Walid Jumblat surprised everyone with his recent statements regarding his membership in the March 14 political grouping. However, Jumblat’s move is more than a political switch-over or change of heart. It is part of a scheme to blackmail him into returning to the pro-Syrian camp, and the price he is being asked to pay for the return.
Jumblat and his political camp, particularly his Druze supporters, were the ones to pay the highest price in last year’s sectarian fighting in the mountains, spearheaded by the Shia Hezbollah militia. Then, Jumblat was made to understand that his membership in March 14 will continue to cost him dearly, and that he best consider returning to the Syrian fold or at least, to refrain from being an outspoken member of March 14.
Since then, he has done just that, but his return itself would not be cheap. After all, Jumblat was the one to take the most extreme of positions within March 14, particularly in his attacks on the Syrians. One of the deliverables he would need to cough up is what he is now doing: tarnishing March 14 by playing the role of the one who condemns the movement from within.
In this vain, Jumblat is painting a picture of March 14 as having been guilty of sectarian politics, and thus in one blow hoping to give the opposition what they most seek, a certificate of innocence. While Hezbollah and Aoun have been the most rabidly sectarian, Jumblat has come out saying that March 14 were the ones to have been swept up in a sectarian frenzy and that he now regrets he ever took part in that.
Pardon us, Jumblat, but if you feel March 14 was ever a sectarian project (which sect???), then maybe YOU misunderstood it all along. As for the rest of us, March 14 was never anything of the sort. The opposite, March 14 stood against the sectarianism of Hezbollah and later Aoun. Maybe now things are as they should be, after all, Jumblat was always at heart a sectarian animal, having in the 1980s committed some of the worst ethnic cleansing ever in Lebanon’s history. Good ridance?
In any case, Jumblat is free to make the political alliances he pleases to make, or that fit his vision for the country. What he cannot do is pretend that he has some special role as witness on what March 14 actually stood for over the years. As for his belief that March 14 was a “right-wing” project and that he is now returning to his leftist roots, how do Hezbollah and Aoun fit within the left exactly? While March 14 are not leftists, they are certainly more to the left than Aoun and Hezbollah, both of which just below the surface believe in furthering the interests of their own respective sects. In that, Jumblat at least is in the proper company.
jumblat is a very confused man