The warlords of Lebanon

Paul Martin

On the hills overlooking Beirut, a Druze militia commander urges his then into a near-suicidal attack. 'Who wants to drink his mother's milk today?', he asks. This must surely be the most astonishing call to battle even in a battlefield such as Lebanon. A Druze soldier, himself a successful businessman in London and New York, but now back to join the latest conflagration, explains. In the Druze religion — a secretive, mystical offshoot of Islam whose inner mysteries are revealed only to a small proportion of 'Initiates' through deep prayer and study — as soon as a Druze dies he is born again, as a baby in his new mother's arms. So death, he says, holds no fears for the Druze, who make up less than a tenth of Lebanon's population. Their un- shakable belief in reincarnation has already had a direct bearing on their military suc- cesses, both recent and stretching back over the seven hundred years since they first sought refuge from persecution in the Chouf mountains.

Once again, it is the BBC's Religious Programme makers who have provided such insights into complexities that their

Current Affairs colleagues have been slow to unravel. In making two documentaries on the Druze and the Maronite Christiafis in Lebanon, entitled Warlords and Widows, the Religious Affairs unit 1115 again had the cheek to delve into realms parently more temporal than spiritual, a has emerged with royal pickings. It has bee, preoccupied with this 'political-religious film-making in the world's trouble spots for some time, ever since it unilaterally over- spent its minuscule budget several year' ago. And despite angry rumblings front Current Affairs people, the men of Re'igi , on have doggedly stuck to their guns. Indeed, their flagship Everyman intends to fortify its globetrotting activities still further.

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Everyman's two Lebanese docutnei' taries, shown a few weeks ago, get to the, very roots of the conflict. Both Druze Maronite Christians say it is a matter of Or. vival. Both are peoples who sought refuge in the mountains of Lebanon from relig10°'e persecution many centuries ago. 130th ar;tv imbued with a sense of moral superl°r that stems from their religious convictions' Indeed, as the programmes' Procitice,ry scriptwriter Colin Cameron narrates, , have — to an outsider — more in coM11.1°'' than the sum of their differences. But for the Maronites, once the majoritY, now clearly outnumbered by recent waves of Muslim immigration and populat11 growth, theirs is a struggle for the surov'l of Christianity in a sea of Islam- The /111„. cient Maronite Church, which became; dependent of Byzantium and Rome 41 !,is fifth century, has no qualms about Church and State: indeed, churchmen at prominent in the Maronites' political baer ties. Father Jusef Muannis, monk, teae.11,d, and television director, says he is `pr to that his students have fought and, g'"7s, necessary, killed in defence of the Chrl

tians over nine years of civil war. 'Our boys are not angels...but we're protecting our Christian values, our Christian existence, against Islamic fundamentalism:

Not just 'our boys'. One of his students is Josslin Ghoeri, who has been studying Christianity, and the tenets of Islam too, at the Church's University of the Holy Spirit. losslin, a beautiful young woman who as a teenager fought in the streets of Beirut alongside her brothers in the early days of the Civil war, now commands a 1,000-strong wornen's militia. An abiding and profound- ly sad image lingers at the end of the film on the Maronite Christians: khaki-uniformed housewives, students, secretaries, office- Workers, guns and eyes blazing, pour a blistering hail of concentrated fire into an unoccupied sand-dune — rehearsing for the

real thing to come.

Josslin's studies of Islam have not brought a deep desire for reconciliation and her Christianity does not mean forgiveness. can forgive them for trying to kill me, but ot for invading my Temple', she says, tak- ing the example of Jesus's 'violence' against the Money-changers who invaded the sanc- tity of the Temple in Jerusalem. She feels she has a 'duty' towards Muslims, but she says their religion 'teaches violence...I don't trust them, they are on a slippery Path.' Christians and Muslims and Druze, any of whom went to school together, hardly ever meet these days. Fifty Christian villages in the Chouf mountains are now deserted.

The Christians have never felt so embattl- ed: They have the most to lose from the shifting balance of power.. They simply find the idea of being a minority in yet another Ih.1-1, slim-dominated country unacceptable. Isri indeed the Maronites who invented the ,„,,,I."1° of Lebanon in the early years of this -nturY. It was a notion that allowed freedom and capitalism to flourish, under a Political system where the Christians held a six-to-five majority, and exclusive rights to the highest office, the presidency. It is essential to understand that the very Concept of Lebanon is political. 'If they anderstand that all of us are Lebanese, then Wstop fighting immediately', says Mike, a soldier manning an outpost in a pockmark- ed building zoo yards from the front line of another major faction, the Shiite Muslims. Muslims reckon there are only Christians, usl,ims and Druze, and that's why were leader right now'. Indeed, the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt makes no bones bout his allegiance. It is not to Lebanon, but to the Druze. 'There is no such thing as a Lebanese,' he confides, standing on the hillsides of the Chouf, He accepts that the ivvea of Lebanon is a Maronite invention, ill there ever be peace? he is asked. 'I am sceptical,' he says. 'We shall see.' Jumblatt, until recently a young playboy tinde still an assiduous womaniser, has now Liarn, fielder l statesman, by virtue of the in- `rlirl leadership and structured pattern of gious, judicial and temporal command mapped out by Druze tradition. The film, fortunately, fails to mention the rivalries

and bloodletting between his and other Druze families, which have only just been held in check by the more pressing matter to hand.

The tragedy is that neither Druze nor Maronite appears in the least inclined to belligerency. Each is almost mystically attached to the mountains, which have been their shelter for centuries. But each side has a long memory, a memory that avenges each massacre and settles each score, and is determined not to let the other get the upper hand. The Druze regard fighting as an 'interruption' from their lives where the highest value is placed on inner contempla- tion, where it is important that there must be `no hate in your heart'. So is there any hope for sanity to prevail? Both sides ap- pear to recognise that things have now got to change. 'We have one last chance left,' said one Druze. 'If my generation does not bring peace to Lebanon, there will be no Lebanon.'

Even the political leaders seem to be in chastened mood. Who else but a Religious Affairs television team could extract this sort of confession from the iron man of the Maronites, Pierre Gemayel, father of the two last presidents? 'We men have turned God into a thing of hate and resentment,' he said. But he offered no solutions. Father Jusef Muannis came the closest to offering a glimmer of hope . 'We have to destroy this kind of hate and build a kind of love. We need to go to the other side and open the window of dialogue. We need to take

the first step.'

The country suffers not just deprivations but also a depravity of the soul. Perhaps the two are bound together. When electric power supply was reduced from six to four hours a day recently, the man in charge said: 'Electricity was made for civilised peo- ple. We've proved we don't deserve any.' But perhaps the most telling statement of Lebanon's malaise was quoted in the second documentary, from one of the country's leading poets who wrote: `Pity a nation full of beliefs and empty of religion, Pity a nation divided, whose each frag- ment deems itself a nation.'

The two documentaries, excellent though they were, could only provide a fragment of the truth about this fragmented group of nations. A third documentary on the Shia Muslims from the 'Belt of Poverty' in South Beirut would have added a vital ele- ment to our understanding. (They were fleetingly shown, entering their square-mile ghetto housing a quarter of a million peo- ple, but we were never told why, if they are so poor, angry and dispossessed, the cars they were driving almost all seemed to be Mercedes-Benzes?) Until last week, the curfew in West Beirut was rigorously en- forced by the army after 8 p.m., while the children of Christian East Beirut played happily on the rollercoasters of the funfair until late at night.