Murr only after the latter issued a formal and public apology for all the misdeeds he had personally approved against ‘Awn’s supporters during the Syrian era. The ‘Awn-Tashnag-Murr alliance proved very effective in 2005 and swept all the seats it contested in Metn. The margin of its victory was so large that the defeated candidates could not argue that their defeat was caused because of the so-called “Armenian bloc vote.”
However, while this new ‘Awn-Tashnag alliance remained strong throughout the next four years, the parallel ‘Awn-Murr alliance grew increasingly shaky and finally broke down in 2008. Thereafter, Murr moved in quick steps toward his former anti-Syrian rivals in Metn and fought the 2009 elections on a single list with the “March 14” forces. In this process, Murr also became a sharp critic of ‘Awn, accusing him of misdeeds carried out not only after 2005 but also in the late 1980s - long before he had forged an electoral alliance with ‘Awn in 2005.
This re-drawing of the political landscape in Metn put the Tashnags before a stark choice. It was evident from the beginning that they had already been charmed by ‘Awn. In public, the Tashnags said that they felt obliged to ‘Awn for having lent them a hand at a time when Hariri was attempting to push them out of parliament altogether. Privately, they were also thankful to ‘Awn for having fought hard and changed the boundaries of the electoral constituencies in Beirut, which had robbed the Tashnags of the Armenian Orthodox and Catholic seats in both 2000 and 2005. Nevertheless, Murr tried hard to lure the Tashnags away from ‘Awn into the “March 14” camp. On March 7, 2009, he arranged a trilateral meeting with Mkhitarian and Sa’d al-Hariri at the latter’s residence. During this first meeting, Hariri reportedly proposed to include three Armenian candidates agreeable to the Tashnag party (out of a total of four) on the “March 14” lists in Metn, Zahlah and Beirut I. In return, he expected the Tashnags to push their electorate - an estimated 80 percent of all actual Armenian voters - to back “March 14” candidates in these three constituencies, hence seriously weakening ‘Awn’s chances of success in any of them. However, it remained unclear how these elected Armenian deputies would position themselves in the next parliament. Hariri’s press office claimed he had suggested that these deputies should completely commit themselves to political neutrality between “March 14” and the opposition. The Tashnag interpretation was different. They said that they had proposed the establishment of a five-member, Tashnag-controlled Armenian Bloc - with a sixth slot reserved for the “March 14” candidate elected unopposed in Beirut II. The Tashnags wanted this bloc to have the freedom to make political decisions independently - without any prior commitment to “March 14” or the opposition. In any case, the Tashnag leadership was quick in rejecting Hariri’s offer; at a time when most pundits expected ‘Awn (with Tashnag and other support) to win in all three constituencies, the Tashnags thought that Hariri’s offer was too little and perhaps too late. The Tashnag decision was formally made public only after it had been communicated Hariri during a second meeting on April 1. Thereafter, the official Tashnag line was that the party would remain an ally of the FPM in all constituencies, but would also vote for Murr on an individual basis in Metn if he did not include another Armenian Orthodox candidate (to challenge Hagop Pakradouni) on the rival list. Murr complied with the Tashnag condition; the list he eventually announced in alliance with the “March 14” forces in Metn did not have an Armenian Orthodox candidate. This made Pakradouni’s election unopposed possible. However, ‘Awn refused to make things easy for the Tashnags. He nominated two candidates for the two Greek Orthodox slots on his list, thus making clear his intention to inflict a defeat on Murr. Against Murr, ‘Awn proposed the candidacy of a young and popular musician, Ghassan al-Rahbani, well known among Armenians for a song he made in 2007 praising the Armenian contribution to Lebanon.
