Grups de Recerca

In 2002, to the unknowing eye, Nejmeh club appeared to be doing really well. It had finally ousted Al-Ansar from the top of the league, and won the country’s championship for the years 2000 and 2002. The club’s long battle with the LFA had concluded in a satisfying outcome, and its popularity remained as robust as ever with fans filling the stadiums in every match. For many years the board had managed to sustain itself financially whilst treading the tightrope of cooperating with the political elite without being completely under their wing, yet upholding the club’s motto - which its fan base no doubt reflected;

‘from Beirut, for the whole of Lebanon’.

Yet internally, according to Nejmeh’s management at the time, the board had reached a point where it could not continue to sustain the club financially. At the economic level, Hariri’s economic policy had weakened the financial standing of many of Beirut’s traditional families and industrialists – the very people who provided the majority of the club’s funding. In parallel in the local football scene, the Olympic Beirut club was rising fast, with a budget that far exceeded that of other clubs. Led by Taha Klaylat, an aspiring businessman who bought out the licence of a marginal club, Olympic Beirut had managed in one year to climb its way up the premier league and, in the spring of 2003, won the national championship. The salaries paid by the newly emerging club to its players were double and triple the salaries paid by Nejmeh or any other Lebanese team, and thus raised the bar of what a club budget should be. In the stadiums, Nejmeh fans had gained

themselves the reputation of being trouble makers. The fans were highly susceptible to being mobilised by various intermediary leaders within the club and the Fans’ Office, and the problem of managing the fans was wearing the club down. Throughout the 1990s, the security forces and the LFA were doing little to make this task easier.

In 2003, the thirty-four year reign of Omar Ghandour, club President since 1969, came to an end primarily because of his financial inability to sustain the club. Surprisingly, the person chosen to take on patronage and leadership of the club was Hariri himself, patron of long-time rival club, Al-Ansar. This transition and the period that followed is the main subject of this thesis, and I elaborate on these issues in detail in later chapters.

Nevertheless, it is useful at this point to give a brief overview of the transformations that have taken place in the club in the twenty-first century and to situate these changes within the broader political context.

With the aim of securing the club and ensuring its viability, from the late 1990s the board discussed many options and approached several funders and patrons, including various members of the Hariri family, for support, but most of these approaches were unfruitful.

Hariri, who was a successful politician and businessman, with the required financial

resources, was one of the few who were, according to Ghandour, ‘up to that responsibility’.

On Nejmeh’s board, members were varied: some were supporters of Hariri, but several others were not, yet at the beginning no real objection to acceptance of Hariri’s support on political grounds was voiced so long as the club could be sustained financially. Following the decision to approach Hariri, negotiations began between Nejmeh board members and Hariri’s representatives. The initial intention was to create a team which combined some of the old board members with a group chosen by Hariri’s negotiators. As the negotiations proceeded, discontent started to arise among some of the board members, but despite this, the deal was completed. In March 2003, elections of a new board representing the new patron took place with only a minor quibble (see table 7). As these arrangements were being made the second Gulf War was on the horizon. While the country was divided politically in its own position towards the war, Saudi Arabia, a long time supporter of Hariri, was backing the US in the war that started in March 2003, only two weeks after the change in Nejmeh’s management took place.

Table 7 - Leadership of Nejmeh Club (1969 - 2011) 1969 – March 2003 Omar Ghandour – President

Zuheir Baroudi – Secretary General (for term ending March 2003)

9 March 2003 – 26 July 2005

(resigned before end of term) Mohammad Fanj - President

Abdulhafiz Mansour - Secretary General 23 October, 2005 -

16 November 2008 Mohammad Amin Daouk - President

Abdul Latif Farshoukh - Secretary General 16 November 2008 – Present

(Serving a second term - First term ended 2011)

Mohammad Amin Daouk – President Saadeddine Itani – Secretary General

The process of organising the club in a form that suited the new patron followed. New members joined the General Assembly, membership fees were raised and the Fans’ Office was restructured. In a much publicised move, the Nejmeh stadium was renovated soon after the club changed hands, most of its debts were cleared, and in both 2004 and 2005, it won the national championship again. The period witnessed various club conflicts between, on the one hand, older fans and some board members who had for decades been part of

the club, and the new management on the other. Once again these conflicts were resolved in favour of the new patron and his appointed management. At this time Lebanon was also experiencing internal division in reaction to parliament agreeing on an unconstitutional extension of term for Syrian-supported President Lahoud in 2004; a decision which Hariri opposed.

