By AJ Naddaff BEIRUT (AP) — At a Beirut hospital ward, five Lebanese protesters with bandaged eyes and faces huddled in a circle, their arms wrapped around each other, and they vowed to be back on the streets soon, despite their wounds from recent clashes with police. “We are coming back,” said one of them, 20-year-old Charbel Francis. Such resolve by some protesters signals that demands for sweeping government reforms won’t be squashed easily, even as security forces throw up cement barriers and resort to more violent means of crowd control, such as rubber bullets. But the recent descent into clashes after three months of peaceful protests has also triggered introspection and divisions among the demonstrators about their next moves. More than 500 people, including over 100 security forces, have been injured in confrontations outside the Parliament building in downtown Beirut last month.
Most of the injuries occurred on January 18. For hours, protesters hurled stones, firecrackers and flares at police who responded by firing tear gas, water cannons and shooting rubber bullets. More than 150 people were injured that night, many of them struck in the head and eyes. It was a shocking reversal for a popular uprising against a corrupt political class that started in mid-October and had been characterised by its striking peacefulness — particularly compared to the bloodbath in Iraq, where a similar uprising has resulted in the death of more than 500 protesters since October, most of them shot dead by security forces.