Vol. 73/No. 36      September 21, 2009

Lebanese citizen Samira Soueidan, for example, married an Egyptian. In an interview with al-Jazeera, she said when her husband died she could not get her children recognized as Lebanese citizens, even though they were born in Lebanon. They were denied public education and access to public hospitals. In order to work they had to purchase expensive residency papers every year.

Soueidan went to court and in 2005 a judge granted her children Lebanese citizenship. The country’s minister of justice is trying to get the ruling appealed to a higher court.

Another lawsuit was filed in April by women from the northeastern Bekaa region of Lebanon. It calls for women to be able to pass their citizenship on to their children as well as to their husband, should he be of a different national origin.

Women involved in the case held a demonstration outside the Interior Ministry in Beirut April 27, reported the Beirut-based Arab news site Menassat. Ilham, a farmer, told Menassat that her husband is Iraqi. Her son was denied a visa to Lebanon by the Lebanese embassy in Baghdad. He returned to Lebanon anyway, was arrested, and jailed for six months until Ilham paid the equivalent of $630 to get him released.

“In our day and age the blame for this situation might easily be cast by some observers on an either outmoded Arab cultural heritage or even so-called ‘Islamic intolerance,’” wrote Mida Zantout in the August 7 Beirut Daily Star. “However, the real culprit is French civil law (Code Napoleon) which is wrongly regarded as progressive and modern, at least in this case.”  
 
French colonial rule
The territory today called Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire for several hundred years up through World War I. Since the empire sided with Germany, which lost that war, the victorious imperialist parties in the conflict stole Lebanon and other parts of the oil-rich Mideast for themselves when they divided up the war spoils. The League of Nations gave the French government the mandate over Syria and Lebanon.

Under the Ottoman Empire a woman’s children could inherit her citizenship. The French rulers took this away in 1925 by imposing on Lebanon the law that governed France at the time: children of French men only could become French citizens.

The reactionary law used to be more widespread in the Middle East. But in Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco women have finally won their nationality rights. Women are still fighting the legislation in Lebanon, Syria, and Bahrain.

A factor in the resistance of the Lebanese ruling class to getting rid of the restriction is the country’s quota system of government, another legacy of French colonial rule. When Paris imposed its rule on Lebanon, it depended heavily on Maronite Christians for support in face of the growing Arab revolt against imperialist rule in the region. Fearful of that revolt upsetting its control of Lebanon, Paris established a government structure there that remains to this day: the president is a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the parliament a Shiite Muslim.

But much has changed since, particularly with the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian territory and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to other lands. A succession of wars between Tel Aviv and surrounding Arab states and Palestinian armed groups has produced tremendous dislocation of the region’s population.

Today, out of Lebanon’s population of 4 million, 10 percent are Palestinian. Tens of thousands are Syrian. Allowing those married to Lebanese women to become naturalized citizens or granting citizenship to the women’s children threatens to destabilize a government that both the imperialists and the Lebanese capitalist class want to preserve.'  
 
 
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