AD BLITZ SATIRIZES LEBANON’S DIVIDES
Ya Libnan, Lebanon
Nov 28 2006
Provocative Signs Target Pervasive Sectarianism
Beirut – The evening was tense, as most are these days in Beirut,
its Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Sunni and Shiite Muslims and
Druze perched imprecisely between war and peace.
Malak Beydoun, a young woman, pulled her car into a parking lot in
the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh. She peered at a billboard
overhead, alarmed and then indignant.
"Parking for Maronites only," it read.
Beydoun recoiled. "How did they know that I was a Shiite?" she
remembered asking herself.
Part provocation, part appeal — with a dose of farce that doesn’t
feel all that farcical — advertisements went up this month on 300
billboards across the Lebanese capital and appeared in virtually
every newspaper in the country. Thousands of e-mails carried the ads
across the Internet to expatriates. Each offered its take on what one
of the campaign’s creative directors called a country on the verge of
"absurdistan" — cooking lessons by Greek Orthodox, building for sale
to Druze, hairstyling by an Armenian Catholic, a fashion agency looking
for "a beautiful Shiite face." At the bottom, the ads read in English,
"Stop sectarianism before it stops us," or, more bluntly in Arabic,
"Citizenship is not sectarianism."
The campaign, designed for free by an ad agency and promoted by a
civil society group, has forced Lebanon to look at itself at a time
when the country is spiraling into one of its worst political crises
in years. The timing was coincidental, the message universal, in a
landscape with ever dwindling common ground: The forces that dragged
Lebanon into one civil war are threatening another.
Many have praised the ads for asking uncomfortable, even taboo
questions about a system in which sectarian affiliation determines
everything from the identity of the president to loyalty to sports
teams. Some have mistaken the campaign for reality. Across the capital,
one in six billboards was torn down, prevented from being put up or
splashed with paint, usually the tactic of choice for conservative
Muslims irked by lingerie ads.
"They didn’t get it," said Fouad Haraki, a 53-year-old shawarma vendor,
idly dragging on a cigarette next to a kerosene tank, across the
street from billboards that had been defaced. "They just read what
was written on top, not what was on the bottom."
The result in his neighborhood, he said, was "a sectarian clamor."
It is almost a cliche that Lebanon is home to 18 religious sects —
from a tiny Jewish community to Shiite Muslims, the country’s largest
single group. The system that diversity has inspired has delivered
minorities a degree of protection unequaled anywhere else in the Arab
world. But it has left Lebanon a country where individual rights and
identity are subsumed within communities and, by default, the personas
of their sometimes feudal leaders, who thrive on that affiliation.
By tradition, the president is Maronite, the prime minister Sunni, the
parliament speaker Shiite. Other posts are reserved for Greek Orthodox,
Greek Catholic and Druze. Boy scouts are organized by community, not
country — the Mahdi Scouts for the Shiites, for instance. Television
stations have their own sectarian bent — the Lebanese Broadcasting
Corp. for Christians, Future for the Sunnis.
Christians are partial to the Sagesse basketball team, Sunnis the
Riyadi team. There are even two Armenian soccer teams — Homenmen
and Homenetmen — one faithful to Armenian leftists, the other to the
community’s right wing. Before this summer’s war, Sunni soccer fans
loyal to Ansar brawled in a stadium with Shiite youths loyal to Nijmeh.
The system, known as confessionalism, dates to long before Lebanon’s
independence in 1943. But there is a growing sense that the decades-old
principles underlying Lebanese politics have grown obsolete. In some
ways, today’s crisis is about the assertion of power — a coup to
its critics — by the long-disenfranchised Shiite community led
by Hezbollah. Hardly anyone can forecast with certainty how the
struggle will end, but almost everyone sees it as a turning point,
a crisis that intersects raw ambition with ideology, foreign policy,
perspective and history, all awash in sectarian combustion.
"This is today a very explosive situation where you have all those
sects being triggered, teased and hammered by all their leaders,"
said Bechara Mouzannar, the regional creative executive director for
H&C Leo Burnett in Beirut, which authored this month’s ad campaign.
He calls himself "a little dazed and confused."
"Something is about to explode, unfortunately," he said.
Added his colleague, Kamil Kuran: "If we keep thinking like this,
the future is going to look like this."
The inspiration for the campaign came almost by coincidence in their
cramped offices, its walls cluttered with ads for L&M cigarettes,
a poster for the film "Reservoir Dogs" and memorabilia from last
year’s protests after the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq
al-Hariri. Those protest signs appear a little dated; "Independence
’05" and "All of us for the nation." On one window hangs a handwritten
quote: "The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my
opinion, is believability."
