Bullet holes still blister the buildings and army checkpoints control the roads up to the Alawite Jabel Mohsen district, but Alloush spots an illusory element about all this
Mustafa Alloush is one of those very few politicians who might turn you into an optimist – even in the Middle East. He’s a much loved doctor, a black belt judo expert, a novelist in waiting, a scourge of uneducated clerics, an enemy of corruption, a critic of all and maybe even a minister in the next Lebanese government. But don’t hold your breath. He speaks rashly, sometimes angrily – when you least expect it – and can take you on a guided tour of his city of Tripoli, pointing out all the old inter-Muslim front lines, and still be dogmatic, stubborn and cheerful. Is that what optimism is about in the Middle East?
A few days ago, the Lebanese army pursued a bunch of gunmen through the streets of this proud, beautiful old city, which even the Crusaders could not capture, and in a gun battle one of the soldiers was killed. “He was brought here to the hospital,” Alloush says with the bathos – sympathetic but coldly factual – of a family doctor who has seen this many times before. “I saw him later. He had been shot in the head and abdomen. He died immediately.” The shootout had not been sectarian. There are gangs in Tripoli. “We did not see this as a major break in the situation.”
Alloush is at his surgery at the Nini Hospital in his white hospital jacket, and he enjoys being greeted by his patients outside – in fact, he likes to be seen being greeted; for this is a man, I suspect, who has a certain vanity, who wants to be recognised not as a seer but at least as a realist. Most people in Lebanon are pessimists, even if they are enjoying themselves in a relatively peaceful country. They talk of hope when they are afraid.
But Alloush, a former MP, would even like to take his optimism into the government. “I told [prime minister designate] Saad Hariri that if I was a minister I would say what I thought was the truth, whatever his reaction. I would not be a ‘yes’ man.” He would like to be a minister of health, sport or culture – he was hoping for the same in the last three Lebanese cabinets. My suspicion is that Mustafa Alloush – one day, not now, you can’t be too careful about these things in Lebanon – would like to be prime minister.
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Categories: Arab World, Asia, Lebanon