As Election Day neared, the Tashnags continuously reiterated their commitment to both ‘Awn’s list and to Murr as an individual. However, this commitment appeared shakier by the day. Although the Tashnags were concentrating on Beirut I, Pakradouni did still appear alongside ‘Awn’s candidates during some of their campaign appearances in Metn. On the other hand, he was never seen alongside Murr, who was conducting a rival campaign against ‘Awn, together with the “March 14” candidates in his constituency. Intent on inflicting a heavy defeat on ‘Awn, Murr supporters on the ground made clear their unhappiness with what they saw as an ambiguous Tashnag stand. They accused the Armenians of ingratitude, after years of alleged service by Murr to the Armenian community.
With the 45-year-old ‘marriage of convenience’ between the Tashnags and Murr clearly showing cracks, a considerable chunk of Tashnag supporters felt more comfortable in openly raising their doubts as regards Murr. This snowballing anti-Murr stand can be attributed to a number of factors: (a) a deep-seated, but previously subdued, resentment toward Murr because of his reputation among his opponents as an arrogant and corrupt politician; (b) a clear preference for ‘Awn’s personality compared to Murr’s; (c) a political choice in favor of the opposition against “March 14”; (d) resentment of some of the electoral allies Murr had chosen, and, finally, (e) unhappiness with the growing criticism among Murr’s clientele, who targeted the Armenians as a whole.
On Election Day, some 13,000 Armenian voters cast their ballots - an increase of 30 percent compared to the previous polls, at a time when the overall number of actual voters in the constituency had increased from 83,502 to 96,748. This large number of Armenian voters showed that, despite the election of its candidate, the Tashnag party still believed that it had something to prove to both friend and foe. Yet again, most of these Armenians followed Tashnag guidelines and voted for the candidates of the FPM. The estimated 10,000 ‘Tashnag’ votes were very crucial in assuring the success of five of the seven FPM candidates; the margin of victory in most cases was only around 2,000 votes. Murr was one of only two candidates on the “March 14” list to win at the expense of their FPM rivals. The Greek Orthodox candidate who lost out against him was Rahbani. The other winner on the “March 14” list, representing the Phalanges Party, was careful in his acceptance speech not to blame the Armenians for the defeat of his list-mates. He was even diplomatic in praising the discipline of the Tashnag electoral machine, as well as the Armenian community’s perceived sense of cohesion, wishing that the other Christian communities would learn from the Armenians. However, Murr was bitter. He had received only 4,500 votes more than other members of the “March 14” list, indicating that the Tashnags had failed to deliver in full their promise to vote for him; otherwise Murr should have had around 10,000 votes more than the remaining members of the “March 14” list. Forty-five years of mutual compliments went down the drain in a single day. Murr soon became a fierce critic of the Tashnags, even questioning the validity of the polls held in Bourj-Hammoud. During the ensuing war of words, the Tashnags admitted that they had only delivered 2,200 votes to Murr. They explained this unexpectedly low figure by what they described as the anti-Murr mood prevailing among the Armenian electorate in the run-up to polling day. The Tashnags also admitted that the other votes that Murr had received in ‘Armenian’ polling booths - close to 3,000 - were cast by non-Tashnag Armenian supporters of the “March 14” forces. This means that, similar to the situation in Beirut I analyzed above, anti-Tashnag Armenian groupings had also increased their share among Armenian voters registered in Metn. During the 2000 and 2005 elections, the anti-Tashnag Armenian Orthodox candidate in Metn had received only around 7 percent of all the ‘Armenian’ votes cast.
