Bangladesh, April 19 -- Fifty years after the outbreak of Lebanons civil war, the nation finds itself at another historic juncture – one that could either lead to long-overdue reconciliation and reform, or to yet another chapter of internal strife and regional interference. The tragedy is that Lebanon never truly emerged from its civil war. The Taif Agreement of 1989 may have silenced the guns, but it never dismantled the underlying structures of sectarian division, foreign influence, and internal dysfunction that birthed the violence in the first place. What followed was not peace, but an uneasy ceasefire – a fragile coexistence among competing factions with no unified sense of national identity.

Many Lebanese still cling to...