[LCM Articles] Ad Blitz Satirizes Lebanon's Divides

[Loai Naamani]

Ad Blitz Satirizes Lebanon's Divides
Provocative Signs Target Pervasive Sectarianism
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/27/AR2006112701
456.html 

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 28, 2006; A12

BEIRUT, Nov. 27 -- 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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