I'm curious about the stats. Of the 3.6MM you reference do you know if that is the "Lebanese" population or if that is the total number of human beings presently residing in Lebanese territory. I'm not challenging your number ... I would really like to know because I have heard of nearly a million Syrian "guest workers" and of an unspecified but very large "Palestinian refuge" population. If there are 3.6MM true Lebanese but 0.8MM Syrian nationals and another 1MM "refuges" then the non-voting foreigners represent a substantial proportion of people there. If the 3.6MM includes the foreigners then there appear to be as many foreigners in Lebanon as Lebanese. Either way I feel sorry for these people.
Here is what I've got so far: according to the
CIA Factbook there were, as of July 2004, 3.8MM in Lebanon. There were 0.4MM Palestinian refuges and their labor force includes "as many as one million foreign workers (2001 estimate)".
It is still not clear from this data if the 3.8MM population includes the workers and refuges. The factbook also indicates that about 60% of the population is Muslim but that includes Shi'ites, Sunni, Isma'lite, Druze, Alawite and Nusayn at least some of which tend to be anti-occupation. Given that Hizb'allah is a Shi'ite organization and that 39% of the population is Christian, and that there is a huge foreign presence in county, it seems very likely that the pro-Syrian turnout was nowhere near proportional to national opinion. This is not to say that Hizb'allah is small or that there is not a significant, pro-Syrian faction. I'm just trying to put together an objective gage of how representative that huge crowd might have been.
It appears to me that in Lebanon, as in this country (The US), the forces of oppression have a disproportionate ability to rally people into the streets.