Activist

days of cedar

ENTREPRENEUR ASMA-MARIA ANDRAOS found that FREEDOM FIGHTING was HER FIRST order OF BUSINESS

Until this year, Asma-Maria Andraos spent her time helping companies boost their corporate brands. Her event-planning business in Beirut promotes everything from cell phones to French jewelry to feminine hygiene products. Last February, she was almost too busy to see the cedar revolution coming.

One event shook Andraos, 34, out of her complacency—literally. The explosion that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14 blew out a window and rattled the doors of her nearby office in the Lebanese capital. “I felt fury, a raging anger,” says Andraos, who shares the common assumption that Syria, whose troops and intelligence agents had dominated Lebanon since the start of the 1975-90 civil war, was somehow responsible. “I thought, ‘Who the hell do they think they are?’” Like many Lebanese, Andraos mourned Hariri, who had been pushing Syria to leave Lebanon, as the driving force behind the country’s rebirth. The day after Hariri’s funeral, Andraos and a dozen thirtysomething friends, Christians and Muslims alike, began a sit-in near his downtown grave site. On impulse they asked passersby to sign a petition calling on the pro-Syrian Lebanese government to resign; after four days, they were wrestling with a scroll of signatures some 400 m long. Andraos, her chums and some new comrades found themselves at the center of Lebanon’s burgeoning protest movement, which eventually brought 1 million Lebanese into Martyr’s Square to demand political change. By the end of April, the Lebanese government had resigned and Syria had withdrawn its forces, the result of an unprecedented display of people power in the Middle East.

Andraos, a Christian whose parents sent her to school abroad to escape the civil war, now has her sights on a total overhaul of Lebanon’s sectarian political system. She and fellow activists have formed a new group, Civil Society ’05, to be a “nagging force” that will unite existing nongovernmental organizations into a nonpartisan movement. “Some of my friends say I’m crazy,” says Andraos. “I’ve become obsessed. I had never really been an activist, but no longer wanted to live in a bubble. It may be ambitious, but if you have a few good people, maybe you can change the world.” —By Scott MacLeod

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