The last of the three Armenian seats contested on June 7 was in the constituency of Zahlah, and again it went to a candidate running against the Tashnags. The number of Armenian voters in this constituency is small, and they are mostly concentrated in the village of Anjar, which - like Bourj Hammoud - is under the quasi-total territorial control of the Tashnag party. Armenian voters in this constituency voted overwhelmingly (an estimated 95 percent) for the Tashnag-backed candidate, the incumbent George Kassardji. However, he and the Tashnag party had placed their bet on the losing side, the alliance between the FPM and followers of the local political boss, Elie Skaf. Members of this list received an average of 41,000 votes, while the opposing “March 14” list, led by Nicolas Fattush, got over 48,000. The Sunni voters in this constituency voted in large numbers for Fattush’s list and played an important role in cementing its victory. Shant Chinchinian, the Armenian candidate on the victorious list, was elected together with all its other members, although the actual ‘Armenian’ support he got in terms of votes was very timid. Nareg Aprahamian, the leader of the Free Lebanese Armenian Movement and originally the preferred candidate of the Armenian factions within the “March 14” bloc, was left out of the two strong competing lists and ended up with only 19 votes.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
This concluding section will be confined to a number of important election-related issues which were not touched above. Predicting how political events pertaining to the Lebanese Armenian community will develop from now on is outside the scope of this analysis; at the time of writing, even the make-up of the parliamentary blocs, which the six Armenian deputies have joined either individually or in small groups, appears still to be fluid.
The 2009 elections will be remembered for having confirmed the status quo both in Lebanon at large and also among its Armenians. Within this general trend, the Tashnags maintained their overall share of the ‘Armenian’ vote. On polling day, friends and foes were equally impressed by the efficiency of their electoral machine; one non-Armenian journalist claimed that it was arguably the best in the country, perhaps even surpassing that of Hizballah. Non-Armenian journalistic interest during the election period focused solely on the Tashnags, almost totally ignoring their Armenian rivals within the “March 14” camp. At times, it even equated the Tashnag party and its supporters with the Armenian community as a whole. In the run-up to the elections, and also during the post-mortem, the chief Tashnag spokesman, Hagop Pakradouni, almost monopolized the airtime devoted to the Armenian dimension of these developments. In his answers to questions posed by talk-show hosts and the general TV viewing public, he appeared quite convincing when selling the idea that his was a party jealous of the independence and dignity of the community it seeks to represent and an organization largely in control of its day-to-day political decisions. Aztag reported visits by foreign election observers to Tashnag offices, but no report appeared in either Ararad or Zartonk as regards similar visits to Hunchagian and Ramgavar headquarters. This appeared to be the continuation of a trend set during the past four years, when a number of foreign mediators, who visited Lebanon, or foreign diplomats accredited in the country, were also regular visitors to the Tashnag headquarters, but made no corresponding visits to the Ramgavars or Hunchagians. These foreign visitors probably considered the Tashnags powerful and independent enough to warrant separate meetings with them. Perhaps some of them - especially from western or conservative Arab countries - harbored a hidden desire to lure the Tashnags away from ‘Awn and hence weaken the latter and, by extension, Hizballah. In any case, their rivals, the Hunchagians and the Ramgavars, were not honored with similar visits; the foreign dignitaries, after all, had direct access to Hariri, who ultimately made the final decisions in the “March 14” bloc. All these factors presumably added to Tashnag self-esteem and self-confidence.
However, all this social capital was not enough for the Tashnags to attain their set political objective: the expansion of ’their’ Armenian Bloc of deputies from two to five members. They lost all three seats which they contested on Election Day and, in both cases, only because they had allied themselves with the weaker party in these two constituencies. What happened was similar to - and perhaps worse than - the 2000 elections. In an analysis written for the Armenian News Network (Groong) immediately after the 2000 polls, this author then attributed the Tashnag defeat solely to an unfortunate choice of electoral allies. Nine years later, when this pattern has been repeated, a more sophisticated analysis of the factors behind the Tashnag defeat becomes necessary.
In the year 2000, Rafiq al-Hariri offered the Tashnags two seats out of five in Beirut and no possibility for the prospective Tashnag deputies to set up a parliamentary bloc independent of him. Hariri’s offer did not cover Metn and Zahlah, where Tashnags would still be free to act as they wished. The Tashnags thought that Hariri’s offer was much less than they felt themselves entitled to. They probably also believed that they could challenge Hariri with the assistance of President Lahud and the state security apparatus in league with him. The election results proved that this Tashnag expectation was unfounded.
