Middle East

Crisis in Lebanon

Patrick Seale

The frenzied blood-letting in Lebanon over the past five months is the ugly discharge from an underlying social and political abscess. Is there still time to drain the sore clean, or has it fatally infected the elaborate compromise on which the state is founded, the delicate checks and balances which made Lebanon a unique haven of freedom, security and tolerance in the Middle East?

This is the worst crisis the country has suffered since the creation of the modern state in 1920, worse by far than the 1958 civil war and almost equalling in ferocity the massacres of Christians by Druzes a hundred years earlier in 1858-60.

Living cheek-by-jowl in the mountains with the war-like Druzes and, since the creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920, lapped about by a predominantly Moslem population along the coast north and south of Beirut and in the inland plain of the Biqa, the Christians of Mount Lebanon have always felt beleaguered and uneasy. Their longing for security found expression in a European orientation, in a dependence on Western protectors, primarily France, and, at the same time, in a narrow, inbred, intransigent nationalism, suspicious of interference from neighbouring Arab states.

Conversely, the Moslems of Lebanon, chafing under Christian commercial and political supremacy and impatient with Lebanon's restrictive frontiers, tended tO look outwards towards their co-religionaries across the frontier in Syria and, when Nasser was alive, sharing his pan-Arab dreams.

Wise leaders from all six of Lebanon's Principal sects — Maronite, Sunnite, Shi'ite, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Druze — have long recognised that Lebanon could only survive on the basis of a Moslem-Christian alliance or partnership. This meant two things: first, a fair representation of the various sects in government (and in its spoils); and secondly, a compromise formulation of the country's foreign policy which would satisfy both Christian particularism and Moslem pan-Arabism. Lebanon's Arab nature had to be recognised but also her special need for a separate identity.

These principles — fair sectarian representation at home and Arab good neighbourliness abroad — were built into the so-called National Pact of 1943 which has been the bedrock of the country's political system ever since.

What has now gone wrong? So many intertwined factors, both internal and external, contribute to the present crisis that it is vain to say which of them bears the prime responsibility. It is hard to assign blame or single out a Villain; the Lebanese themselves are aghast and Perplexed at the demons released from their Pent-up grievances and frustrations.

The regime of President Suleiman Frangie has not been a happy one and it is fair to say that he was largely discredited even before Widespread fighting broke out last April. He is a small-time feudal baron from Zghorta in north Lebanon, boss of a Christian hill-top fief, steeped in the narrow sectarian prejudices Which it was the aim of the National Pact to correct. Inevitably, Moslem susceptibilities were inflamed.

The presidency of Lebanon is one of the hottest seats on this troubled planet requiring a very special mix of velvet glove and mailed fist. Frangie has fallen far short of the standards set by President Fuad Shihab who led the country to peace and prosperity after the 1958 civil war by conciliating the Moslems and disciplining his fellow Christians, forcing them to accept a modest reform of Lebanon's free-for-all commercial and financial system.

Shihab, however, did not or could not abolish the all-pervasive client system whereby favours are traded for votes. But he did hold it in check. His broom did not sweep clean the Augean stable of sectarian and family interests in the civil service, but he did start a small wind of modernism and probity blowing. Under Frangie, the bad old habits have returned with a vengeance. Laissez-faire can produce Spectacular results — and Beirut's glossy sky-scrapers are among them — but it is a system in which the strong devour the weak and the rich trample on the poor.

The crying need for social reform, for the state to protect the victims of unbridled capitalism, has powered a militant radical movement which has emerged fully armed onto the streets as a powerful new force in Lebanese Politics. It is made up of many strands often in loose alliance. These include the anti-establishment Druze leader Kamal Junblat who is attempting to harness the various forces of the left to promote his own political ascendency; a hard core of revolutionary Marxists which provides much of the tactical leadership of the movement; a resentful, underprivileged Moslem urban proletariat in the coastal towns, led by a new generation of city bosses eager to displace the old beys and effendis, the Karamis, Salams, Yafis and Sulhs who have led the Sunnite Moslem community since independence. Yet another wing of the movement is provided by the Shi'ite Moslems, the great disinherited population of south Lebanon who have found a radical leader in Imam Musa Sudr. His 'shock troops' are the shanty-town dwellers on the outskirts of Beirut, driven from their homes on Lebanon's southern border by Israel's punitive strikes.

Faced by these new and menacing forces, the country's old guard establishment — President Frangie, with the Tripoli leader Rashid Karami as Premier and ex-President Camille Shamoun, the symbol of Christian Mount Lebanon, as Minister of the Interior — seems paralysed. Some two to three thousand people have already been butchered and there has been great destruction of property, but the government has taken only the most timid and hesitant steps to restore the state's authority.

More importantly, it has not had the calibre or the vision to announce loud and clear that the old community arrangements for power and spoils-sharing are dead and that a new equitable formula for Chrisian-Moslem partnership must urgently be found. It is now widely believed that the Christians of Lebanon must edge over and given the Moslems a bigger share in everything to match their swelling numbers and political influence.

What makes such a readjustment intenselY delivate and painful are the outside pressures to which Lebanon's rival sects are subject. And of these, the most important are the Palestinians, an army of irregulars camped on Lebanon's soil, weighing heavily on her national life, encroaching on her sovereignty, bitterly resented by the Christians but recruited as redoubtable allies by the new left.

Stalemated in their struggle against Israel, deeply disturbed by Sadat's bilaterial deal with Israel, the Palestinians vent their frustrations against their local antagonists in Lebanon. The 1973 war and its aftermath are the backcloth against which the Lebanese tragedy is being played out. Arab military successes and the great surge in oil wealth which followed produced profound psychological changes in the minds of Arabs everywhere. Their self-confidence and morale were immensely boosted. This change of mood infected the Moslems of Lebanon no less, but it was tinged with shame in that they had stood idly by while Syria and Egypt fought Israel to something like a draw. Frustrated Arab pride is a powerful motive behind the current Moslem revolt in Lebanon.

But no list of factors in the current crisis can exclude the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi who has been fanning the flames with money and propaganda since the beginning of the year. Gaddafi is locked in battle with President Sadat and wants to defeat his peace strategy with Israel. He sees in the Lebanese crisis his best hope to set the region on fire and, by bringing about a Lebanese collapse, provoke a Syrian and then perhaps an Israeli intervention, followed do doubt by the Great Powers. In his thinking, such a conflagration could not but put back the chances of peace for a generation. It must be the hope of all wise men in Lebanon that their country will be spared such a fate.