The Lebanese Conflict: Looking Inward 9781685858216

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Asabiya and Authority in the Lebanese Polity
3 Cleavages in the Lebanese Social and Political Structure
4 Communal Relations and the Generation of Conflict
5 Conflict Management in a Multicommunal Society: Lebanon's National Pact
6 Conflict Resolution: The Taif Accord
7 Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Book and Author

Citation preview

The Lebanese Conflict

Canberra Studies on Peace Research and Conflict Analysis Ramesh Thakur, series editor

V3

W

Published in association with the Peace Research Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies and the Centre for Middle Eastern and Asian Studies, The Faculties The Australian National University

The Lebanese Conflict Looking Inward

Latif Abul-Husn

LYN NE RIENNER PUBLISHERS

BOULDER. L O N D O N

Published in the United States of America by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU Distributed in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Island States by The Peace Research Centre Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 © 1998 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abul-Husn, Latif. The Lebanese conflict: looking inward / by Latif Abul-Husn. p. cm. — (Canberra studies on peace research and conflict analysis) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-55587-665-4 (he : alk. paper) 1. Lebanon—History—Civil War, 1975- —Causes. 2. Lebanon— Social conditions. 3. Lebanon—Politics and government—1975I. Title. II. Series. DS87.5.A29 1998 956.9204'4—dc21 97-36617 CIP British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

©

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

To Samira, Roula, and Ranya, my brothers, and to the memory of my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1

Introduction

1

2

Asabiya and Authority in the Lebanese Polity

9

3

Cleavages in the Lebanese Social and Political Structure

29

4

Communal Relations and the Generation of Conflict

53

5

Conflict Management in a Multicommunal Society: Lebanon's National Pact

73

6

Conflict Resolution: The Taif Accord

91

7

Conclusion

131

Selected Bibliography Index About the Book and Author

145 165 171

vii

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the assistance and support of a number of people. My main debt is to Lawrence Saha and Amin Saikal for the time they have generously given me and the guidance and counseling they persistently provided. I would like to express my thanks to Robert Springborg for his many pertinent comments and helpful suggestions. I am thankful also to William Harris, Mary-Louise Hickey, Susan Sample, and Ramesh Thakur for their editorial help and valuable comments. My warm thanks to Susan DeMarco for undertaking the difficult task of typing, to Betty Pilgrim, who continued, cheerfully, to type and retype, and to Jan Preston-Stanley and Carol Taylor of the Peace Research Centre in Canberra. The opinions and views expressed in this book are mine and do not represent the views of the Lebanese government. Latif

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Introduction

This book deals with the conflict in Lebanon from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. More than 100,000 people died in that conflict, many times that number suffered, and the world looked on while the warring parties within Lebanon were joined by external forces to achieve this outcome. The origin of the war, however, did not lie with these external forces, who had their own goals, but with the conflict within and between Lebanon's communal groups. This study, then, is mainly involved with the genesis, growth, and resolution of the conflicts among those factions. It investigates conflict dynamics not only as they relate to structural characteristics and political motives, but also as they challenge public policy and social engineering in any country with major ethnic or communal divisions. An emphasis on social structure is necessary to an understanding of the root causes of social conflict, though this is not meant to direct attention away from the political process. 1 This study will thus examine structural failures that seem to be the spawning ground of communal group tension. The conventional literature on the conflict in Lebanon has been dominated by three hypotheses. The first argues that the basic source of the conflict is the malfunctioning of the country's sociopolitical and economic structure. The second suggests that the conflict is a function of the interplay among Lebanon's domestic, regional, and international environments. The third contends that the conflict is caused and determined solely by the intervention of foreign powers. The proponents of these hypotheses differ in focus, methodology, and judgment. They do, however, have one theme in common: with different degrees of emphasis, they all view the sociopolitical and economic structure as a fundamental variable to be reckoned with in any meaningful analysis of the conflict. The influence of foreign intervention no doubt played a conspicuous role in the Lebanese conflict, but the conflict process has been cradled in domestic social, political, and economic contradictions that exacerbated it and hardened it to possible resolutions. The conflict itself has changed in shape, form, and direction over the years but the social structure has 1

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

remained constant. Analysis will show that the structure and its inherent conflicting tendencies are mutually reinforcing. The outcome of such an interplay supports the argument that the social structure is the spawning ground of conflict, and that the conflict itself contributes to the potential (and eventual) weakening of the social structure.

