Frangieh's crises
Patrick Cockburn
The ceasefire in Lebanon which ended the ten months of civil war was always tenuous. It produced some signs of a return to normality : barricades were cleared away and fashionable Hamra Street was once again clogged with traffic. Shops reopened and for the first time in months taxis drove to the mountains. But after six o'clock the streets emptied apart from military patrols warming themselves beside fires lit in old oil drums. The road from Beirut to Tripoli remained dangerous, and around Zahleh, an isolated Christian town on the edge of the Bekaa valley, killing and kidnapping never entirely stopped. The local warlords Who control the Muslim and Christian militias continued to rule their own areas.
The coup against President Frangieh led by General al-Ahdab is a measure of the frustration felt in Syria and amongst Lebanese Muslims on both right and left at the continuation of the stalemate. President Assad and Khaddam, his Foreign Minister, invested too much time arid Prestige in Lebanon to see it blow up in their faces but it was becoming clear that the 22 January ceasefire had satisfied nobody. The original deal with the Christian leaders was that the Palestinians would be controlled and constitutional reforms limited. The old confessional system, whereby every government job from president to postman is distributed according to religion, was to be maintained.
This was unrealistic. For the Christians, the war was a political disaster. On 13 April last year twenty-seven Palestinians in a bus Passing through the Christian suburb of Ain Al-Rummaneh were machine-gunned to death. Since then the Christians have been progressively isolated. There has been no outside intervention by the Americans, as in 1958, or by the Israelis. Arab governments which saw the Ketaeb, the paramilitary wing of the Christian Phalange Party, as a counterweight to the Palestinians, have withdrawn support. The Syrians hoped that, recognising this weakness, the Christian establishment would look to Damascus for protection. The Palestinians and the Lebanese Muslims, on the other hand, would be kept on a tight leash. Since they drew nearly all their arms and ammunition from Syria during the war their misgivings would not lead to action.
The plan did not work for two reasons. President Frangieh, elected in 1970, proved too incapable to create a government of any authority, and the army was split. Frangieh is himself symbolic of the deadlock in Lebanese politics. Originally a clan chieftain from the Maronite Christian stronghold of Zghorta in northern Lebanon, he always had a taste for violence. In 1957 a gun battle between the Frangiehs and a rival Christian clan fought out in a church left seventeen dead. Since becoming President he has pursued a steady policy of jobs for the boys, rewarding his clients and followers with government patronage.
Throughout the civil war he did yirtually nothing. Most of the time he remained in his palace above Beirut and the appearance of his somewhat goat-like face on television has never increased confidence. However, getting rid of Frangieh will hardly be enough to break the political log-jam. The old establishment of Muslim and Christian leaders has learned little from the civil war. Since January, for all the promptings of Damascus, there have been few signs of any new flexibility of approach. The tentative agreement reached in mid-February is too vague to be the basis for a new balance of power within Lebanon.
The departure of Frangieh will be less important than the manner of his going. During the civil war the worst failure of the Christians was their inability to involve the army. Given the clashes between them and the Palestinians in 1969 and 1973 this always appeared to be on the cards. It didn't because the PLO, obsessed by the memory of their eviction from Jordan in 1970, generally kept out of the fighting till the last month of the war. When the air force briefly intervened on the side of the Christians, over 1,000 Muslim soldiers promptly deserted.
Since then Lieutenant al-Khatib has maintained his 'Lebanese Arab Army' in the Muslim-dominated south Lebanon. Closely associated with the Lebanese left and the Palestinians the government was not able to do anything about him. His demands for an army which was not basically pro-Christian—at least in the officer corps—won him popularity among the Muslim rank and file. The take-over of a number of bases by his supporters compelled the Syrians to speed up their attempts to get rid of Frangieh and reorganise the army as a whole.
For the Christians any such move has enormous dangers. They do not want another round of the civil war—though there are plenty of Para-military leaders who speak of partition. Frangieh has little enough prestige amongst them but to see him forced out by the army on the say-so of the Syrians would further erode their position. General al-Ahdab and the High Command have only a limited end in view: to reunify the army and use it to restore a government with some authority. But it is doubtful if the Christian right will believe that concessions will end there.
The difficulty of finding any modus vivendi is that the army, the Syrians, the Palestinians, the Muslims and the Christians are all lacking in the power to set up a government which is not obnoxious to one or other of the opposing factions. The 15,000-strong army is too weak and divided to impose military rule. Paramilitary leaders and politicians who emerged during the fighting show no inclination to disappear back into the woodwork. With 12,000 killed in the civil war—the police privately put the figure much higher—there is no possibility of a return to the status quo ante. In 1958, when some 2,000 died, the traditional leaders, in true Wars of the Roses style, could patch up alliances with yesterday's enemy. The civil war went on too long for this to be repeated. Instead it has created in Lebanon a pocket-sized Balkans and a new focus for conflict between Syria and Israel.
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