In February 2005, Hariri was assassinated by a car bomb, an event that marked the beginning of a period of intense political division and turmoil. As a result of the

assassination, the political scene, and a large part of the Lebanese population were sharply divided into two camps, the March 8 Alliance and the March 14 Alliance, names adopted from the dates on which protagonists of each of the groups led massive popular marches in Beirut’s city centre in March 2005.

In exacerbating the pre-existing political tensions, the division I describe only crystalized in the two months following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. I elaborate further on this situation as it was instrumental in dividing Nejmeh club and its fans.

The March 14 Alliance was headed by the Future Movement, and composed of political groups who accused the Syrian regime of being behind Hariri’s killing: it also protested against Syria’s presence in Lebanon. Regionally, March 14 allied itself with the Saudi political agenda. According to members of the alliance, military resistance to Israel had not been a priority since the liberation of the south of Lebanon in 2000, therefore calls for disarming Hezbollah were made. Besides the mostly Sunni Future Movement, members of the alliance included some of the Christian political groups, namely the Lebanese Forces, and the Kataeb.

The March 8 political camp, represented by Hezbollah, adopted a strong pro-resistance to Israel position and allied itself with the regimes of Iran and Syria. It contested the claims that the Syrian regime was responsible for Hariri’s assassination and saw in it support for the resistance against Israel. It also refused calls for disarmament of Hezbollah’s resistance, asserting that Israel continued to be a threat to Lebanon and that some areas of Lebanese land continued to be occupied. Its members included another Shiite political group, the

Amal movement, the Free Patriotic Movement as well as some of the communist and nationalist parties.⁶³

Despite the involvement of most political actors in one camp or the other, the poles of the two groups remained the predominantly Shiite Hezbollah, and the predominantly Sunni Future Movement⁶⁴, giving the divide a sectarian as well as a political character. At the same time, and although this political conflict appeared as ‘a conflict between two incompatible visions for the country’ (ICG, 1) close examination of the key sectors of public concern to voters and the political discourse around them, reveals that the differences, besides the regional allegiances, between the two competing camps were not flagrant. Saad Hariri and the March 14 political camps promoted a capitalist economic agenda, heavily reliant on privatisation, international aid, and stability of the Lebanese currency - all continuations of late Prime Minster’s Rafic Hariri’s policies. Saad Hariri’s political opponents criticised the focus on the services and financial sector as opposed to agricultural and industrial sectors, and called for decentralised development beyond the capital, Beirut. That said, none of them truly provided an alternative economic vision, nor did they fundamentally disagree with the country’s free market economy or the massive external debt it had accumulated.

During the June 2009 elections, March 8 championed an anti-corruption agenda and then accused the Hariri camp of corruption, despite the fact that ‘corruption in the country was pervasive at all levels of society and state’ (Daily Star 18/11/2009) and was well

documented and publicly acknowledged⁶⁵. Both the accusations of corruption, as well as the denial of such accusations by Hariri, were mere performances. Politically, despite their diverging agendas, both parties voiced support for the ‘Palestinian Cause’, the legitimacy of resistance to Israel, and the centrality of Lebanon’s Arab identity.

After Rafic Hariri’s assassination, contrary to established traditions, Saad, his second son, took on the political leadership of the Hariri Establishment. The role entailed leadership

63 Some changes did occur in the composition of each of the groups with parties and political groups changing alliances. The FPM which stood with Future Movement in their opposition to the Syrian regime in 2005 and secured the return of its leader, General Aoun, from exile in the same year, switched political sides and signed a memorandum of understanding with Hezbollah in February 2006. The Druze leader and head of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) changed sides on several occasions and was often key in tipping the balance in favour of one or the other of the alliances.

64 Future Movement is the political group led by Saad Hariri, and the largest political group within the March 14^th coalition. Although long-standing, it was only officially established in 2007. For details see the movement's official website http://www.almustaqbal.org/ Accessed 21/10/14.