Nine years later, Hariri’s son, Sa’d, proposed to the Tashnags four seats out of seven possible - at a time when the Tashnags were realistically aspiring only to five of these seven seats and would be content with four if they were allowed to lead an independent Armenian Bloc of six deputies. By rejecting this new offer, the Tashnags again ended up with only two seats. If the Tashnags had agreed to the young Hariri’s offer and voted for the “March 14” lists in all three constituencies concerned, today they would have had four seats in parliament and possibly a separate Armenian Bloc, albeit with limited political choices. At the same time, the opposition would have found itself in an even weaker position, with only 50 seats (instead of the current 57), while the “March 14” bloc would have had 74 deputies (instead of the current 71). The Tashnags could have either formed an ‘independent’ bloc of four or joined the “March 14” alliance outright and raised its total to 78 seats.
In retrospect, whether the Tashnags were correct or not in rejecting Hariri’s latest offer depends on our reading of what the party’s aims are. Why did the party choose to stick with ‘Awn to the end? Is the current Tashnag-FPM alliance yet another ‘marriage of convenience’ or is the Tashnag commitment to ‘Awn based on a deep conviction that his vision for the future of Lebanon is indisputably the best on offer? After all, ‘Awn did benefit from the Tashnag commitment, especially in Metn, but what did the Tashnags benefit from ‘Awn in return?
Since very little is divulged about internal Armenian party (including Tashnag) deliberations, a lot of what follows remains speculative. Among the various factions constituting the (anti-American) opposition in Lebanon, of which the Tashnags are now seen as an important component, there are influential individual political bosses, who have significant following in certain areas - not less and often broader than that of the Tashnags - and who again, like the Tashnags, failed to enter parliament with the number of allies they had anticipated. These political figures need not undergo renewed soul-searching following the elections for they have committed themselves to the opposition for ideological reasons, and their followers would not ask their leader why he chose the allies he did. However, the Tashnag rhetoric, especially when it is geared toward an Armenian audience, does not leave the impression that the party’s commitment to ‘Awn is ideological. Tashnag orators avoid deep analyses of pan-Lebanese issues in their public appearances. This may be a manifestation of the Lebanese Armenian tradition, established prior to and during the civil war, according to which the Armenian community (as opposed to the individuals who constitute it) should remain neutral among and equidistant from all other Lebanese factions engaged in serious political divisions in the country. The Tashnag line of reasoning in public is more tuned toward the argument that, within the Lebanese ethno-confessional mosaic, the Armenians will be better situated at the bargaining table if they are represented there through their most formidable force. During the next four years, however, the Tashnags will not be the undisputed representatives of the Armenians at that table and - as in the year 2000 - they only have themselves to blame for having placed their bet on what proved to be the weaker contestant. If predicting the future trajectory of political developments is an important quality of leadership, then the current Tashnag hierarchy in Lebanon failed again to notice the direction in which the winds were blowing, i.e. the fact that ‘Awn had lost some of his Christian following since the 2005 elections, in addition to the potential effect of all the sums and efforts the “March 14” bloc and its American and Saudi backers were spending to humble ‘Awn and hence weaken Hizballah on the Lebanese political scene.
If the inability to notice the changing mood of the Arabic-speaking public is the actual cause of the Tashnag failure, then it must be added that this type of conservative behavior has its precedents in the history of the party’s involvement in Lebanese politics. In 1943, for example, Movses Der Kaloustian of the Tashnag party was one of the two Armenian Orthodox deputies sitting in the Lebanese parliament which terminated the French mandate. If an oral testimony attributed to the then Lebanese Prime Minister, Riad al-Sulh, is to be believed, Der Kaloustian’s victory in the 1943 elections was declared only under strong pressure from the outgoing French mandatory authorities. In return, Der Kaloustian became one of the only five deputies who abstained when the necessary constitutional amendments were put to vote in parliament on November 8, 1943; the other Armenian deputy, representing the anti-Tashnag factions, voted for the proposed changes. Nevertheless, this abstention did not prevent Der Kaloustian and another Tashnag-backed candidate from filling the two Armenian Orthodox slots on the pro-government list during the next elections in 1947. Another example of slow Tashnag adaptation to changing circumstances was the vote of the four pro-Tashnag Armenian Orthodox deputies in favor of the pro-government candidate during the crucial 1970 presidential elections. He eventually lost this dramatic election by a single vote, and his defeat marked the end of a period in Lebanese history. The Tashnags had worked with the previous government for twelve years and, following the 1970 presidential elections, their relations with the incoming president remained cool for at least two years. However, things had been patched up yet again in time for the next parliamentary elections in 1972.
