"Return my Vote .... "

FORBES/ here

".... Not far from the rally's main stage on Sunday stood 47-year-old Naha Rafia holding a sign that read "Return my Vote." Her protest was a message to Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt, whose followers are largely of the Druze faith, considered an off-shoot of Islam. Jumblatt was once a member of the March 14 coalition--named after the date of the largest 2005 anti-Syrian rally. After last year's parliamentary elections, however, Jumblatt separated himself from the anti-Syrian movement and reconciled with the pro-Syrian March 8 movement in a move that confused and angered many of his supporters. "Our leaders are not sticking with what we want," said Rafia, who voted for Jumblatt because he was part of March 14...... a recent move by Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who came to power after his father's death, raised eyebrows. In December 2009 he met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus--a visit some say undermines both the principles of the Cedar Revolution and the pending progress of the U.N.-backed International Tribunal. "It leaves the movement with no platform," a professor at the American University of Beirut recently told me......

Others, many too young to remember the day Hariri died, rested quietly, shading their heads with Lebanese flags, seemingly unmoved by the spirited music projecting loudly throughout downtown. Sitting curbside in the space left largely unoccupied by demonstrators, they were no inspiration to a country whose government has yet to achieve full political control...... Lebanon's past shows that it is during the most unstable periods that robust political demonstrations are at their finest. So, in Lebanon's current moment of peace, maybe people just don't feel moved to flaunt their political beliefs."