65 Leenders (2012) provides a summary of numerous studies concerning the prevalence and perception of corruption in Lebanon.

not only of the Sunni communities and the parliamentarian coalition his father had brought together, but also Almustaqbal newspaper, Future Television, Future Movement - the political movement established by Rafic Hariri - several social and philanthropic organisations, and, of course, Nejmeh club. In view of the numerous heirs and entourage members surrounding the inexperienced young leader, the transition took time and was embroiled with internal conflicts.

In the period that followed, violent clashes took place within Nejmeh club and on the streets of Beirut. The city centre, the cherished reconstruction model of the slain leader Hariri, was the site of demonstrations and extended sit-ins by hundreds of thousands of people. The country was overwhelmed by reports of the assassinations of politicians and journalists, of bombs in commercial and residential areas, street clashes between followers of different camps, violent confrontations in the north between the Lebanese army and an Islamic militant group based in the Palestinian refugee camps, and most significantly, the 2006 summer war with Israel. The 2006 war, besides causing over a thousand deaths and leaving a million people displaced, served to worsen the rupture between conflicting Lebanese parties, as well as inflicting significant damage in certain neighbourhoods of Beirut. Less than two months after the end of the summer Israeli war on Lebanon, and in one of the first sports matches to be played in the war shattered country, Nejmeh fans, like the country, demonstrated their own internal divisions. In two of the Asian Cup games played in Beirut in September and October 2006, Nejmeh fans exchanged political and sectarian insults. The response of the club’s management at the time further widened the divide and placed the club squarely in the pro-Hariri camp, thus alienating a great number of fans.

It was after this series of events that many Nejmeh fans claimed that ‘Nejmeh Club was dead’. Fans told me it was a time when fans who did not belong to the pro-Hariri camp felt that they no longer belonged to the club that they had for decades called home. The club, according to the Hariri appointed club President, was a ‘rooted’ Beiruti club - it had ʿaraqah (rootage) like the city in Solider’s motto - and no longer championed the motto

‘from Beirut, for the whole of Lebanon’. The conflicts in the club emerged against the background of a city already experiencing a sharp divide between a Beirut depicted as Sunni, and the Shiite Southern Suburbs. The long-standing stereotype of Shiites as socially inferior and intruders on the city’s urban life was best exemplified by the jokes popular during the sit-in by March 8 forces protesting at the policies of the March 14 led

that the city centre was now ‘smelly’ and they mocked the cheaper services now available to the hundreds participating in the sit-in. For many participating in the sit-in, this was the first time that the city centre, until then an expensive neighbourhood attracting tourists from Gulf areas, appeared to be a welcome space. For many of Beirut’s Sunni, the sit-in was an ‘occupation’ of the city by the Shiites, who were regarded as not belonging in it to start with.

In 2007, due to the recurrence of similar clashes, the Internal Security Forces decided that football games were to be played without spectators in the stadiums, a ban that remained in force throughout the period of my field work and lasted for four consecutive seasons. This decision distanced the club even further from its fans and significantly weakened the football scene in Lebanon.

Figure 15: Pro-Hariri and Salim Diab electoral banner in Tariq Al-Jadidah. The banner reads ‘Beirut of Arabism, Beirut of Rafik Hariri says “thank you Salim Diab”’. The banner is signed by the ‘sons of Beirut’.

Conclusion

This chapter has introduced Nejmeh Sport Club’s long history and its contested spatial, social and political positioning within the city. About sixty years after its establishment, the club’s identity was being disputed and many of its fans were finding themselves distant from the club that they had identified with for decades. The turmoil which the club and its host city were going through was the result of longer processes of invention and

reinvention of the city’s identity, and of the processes of inclusion and exclusion that defined who had the right to belong to the city and who didn’t. I have described how the

club was for decades an inclusive space for members of the various religious communities of Lebanon, one that had striven to be a club for ‘the whole of Lebanon’, yet at the time of the research was at a crucial turning point and more clearly confined within one political leader’s faction.

In the following chapter I examine the first stages of transformation within the popular club, particularly the process by which Rafic Hariri established his position as a political and communitarian leader. The chapter examines specifically the transition of the club from the thirty year reign of Ghandour into a new era – one which brought a new model of

leadership to the club and to Lebanon.