In the past, Tashnags could ‘correct’ such ‘mistakes’ and remain politically afloat because the Armenian votes they controlled were significant for the success or failure of rival non-Armenian politicians. They were eventually courted by everybody who wanted to win at all cost. What has made the ‘correction’ of similar ‘mistakes’ difficult since 2000 is not only the sophisticated methods now used by the Tashnag party’s potential rivals to dilute the ‘Armenian’ vote through successive waves of gerrymandering, but also the decline in the overall percentage of the ‘Armenian’ vote because of mass emigration during the war years - noticeably above the national average.
The three successive defeats of the Tashnag party, and the independent development of Armenian individuals now joining non-Armenian political factions in increasing numbers, may eventually fully destroy the myth of the centrality of the so-called “Armenian bloc vote” in East Beirut and Metn. Accordingly it may embolden non-Armenian political factions like the FPM, the Lebanese Forces, the Phalanges or the Future Movement to try to fill the parliamentary seats allocated to the Armenians through ethnic Armenian candidates from their own party ranks, totally bypassing and even confronting traditional Armenian community structures. In retrospect, it can be argued that had the Lebanese Forces insisted on having Kouyoumdjian on the “March 14” list in Beirut I, instead of Hunchagian-backed Toursarkissian, and had the Hunchagians and Ramgavars carried out their threat of a boycott, the “March 14” list might still have defeated its FPM-Tashnag rivals, for the eventual margin of victory was slightly higher than the around 2,000 votes which anti-Tashnag Armenians were able to deliver to their “March 14” allies. The Tashnag leadership seems to be fully aware of this ‘danger,’ and appears determined to fight it tooth and nail within the limit of its abilities. The anti-Tashnag Armenian stand vis-’-vis Kouyoumdjian was also not motivated - in all probability - solely by selfish interests, but was also a reflection of the same fear, which is being felt on both sides of the traditional Armenian political divide. However, Chinchinian’s possible adherence to the Lebanese Forces bloc may yet again complicate matters as regards this issue among the Armenian factions within the “March 14” camp.
Another common explanation for the continued Tashnag support for ‘Awn - given mostly by ‘Awn’s Arabic-speaking Christian opponents - was the alleged pressure the Syrian and Iranian governments exercised on the Tashnag party in Lebanon through the manipulation of both the existence of significant Armenian communities in Syria and Iran and the transnational structure of the Tashnag party. Indeed, the current chairman of the Bureau, the Tashnag party’s highest executive body world-wide, was born and grew up in Iran, before moving to and settling in Armenia soon after the country regained its independence in 1991. In all such analyses, he appears as a shadowy figure, pushing his party’s branch in Lebanon toward accommodating the political desires of his country of birth. Tashnag spokesmen predictably refute all such allegations, citing the fact that the party’s internal bylaws have always allowed a large measure of decentralization, including the right of party structures in Lebanon to draw the guidelines of local policy and nominate the party’s representatives for government posts. Because of the Tashnag habit of holding their deliberations in secret, it is impossible for outside observers to confirm or reject such claims outright. However, if the burden to provide proof falls on those who come up with such claims, what they have actually produced so far amounts to nothing more than guesswork. Before 2004, too, the argument that the Armenians of Lebanon