'For All This, People Have Died?'

Lebanese Question Why It Took 18 Months and Violence to Resolve Political Crisis

BEIRUT, May 22 -- Under the gaze of the statue of Riyadh al-Solh, one of the founders of modern Lebanon, there were scenes of reconciliation in Beirut on Thursday. Roads were reopened, cars returned to parking lots overgrown with weeds, and Hezbollah's workers finished dismantling the downtown site of their 18-month-long protest, planting flowers, directing traffic and piling glistening barbed wire in coils 10 feet high.

But the relief that met the announcement Wednesday of a deal to end Lebanon's worst crisis in a generation had given way, a day later, to anger that the confrontation had lasted so long. There was resentment toward communal leaders, some endowed with near-feudal powers, who often seemed to stage-manage the crisis until it descended into a paroxysm of violence nearly two weeks ago. Shaded by the statue, others asked why -- in civil wars in 1958 and 1975 and in the conflict now -- the country had to resort to violence to resolve changes in the fragile sectarian balance of 18 religious communities that Solh helped craft in 1943.

"In five days, everything is finished? You must ask why in five days, all this was resolved directly. Why did we have to go through all this?" asked Nicholas Dagher, the 42-year-old owner of a downtown bookstore, Libraire du Liban. "For all this, people have died? For what? For nothing. We have lost so much time for nothing."

The agreement was reached in five days of negotiations in Qatar between the Hezbollah-led opposition and the government and its allies. In the end, the deal met the very demands that the Shiite movement had made at the start of the crisis -- veto power in the cabinet and what it called a government of national unity. The important question of Hezbollah's formidable arsenal was left to future talks.

With the accord, Lebanon began trying to reconstitute what had looked more and more like a failed state. Parliament was to convene Sunday to elect Gen. Michel Suleiman, the army commander, as president, filling a post vacant since November. A little hesitantly, life returned to downtown Beirut.

Workers deployed by Hezbollah, wearing yellow caps, the color identified with the movement, planted roses, shrubs and trees in the once-manicured gardens the group's protesters had dwelled in since 2006, a cosmetic touch to a scarred city. Others repaired lights under Solh's statue, stacked bags of fertilizer and trimmed olive trees.

"We're going to bring this place back exactly the way it was," said Abu Mohammed Fahs, as he directed the dozen or so workers. "Perhaps even better."

As he talked, another Hezbollah official arrived with a bag full of yellow shirts.

"Come on, guys!" Fahs said. "Let's put on the yellow!"

In the street beside them, Hezbollah's men directed traffic alongside policemen in gray camouflage they had derided as a state-organized militia weeks ago.

Near the government headquarters known as the Serail, the workers removed barbed wire from purple bougainvillea. Others hauled away concrete barricades, one bearing the slogan "Death to Israel."

Under Solh's statue, one traffic light still worked. Fittingly, it blinked yellow.