The long-simmering crisis over the election of a new president for Lebanon refuses to go away. As President Emile Lahoud's term came to an end without an elected successor at midnight on November 23, Lebanon stared into a power vacuum unprecedented in its history. Months of intense international mediation and backroom negotiation between rival politicians from the two main opposing factions – the Western-backed March 14 coalition, which holds a narrow parliamentary majority, and the opposition spearheaded by Hizbullah – failed to break a tense stand-off over the choice of a compromise presidential candidate.
When bands of pro-government hoodlums and thugs, armed with sticks, chains, knives and assault and sniper rifles, attacked students in and around the campus of the Beirut Arab University on January 25, Lebanon again peered into the abyss of civil war. But it backed away, mainly thanks to the rigorous exercise of self-restraint on the part of the opposition
If anyone needed evidence that the deepening political crisis in Lebanon has entered an unpredictable phase, the government of Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora provided it on November 25. Siniora defied warnings from the opposition and other leading politicians and high-ranking officials, including president Emile Lahoud, and called for a cabinet meeting that approved a draft United Nations document for an international tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, who was killed in a massive truck-bomb on February 14, 2005 in Beirut.