had to follow the Syrian line during the period of Syrian hegemony because the Syrian government would otherwise make life very hard for its Armenians was quite common. Developments since 2004 have shown, however, that such fears were misplaced. The Hunchagians and Ramgavars also have their followers and party structures in Syria. Since September 2004, their party organizations and newspapers in Lebanon have largely followed and never dissented from the anti-Syrian line of the Hariris. Yet there is no indication that the Syrian government has made life more difficult for Hunchagian and Ramgavar activists or sympathizers, who are Syrian citizens and live in Syria. In the case of Iran, it should be remembered that, in addition to hosting a large Armenian community, it shares a lot with Armenia the nation-state as well - a common border; economic investment; growing transportation and energy infrastructure; political concerns related to the South Caucasus; geopolitical ramifications of oil and gas exploration and transportation in the Caspian basin, etc. Many of these issues are of no great interest to the Lebanese and were never touched on by analysts based in Beirut. To assume that Iran would disturb these delicate relations with Armenia, a friendly Christian neighbor, and, by extension, with the latter’s more powerful geopolitical ally, Russia, simply because of how a few thousand ‘Armenian’ votes would go during elections in Lebanon is tantamount to according Lebanon, let alone its tiny Armenian minority, an importance much greater than it actually deserves. Moreover, the Tashnags have played a lesser role in formulating Armenian foreign policy in Yerevan in recent years, and in April this year they left the ruling coalition government altogether. Finally, it should also be mentioned that the number of Armenians living in either the United States or France far exceeds those living in Syria and Iran together.
Another newspaper, critical of ‘Awn, reported in the immediate aftermath of the elections that the Tashnag party’s Bureau, based in Yerevan, had asked the Tashnag leadership in Lebanon for an explanation for its latest defeat at the polls. Yet again, it is naove to expect the Tashnags in Lebanon to confirm such an occurrence even if it actually happened; it would be against the party’s modus operandi. There is no archives-based research on the internal party history of the Tashnags in Lebanon, and independent historians are unable to discover in full to what extent there has been Bureau involvement at the times of Lebanese elections in the past. Memoirs written by two former Tashang parliamentarians, Khosrov Tutundjian in 1937 and Melkon Eblighatian in 1972, admit that on both of these occasions the Bureau was directly involved in the process of choosing the Tashnag candidate. However, they make no hint that the Bureau’s involvement was related to the dictating of policy or the imposing of electoral alignments with non-Armenian factions. During the recent elections, the Bureau had at least a moral right to seek an explanation because such a mobilization transcending continents in order to locate potential voters from among Lebanese Armenian expatriates, as well as organizing and paying for their return for the elections could not be accomplished without the Bureau’s blessing. Some of the vast amounts of money spent for this purpose might also have come from funds at the Bureau’s disposal. On the other hand, if the Bureau is held responsible - by some of the Tashnag party’s non-Armenian rivals - for having imposed upon its branch in Lebanon its alignment with the allegedly pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian opposition, then it goes without saying that it has, in that case, no right to hold the Lebanese Tashnags responsible for their electoral defeat.