Manal Naji, a 27-year-old senior art director, had glanced at a
r?sum? tucked underneath another piece of paper. "Christian," it
read. "We were so shocked," she recalled. In the end, it turned out
it was the name of the applicant’s father, but it gave Naji an idea.
"What if it actually existed," she said. "What if it reached the
point of putting it on your job application."
"We wanted the same shocking effect," added Reem Kotob, a 25-year-old
member of the creative team.
This weekend, the two sat with another member of the team, 26-year-old
Yasmina Baz, in the agency’s conference room, looking over the ads
they designed in a burst of energy on that first night and a later
session at a nearby bar, Club Social.
One is a doctor’s plate: "Dr. Mohamed Chatila, Muslim Sunni." Another
is a three-story banner that reads, "For Druzes, Building for Sale."
A license plate is pictured: "A Shiite car," it says in Arabic,
"Shiite" in English. And an ad for a car: "2000 model, in near
perfect condition. Owned and maintained by a Maronite. Never driven
by non-Maronites."
The team took the ads to Amam 05, a grass-roots group that grew out of
last year’s protests. The name means "ahead," an acronym of the Arabic
for civil society. It states its mission, admittedly ambitious, as "a
modern, sovereign state built on non-feudalism, non-confessionalism
and non-clientelism." But even its leaders admit to being a little
glum, given today’s crisis.
"Very frustrated," said Nicole Fayad, one of the activists.
The original idea was to actually hang the signs in the city:
"Maronites only" in a parking lot, "For Druzes" on the side of
a building. But when Asma Andraos, one of the group’s leaders,
approached the owners, they cringed.
"They called me back, and they said they loved it, that I was crazy,
and that there’s no way they could do this," she recalled. She shook
her head. "If I had a building, I wouldn’t have done it, either,"
she said.
They went instead to newspapers, placing the ads in eight papers for
two weeks this month.
One printed them for free, the others at a 50 percent discount. A
billboard agency agreed to post 300 for free for a week. In all,
it cost the group $40,000; Mouzannar estimated it would have cost
more than $500,000 commercially.
But before the billboards went up, they had to go through the
formality of getting permission from the intelligence branch known as
General Security. At first, officials refused; one compared the ads
to Nazi-era segregation. It took two hours of face-to-face meetings
to reach a resolution, by convincing the officials that the campaign
was intended to be ironic.
Then when the billboards went up, 50 were defaced or torn down. Some
residents stopped them from going up in the first place. In Lebanon
and abroad, e-mails flitted back and forth, some of their authors
believing the messages were real.
"People were seriously panicked," Andraos recalled. "Are there really
signs like that in Lebanon now? The mere fact that people think it’s
possible, that there might be signs like that in Lebanon now, means
we’re not really that far off."
Members of the group say people have criticized the timing, and
the group delayed the campaign’s next step after the assassination
last week of a government minister, Pierre Gemayel. But they plan
to distribute as early as this weekend 15,000 business cards with
the same theme at bars and restaurants in Beirut. Each card lists a
person’s name and religious affiliation. Next, they will send copies
of the cards to Lebanon’s 128 legislators.
"We want it to be raised as an issue," Fayad said, "but we don’t have
the pretension to say we have the answer."
At a cafe near downtown, Randy Nahle, a 21-year-old student,
wondered about the way out. His father is Shiite, his mother Maronite
Catholic. The neighborhood he sits in, like virtually every one in
Beirut, has its markers: the posters and religious symbols on walls,
the muezzin or the church bells that identify its affiliation.
For once, he said, something organized spoke to his rejection of being
"categorized or oversimplified."
He smiled at his favorite ads, the ones that identified doctors by
their sect. "It has infiltrated our fabric so much, almost indelibly,"
Nahle said. "If I have an earache, an Orthodox doctor will understand
it better. It’s an Orthodox ear."
He recalled sitting with a Shiite woman at a cafe near the American
University in Beirut. She treated him as a fellow Shiite until he
revealed his mixed background. She looked at him disapprovingly. It’s
bad for the children, she said. "They’re going to come out confused,"
she told him.
"I said, ‘You know, the problem of this country is we don’t have
enough confused people. The problem is we have too many people blindly
convinced by their political orientation, by their religion, by their
community’s superiority.’ "
She smiled, he recalled, and then laughed a little uncomfortably.
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