The Basic Issues The conflict in Lebanon broke into civil war following two apparently unconnected incidents in 1975.2 The first occurred in March in the southern port city of Sidon, where the army clashed with an organized rally protesting the establishment of a fishing monopoly in Lebanon. The death of a former parliamentary deputy, marching at the head of the protesters, triggered a campaign against the army that degenerated into civil war. 3 The second incident, on April 13, was a massacre in Ain al-Rummani, a suburb in east Beirut: Christian Phalanges gunmen ambushed a bus and killed twenty-seven of its predominantly Palestinian passengers. This incident sparked heavy fighting between the Phalangists and the Palestinian resistance movement in Lebanon. The fighting developed into intercommunal clashes, spread like shock waves through Beirut, and gradually engulfed the whole country. During the sixteen years of conflict, loss of human life (estimated at 150,000) and destruction of property were matched only by the damage incurred by the social structure in the areas of community relations and nation building. The conflict revolved around three main themes: reform of the political system, the national identity of Lebanon, and Lebanon's sovereignty. Other issues emerged as the conflict progressed and evolved in form and focus, but only these three endured. Intercommunal tension has been a feature of the modern state of Lebanon since its creation. From the early 1960s, the two main confessional blocs—the Christians and the Muslims—began to drift apart. This change was associated with three phenomena: the rise to power of an organized Palestinian armed resistance in Lebanon that aligned itself with the Muslim bloc; a soaring Arab nationalist feeling in the wider region; and the rising expectations of the Shiites and their demands on the system for a greater share in the power structure. The rising Arab nationalist feeling among the Muslim masses in Lebanon and the increasing Palestinian influence in domestic politics alarmed the Maronites and their allies. They sensed that such developments might shift the intercommunal balance of power in favor of the Muslims in the country. Their fears were reinforced by the simultaneous rise of the Shiite power under the leadership of Imam Mousa al-Sadr.

These developments were associated with the emergence of a configuration of two distinct conflict groups and blocs: the reformists, who sought a change in the power-sharing arrangements with a view to increasing their share in the power and authority structure; and the status-quo coalition, who feared losing their privileged status. What seemed to differentiate the two camps was neither their sectarian nor ideological orientations, for those two divisions had been satisfactorily accommodated through various conflict regulation mechanisms, including the 1943 National Pact. The bottom line was rather their profoundly divergent interests in changing the existing power-sharing formula. However, although the conflict had a sectarian dimension, it was not fundamentally a conflict between Christians and Muslims over religious precepts, or between leftists and rightists over ideological issues, or between Arab and Lebanese nationalists over the identity of Lebanon, or between the rich and the poor, or the powerful and the powerless over positions of authority. While some smaller groups that made up each camp assumed these identities and used them as a springboard to achieve their particular aims, each larger camp developed a set of core issues that distinguished it from its opponents. At different stages of the conflict the antagonism was greatest between the Christian and Muslim divisions, while at other stages the dividing line was between left and right, and so on, depending on the ebb and flow of the issue in dispute.

The Conflicting Parties Groups supporting the status quo included the Lebanese Front and the Christian establishment. Formed in mid-1976, the Lebanese Front was a coalition of several Christian parties, militias, personalities, and organizations. It consisted of the Phalanges and National Liberal Parties, whose leaders, Pierre Gemayel and former president Camille Chamoun, joined with former president Suleiman Frangie (founder of the Marada militia), Father Charbel Kassis (head of the Order of Maronite Monks), and a few other leading Christian intellectuals to form the front. There were a few other organizations and parties that remained outside the front but were in alliance with it. The front's political agenda was to preserve the status quo, but if that proved impossible, then the establishment of a federal system of government, resettlement of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon throughout the Arab world, and the removal of foreign forces from the country were considered minimally necessary. 4 The second category of revisionists consisted of the Lebanese National Movement, the Muslim establishment, and the Palestinian resistance movement. The Lebanese National Movement consisted of six major