Ever since voting in separate ethno-confessional polling boxes was introduced in Lebanon in 1960, non-Armenian candidates who have lost because of Armenians voting for their rivals in large numbers have also often ended up claiming that their defeat was imposed by a community whom they still see as somewhat alien to the Lebanese social fabric. This argument, and its acceptance by at least part of the Lebanese public, is without doubt evidence both of lingering xenophobia within Lebanese society at large and of the problematic nature of gradual Armenian assimilation into the host society. The Lebanese electoral law does not insist that deputies filling seats pre-allocated to a certain ethno-religious community should necessarily receive the most votes from members of their own community. However, in a fragmented political environment, imbued with feelings of ethno-confessional xenophobia, this ploy has been used quasi-regularly by defeated candidates. Supporters of the Tashnags, the majority party among the Armenians, have, in turn, questioned the legitimacy of non-Tashnag Armenian deputies who have not gotten the majority of votes cast by Armenians and have obtained their seats largely through votes delivered by non-Armenians. On this occasion, ‘Armenian’ votes in Metn benefited ‘Awn and deprived the Christian factions of the “March 14” bloc of one Greek Orthodox, one Greek Catholic and three Maronite seats, which would have gone the other way had the Armenians as a group decided not to make use of their constitutional right to vote and stayed at home. Moreover, the Armenians were not the only community on this occasion whose members voted overwhelmingly for one faction. Sunni voters cast some 75 percent or more of their ballots for the Future Movement; the Druze, for the PSP; and the Shi’is, for the Hizballah-Amal alliance. Again, in a thinly disguised xenophobic tone, the Arabic-speaking Christians, i.e. Maronites, Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics - especially supporters of the “March 14” alliance - argued that theirs were open societies, but ’their’ deputies in religiously mixed constituencies were being imposed upon them by Armenian, Sunni or Shi’i “bloc votes.” In addition to Murr’s complaints discussed during our coverage of the results in Metn, similar accusations were leveled at the Armenians, in particular by Murr’s 27-year-old granddaughter, who ran and won in Beirut I, and by a returning Lebanese Forces deputy in North Lebanon. Fortunately, such comments also received timely criticism not only from the leaders of the Tashnag party but also from a number of prominent non-Armenian politicians, including the outgoing prime minister.
The “Armenian bloc vote” is a relatively new phenomenon in Lebanese history. ‘Armenian’ seats were hotly contested among rival Armenian groupings, particularly in Beirut, in the 1930s,’40s and ’50s. During the last head-to-head contest between the Tashnags and their Armenian rivals, prior to the outbreak of the 1975 civil war, the Tashnags and their Phalanges allies got ‘only’ 58 percent of the ‘Armenian’ votes cast in Beirut I in 1960. Their Hunchagian and Ramgavar rivals mobilized the remaining 42 percent of the Armenian electorate. We must also remember that illegal, but unashamedly open, Lebanese government intervention on polling day in favor of candidates it preferred was persistent up to the mid-1960s. The anti-Communist Tashnags regularly benefited from such interventions, especially after the Second World War. Such intervention could have made an additional difference of a few percentage points. However, when the “Tashnags versus the rest” electoral contests in Beirut resumed in 2000, it soon became clear that the Tashnags had during the intervening forty years consolidated their hold over the Armenian community in general. They are now regularly getting some 80 percent of the ‘Armenian’ votes, even though direct government intervention on polling day is now much less and the Tashnags are no longer necessarily the favored Armenian party for successive Lebanese governments. Why and how the Tashnags became even stronger at the expense of their rivals warrants a separate study by historians and will not be covered here.
If the preliminary figures regarding the distribution of the ‘Armenian’ votes cast, released by the Tashnag party and used in this analysis, are true (and, in the past, they have only differed slightly from those tabulated ultimately by the Lebanese Ministry of the Interior), the non-Tashnags made a slight advance on this occasion in Beirut I and a more significant one (but from a much lower base) in Metn, compared to the results in 2000 and 2005. However, these advances are too insignificant to alter the image that, when it comes to Lebanese electoral politics, “Armenian” mostly means “Tashnag.” Hence, when Armenians are targeted, such comments and behavior come mostly from non-Armenians unhappy with the political choices of the Tashnags.
Moreover, the Tashnags are seen as the Armenian party most ready to raise its voice and object when the reputations of the Lebanese Armenian community or Armenia the country are targeted. The reaction of anti-Tashnag parties or deputies has usually been slower and appeared half-hearted. While Hagop Pakradouni has become in the last four years a figure familiar to all politics-crazy TV viewers across Lebanon, the anti-Tashnag spokesmen among the Armenians have failed, for a variety of reasons, to come up with a corresponding figure (or figures) ready and well-equipped to also carry their respective message to the airwaves. TV appearances by Oghassabian and Toursarkissian have been far fewer and much less articulate. Kassardjian rarely gave TV interviews during his nine years as a deputy, while the now retiring Djeredjian probably never appeared on live TV or radio throughout his 17 years in parliament. Will the incoming two non-Tashnag deputies, Kalpakian and the much younger Chinchinian, make any difference and fill in this gap? This remains to be seen.
