By Emma Gatten
BEIRUT: Around 400 people marched
from Dora, Greater Beirut, to the Electricite Du Liban building in Mar Mikhail
Sunday calling for social justice and with the hope of relaunching the
anti-sectarian movement that rose to prominence last year.
Protesters chanted anti-sectarian
slogans as they marched through residential areas with the hope of generating
interest from passersby.
“We want to get the idea back into
people’s heads that the system is not working,” said Nadine Moawad, a member of
the feminist collective Nasawiya, which helped organize the demonstration.
“It’s the beginning of a series of actions and demonstrations to bring back the
movements. It’s not a one-off thing.”
Anti-sectarian movements are a small
but long-standing feature of the Lebanese political scene but became
particularly prominent in the early half of last year, with activists holding
weekly protests, at one point attracting 20,000 people in a march from Beirut’s
Ashrafieh district to the Interior Ministry in Sanayeh, before the movement
appeared to lose momentum.
Moawad said Sunday’s protest had
been “small but effective.”
“The size reflects the independence
of the march,” she said. “Every single political party told their followers to
boycott the event.”
Among the demands of the protesters
are better transportation, education, rent control, wages and women’s rights,
with Sunday’s protest focused particularly on the country’s crippled
electricity sector.
“We’re bringing all the campaigns
together,” Moawad explained.
“Sectarianism is responsible for
everything. There’s nothing right in this country, no work, no benzene [fuel],
nothing,” said 19-year-old chemistry student Carina Ayoubia during Sunday’s
protest.
The protest was advertised in the
prior days as a funeral for EDL, the state electricity company which provides
just 21 hours of electricity a day in Beirut, and fewer outside, and at the end
of the march organizers hung a funeral wreath on the gates of the building.
Speakers decried the “lies and
hypocrisy” of Lebanese politicians which they said were keeping the country in
“hours of darkness.”
Watching nearby, 29-year-old travel
agent Joelle said she had never been involved in any form of civil
demonstration, but that “if the crisis persists like this, of course I would go
and protest with them.”
However she also added that, “the
main problem is the electricity,” and not sectarianism.
Civil society demonstrations have
been on the rise over the past number of years in Beirut, with the first recent
milestone in April 2010 when 5,000 people marched from Ain al-Mreisseh to
Parliament to demand an end to the sectarian system.
Seventy-year-old Rashid Zaatari said
the country could not move forward without addressing the sectarian system. “We
are not individual citizens in this system; each one of us is affiliated to his
own sect from the date of his birth to the day he dies,” he said. “We cannot
build a nation state with sectarianism structured in our political system.”
Some activists cited the Arab Spring
as inspiration for last year’s protests, following the toppling of leaders in
Tunisia and Egypt in the early months of the year.
But last spring’s slogan, echoing
the Arab uprisings, “the people want the end of the [sectarian] regime,” was
only briefly heard at Sunday’s protest, before being drowned out by other
chants.
Speaking to The Daily Star at the
protest, 29-year-old engineer Mohammad said the anti-sectarian movement had
important differences to the uprisings in the rest of the region.
“It’s not similar really to the Arab
revolutions,” he said. “It’s going to take people a long time to make change
[here].”
Active in last year’s anti-sectarian
movement, he said the time was ripe for a rebirth.
“The movement’s a bit more mature now,” he said.
“We understand more that it’s going to be a long-term, not a short-term thing.”
– With additional reporting by Brooke Andersonhttp://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2012/Feb-27/164719-activists-reawaken-anti-sectarianism-campaign.ashx#axzz1naY8As4a