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

parties and ten organizations who shared several aims: reforming the political system, supporting the Palestinian resistance movement in Lebanon, and opposing the right-wing militias. 5 The main constituent groups of the movement were the Progressive Socialist Party, the Organization for Communist Action, the Lebanese Communist Party, the Movement of Independent Nasserists (al-Murabitun), the Syrian National Social Party, and the Baath Party (both pro-Syrian and pro-Iraqi branches). The Amal Movement did not join the Lebanese National Movement but coordinated its activities with it. The Muslim establishment included the Sunni, the Shiite, and the Druze religious organizations. This alliance called for extensive political reform to ensure a more equitable distribution of scarce resources and the secularization of the representative system. They also sought restructuring of the balance of power between the three branches of government, the reorientation of the institution of the army toward more distinctly national aims, and the alignment of the military with other Arab armies in defense of the Palestinian cause. 6 The two main domestic camps were not the only actors in the protracted conflict. There were also a number of external participants, including Syria, Palestine, Israel, Iran, Libya, and Iraq. Syria played a major role at almost every stage of the conflict. Due to both its own security concerns and its historical ties to Lebanon, Syria acted as mediator, conciliator, patron, and balancer at different times during the conflict. The Palestinians in Lebanon, both as a community and as an independent armed resistance movement, were perceived by the status quo coalition, particularly the Maronites, as a threat to the sectarian balance and the sovereignty of the state. 7 Their support for the Lebanese National Movement and their increased raids into Israel from South Lebanon, which invited disproportionate and indiscriminate Israeli retaliation, strained the already tense intercommunal relations. Israel's persistent incursions and air raids on Palestinian bases in South Lebanon, compounded with its support of the status quo coalition militias, exacerbated the intercommunal tension and contributed to an escalation in the conflict. Inter-Arab discord and rivalries were another factor contributing to the war. They increased the intensity and violence of the conflict, and it was only when there was some Arab unity on the matter that a peace initiative succeeded in Lebanon. This was accomplished late in 1989, through the Taif Accord, after which the conflict subsided to a tolerable level. The preexisting power-sharing arrangement offered each community an opportunity to contribute to the political process in the country according to its numerical weight. In retrospect, this system lacked flexibility and an adequate adjustment mechanism for dealing with demographic changes, as well as the modernization process and other domestic and regional changes. The basic issues in dispute between the two conflict groups were

INTRODUCTION

5

resolved at the Taif meeting. This meeting evolved from several earlier unsuccessful attempts over a period of fifteen years. Several methods of conflict resolution were attempted by foreign as well as domestic actors but failed. 8 Conciliation and mediation by a high-profile and authoritative Arab League committee consisting of Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Algeria were finally successful; the committee put forward viable proposals that provided a base for negotiation and were approved by members of the Lebanese parliament in October 1989. As a result, an accord was signed between them under the auspices of the tripartite mediating committee, bringing the hostilities to an end and setting the peace process in motion. The Taif Accord allowed communal pluralism to maintain its legitimacy in the face of federalist desires, cantonization, and irredentist panArab ideologies. It restored to the political system its structural options and provided the policymakers with a conceptual foundation in their search for a relevant process to end the conflict and restore stability and credibility to a multicommunal system. The accord established a framework for continuing and formalizing the resolution process that might, if properly implemented, lead to political integration and social harmony over a period of a generation or two. Two factors were responsible for the success of the mediation in resolving the conflict. First, the conflict itself reached the end of its life cycle. Second, through their extensive involvement in the peace process, the mediators gained insight into the nature of the conflict, the issues key to it, and, above all, its structural base and sociopolitical bearings.

Multicommunal Lebanon The Lebanese conflict took different forms and directions and passed through several stages during its long life. It involved a whole range of conflict groups, factions, and parties and caused devastating damage to the society and state. The Lebanon of today, with its name and present borders, was created on September 1, 1920, by expanding the area of the previously semi-autonomous Mount Lebanon (whose main inhabitants were the Maronites and the Druzes). The newly incorporated areas were mostly urban communities, inhabited predominantly by Muslims and an Orthodox Christian minority. By virtue of their urbanization, they differed in outlook from the inhabitants of rural Mount Lebanon, who saw themselves as an independent republic of villages. By annexing the coastal cities and the interior areas, Lebanon became a city-state, a concept foreign to the inhabitants of Mount Lebanon. Their contradictory interests, and their different conception of what the new Lebanon was and what it ought to be, were almost irreconcilable. 9