It will be interesting to analyze in depth how various components of the Lebanese Armenian community are choosing their representatives at this current juncture, especially after 2004, when Lebanese politics became exceedingly polarized. Most Lebanese pollsters take for granted that Armenians will vote according to their communal party allegiances. Those with more day-to-day contact with Armenians, however, realize that the picture is more complex. For example, if the Tashnags had agreed to Hariri’s offer and crossed to the “March 14” bloc prior to the recent elections, what percentage of votes would ‘Awn and his supporters still have gotten from Armenian voters? While this hypothetical number would have definitely been much lower compared to what they actually got on June 7, it would still not have been negligible. As Armenians are becoming more integrated within the Lebanese (actually, the Arabic-speaking Christian) community and are in better command of the Arabic language than ever before, they have also become more prone to obtaining information and making political decisions bypassing their traditional Armenian party channels. It is evident for those living and working within the Armenian community that, in recent years, the number of traditional Ramgavars and Hunchagians sympathetic to Hizballah’s arguments in favor of a resistance movement in south Lebanon, or the number of traditional Tashnags wary of the future repercussions of ‘Awn’s pro-Hizballah line, is not negligible, particularly among the better-educated. The ‘mini-rebellion’ among Tashnag supporters against the decision to vote for Michel al-Murr may be one manifestation of the more independent spirit shown by some Armenian voters in recent years. However, this ‘independence’ is partly conditioned by fact that politics in Lebanon on the one hand and pan-Armenian political issues pertaining to Armenia and the Diaspora on the other are no longer seen by most Armenians as being inter-connected, as was the case earlier, during the Cold War period. This issue also warrants an in-depth analysis based on a broad survey of political opinion among the Lebanese Armenians.
The gradual Armenian assimilation within the ‘Christian’ Lebanese fabric was also evident through the professional qualities of some of the new candidates, who contested the elections for the first time. Command of the Arabic language has always been a major obstacle when selecting Armenian candidates to run for public office. Lebanese political satire has, in turn, concentrated excessively on fossilizing the stereotype of the Armenian who cannot speak the Lebanese Arabic dialect properly. For years, Armenian parents who preferred to pull their children from Armenian community schools and instead send them usually to foreign missionary schools have dwelt upon the necessity for their children to master the Lebanese Arabic dialect in order to succeed in life. Hagop Pakradouni, a product of the Armenian community school system, broke this myth in 2005 and showed that it is possible to learn to speak Arabic at an acceptable level and become known to the Lebanese public without necessarily attending a non-Armenian school. Among the candidates who failed on this occasion, but were fully qualified to repeat Pakradouni’s accomplishment, were Gregoire Calouste and Sebouh Mekhdjian. Both may again attempt to enter parliament in 2013. Finally, two of the three Armenian newcomers in the Lebanese parliament of 2009 bring with them past experience as principals of Armenian community schools - again following a path first taken by Hagop Pakradouni.
Unfortunately, the increasing visibility of Armenians within the context of Lebanese politics is offset by the continuing decline of the influence of the Lebanese Armenian community across transnational Armenian politics. In the year 2000, soon after the news that the Tashnags had failed to win five seats in Beirut came out, this author received an email from a renowned senior colleague in the field of Armenian Studies in the United States. He asked if this change in Tashnag fortunes in Lebanon might assist in making the Tashnags more flexible and help in finding a solution to the lingering political and administrative dispute around the Armenian Church in the USA. Developments in Lebanon were still seen as pivotal by some when it came to transnational Armenian politics. Nine years later, fewer people, if any, harbor any expectation of a domino effect transcending state borders. The Armenians of Lebanon are becoming more rooted in their host society, but Armenian politics on the Lebanese scene is losing its ability to influence Armenians in other countries.