‘Coming out party’ for Hezbollah in Lebanon

Was the crowd peaceful? Was there a fear of clashes with the anti-Syrian demonstrators a few blocks away?
The crowd was very peaceful. We were right in the thick of the crowd and it felt very peaceful.

We were talking to people as an NBC News crew, so they knew we were Americans, and they came to us and we had very good discussions. It was very open, very frank and very friendly. I felt no tension at all in the course of the day.

There was plenty of security out there. Several units of the Lebanese army, probably hundreds of troops. And they were not riot police. These were troops that had real weapons and real bullets, not rubber bullets. But they looked very relaxed as well as they formed a ring around the demonstration. There were no incidents at all.

The pro-democracy or independence uprising group did not have any kind of counter demonstration today. They really did lay low. There was almost no activity at all at the neighboring Martyr’s Square, about 300 yards away.

How was today’s demonstration an example of democracy?
For me, it was very encouraging to see — particularly as someone who covered Lebanon in the '80s and even the '70s, and saw the civil war and the subsequent catastrophe of the Israeli invasion here.

Earlier we saw masses of people — Christian, Druse and some Sunnis — coming out for one idea, to move democracy forward.

And then today, we saw a very different look from people who you might call conservative, coming out in huge numbers to express their preferences in a peaceful way. 

You have a debate here, as you do in many societies between people who want to move forward and people who are more comfortable staying where they are. That’s really what you have and that’s what the divide is.

But there was no sense at all that it was anything other than a positive exchange of ideas in the streets through demonstrations, rather than returning to the old habits of forming militias and having militias shoot it out at each other on street corners.

From that perspective, it passed the first test of this fledgling democracy.

It could all change with one terrorist attack, but today there was a peaceful exchange of ideas.

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