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The interaction between the various component communities was strongest through economic and commercial exchanges, rather than through social life. This interaction was not strong enough to integrate the various communities into one social system. Each community developed an independent social system, with its own beliefs and values, communal consciousness, specific interests, and stratification system. Moreover, each community was virtually self-contained geographically: the Druzes and Maronites live in their enclosure in Mount Lebanon, the Shiites in southern Lebanon and the Beq'a Valley, the Sunnis in the coastal cities and towns, and the Orthodox Christians in parts of North Lebanon and the city of Beirut. This trend has only been intensified with the coming of civil war. Perhaps the most relevant portrayal of Lebanese society is to underline its multicommunal character. It consists of several social systems that exist side by side, often in harmony, but void of a basic central value system and widespread acculturation. Their exposure to a common lifestyle, urban or rural, has brought these communities closer to each other, but not close enough to create an integrated social system. Western values permeate the Christian society and influence the lifestyle of those sects but have failed to penetrate Muslim society enough to create a similar transformation. Lebanese society has preserved its multicommunal characteristics over the centuries. 10 Even present-day Lebanon is seen by some as no more than a grouping of sectarian communities. 11 It is a system of multiple social units hierarchically structured; conflicting tendencies are embedded and generated in this system. 12 No doubt such a system experienced intermittent periods of stability, but behind that apparently smooth functioning remained divergent communal interests that penetrated the social order and created separate value systems. Between 1864 and 1920, intercommunal relations in Lebanon were stable: seventy years of stability and cooperation followed the mid-nineteenth-century cycle of violence between the Druzes and Maronites, the two main communities of Mount Lebanon. Yet the antagonistic tendencies in each community persisted beneath the surface and were instrumental in defining and sharpening the communal boundaries, interests, and goals. An analysis of the Lebanese conflict and its resolution requires a thorough investigation of the social structures and processes of conflict and their outcomes. The genesis of that conflict is the social structure: the war was born of the communal contradictions inherent in this structure and exacerbated by external contingent factors. The conflict process is itself a cause as well as an outcome of change. There are a number of theoretical approaches in understanding conflict. Karl Marx explains it in terms of economic determinism and property relations. Talcott Parsons lends more weight to cultural factors but rejects the notion of conflict as a natural phenomenon in life. Rather, he sees it

INTRODUCTION

7

as an aberration in an otherwise orderly world. Ralf Dahrendorf and Ibn Khaldun both share with Marx the assumption that the social system is the spawning ground of conflictive tendencies. Contrary to Marx, however, Dahrendorf postulates that positions of authority, rather than differential distribution of property, are the major sources of conflict. Ibn Khaldun ascribes the cause of conflict to the asabiya factor in societal relations. Both factors, authority and asabiya, aid analysis by identifying and understanding the root causes of the Lebanese conflict. Dahrendorf's concept rests on the assumption that social conflict is ubiquitous and pervasive, even though every society incorporates measures of restraint and control. 13 Ibn Khaldun's concept of asabiya explains the rise and fall of the state and the formation and dissolution of conflict groups. Asabiya is a concept that refers to group cohesion. It is a fourteenth-century notion that refers to the vitality, cohesion, and stamina of the group. Its main attributes are obedience and loyalty to the chieftain and the unrestrained support of the group members. While Dahrendorf argues that the group's solidarity may be achieved by coercion, Ibn Khaldun maintains that such a solidarity could be obtained through the asabiya attribute of obedience. The following chapter will discuss the relevance of the concept of asabiya to the Lebanese civil war of 1975, as well as its role in the rise and fall of state institutions and the groups in conflict.

Notes 1. Joseph Himes, Conflict and Conflict Management (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 51. 2. The term "civil war" has been subject to dispute. Khuri suggests that those who fought on the side of the established regime, that is, the Maronites and their allies, referred to the conflict as "war," whereas the ideologues who attacked both the regime and the Maronites called it a "revolution." The Palestinians in Lebanon who fought side by side with the Reformist Camp referred to it as "civil war," implying a Lebanese-Lebanese rather than Lebanese-Palestinian conflict, as did Kamal Salibi. A fourth group called it "internal war." See Reuven Avi-Ran, The Syrian Involvement in Lebanon Since 1975 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 1-2; Fuad I. Khuri, "The Social Dynamics of the 1975-1977 War in Lebanon," Armed Forces and Society 7, no. 3 (spring 1981), pp. 383-408; Kamal Salibi, interview, An-Nahar Supplement 19 (July 18, 1992), p. 6. 3. Abbas Kelidar and Michael Burrell, Lebanon: The Collapse of a State: Regional Dimensions of the Struggle, Conflict Studies No. 74 (London: Institute for the Study of Conflict, August 1976), p. 12. 4. George Delury, ed., World Encyclopaedia of Political Systems (London: Longman, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 615-616. 5. Ibid., p. 618. See also Marius Deeb, The Lebanese Civil War (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980), p. 139. 6. Delury, ed., World Encyclopaedia, p. 617.

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

7. Theodore Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation (London: The Centre for Lebanese Studies in Association with I.B. Tauris and Co., Ltd., 1993), chapter 6. 8. For a thorough insight into the mediation efforts of foreign powers to resolve the conflict, see Elie A. Salem, Violence and Diplomacy in Lebanon: The Troubled Years 1982-1988 (London: I.B. Tauris and Co., Ltd., 1995). 9. Albert Hourani, "Visions of Lebanon," in Halim Barakat, ed., Toward a Viable Lebanon (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 3-11. 10. Samih Farsoun, "E Pluribus Plura or E Pluribus Unum? Cultural Pluralism and Social Class in Lebanon," in Halim Barakat, ed., Toward a Viable Lebanon (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 100-115; Helena Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1985), pp. 10, 11. 11. Augustus R. Norton, "Sectarian Estrangement and Social Fragmentation in Lebanon," in Altaf Gauhar, ed., Third World Affairs 1988 (London: Third World Foundation for Social and Economic Studies, 1988), pp. 63-76; Tabitha Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), p. 16. 12. Halim Barakat, "The Social Context," in P. Edward Haley and Lewis Snider, eds., Lebanon in Crisis: Participants and Issues (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1979), pp. 5-6. 13. Ralf Dahrendorf, "Out of Utopia: Toward a Reorientation of Sociological Analysis," American Journal of Sociology 64, no. 2 (September 1958), p. 126.

2 Asabiya and Authority in the Lebanese Polity

The major factors underlying the Lebanese conflict are the struggle for political power and economic disparities. This chapter looks at the political power struggle in terms of asabiya (group consciousness) and authority. Both concepts have implications for the emergence of conflicting parties, the distribution of power between them, and the success of patterns of domination among them. Authority is a central issue in the birth of conflict, and asabiya is a fundamental factor in the rise, growth, and demise of the conflict groups. The effects of sociopolitical and economic disparity will be discussed in later chapters. Three assumptions underlie the theme of this chapter. The first is that positions of authority in the Lebanese power structure are a source of tension that can, under specific circumstances, throw the existing institutional arrangements seriously out of kilter. Second, shifts in the balance of power between the communities who occupy positions of authority in the Lebanese power hierarchy can also cause new forces to emerge; these new groups are fundamentally organized around the concept of asabiya. The third assumption of this chapter is that the notion of asabiya is a phenomenon that constitutes a quintessential source of power for the leadership of conflict groups and provides for social cohesion and performance. The term asabiya is pre-Islamic and is now used to describe a strong bond between members of the same group. This bond would commit its adherents to support one another without question, without regard to the justice of the cause. Islam condemned asabiya, and the prophet Muhammad denounced it as contrary to the spirit of the religion: aiding one's people in unjust action is repugnant and antithetical to Islam. Ibn Khaldun was well aware of Islam's religious rejection of the concept, yet he uses it to explain the conflict in Muslim thought without damaging the orthodox view on the role of the prophet's successors, the Caliphs. Most writers who follow Khaldun seem to have failed in reaching a consensus on the precise meaning of the term. This is due, primarily, to the 9

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

lack of a direct translation for asabiya. Writers interpret the term differently depending on their own orientation. Some have defined it in a purely sociological context, accentuating a causal relationship between asabiya and cultural context. Others have focused on its political framework—with special reference to its organizational impact on the rise of power groups and the formation and decline of the state. Ibn Khaldun himself gave no precise definition for the term. The way he used the term (around five hundred times in his Muqaddimah) conveyed many different shades of meaning. However, most of the renditions of the term point to one widely accepted interpretation: "solidarity." The further connotations are wideranging: social solidarity, group solidarity, group cohesion, common will, esprit de corps, group feeling, group instinct, fanatical solidarity, the corporate will of the group, party spirit, community ethos, socio-agnatic solidarity, fellow feeling, zeal and ardor, patriotism, tribal spirit, national spirit, national feelings, party strength, power, support, communal ethos, and the vitality of the state. Each of those connotations implies an equally divergent and discursive meaning of asabiya. Undeniably, there is both a sociocultural meaning and a political one. An examination of asabiya and its role in the emergence and perpetration of conflict can greatly facilitate an understanding of the Lebanese polity. Asabiya is highlighted in an intensely conflictive situation, where it can play a defensive role. Ibn Khaldun argues that "group feeling produces the ability to defend oneself, to protect oneself and to press one's claim. Whoever loses his group feeling is too weak to do any one of these things." 1 The root of asabiya means kingship or rulership, and this implies an inherent notion of domination: presumably, a group with strong asabiya manifests a unity and dynamism that help it gain domination over other groups. It is only those groups with strong asabiya who can constitute a major political force in a larger polity, and who can use that force to propel their leader to national power. 2 Once a group attains authority by virtue of its stronger asabiya, it dominates other groups, though the dominance atrophies as the asabiya wanes. Before long, another group whose inferior position leads to a defensive growth of its own asabiya is in the position to overthrow the dominant group and replace it in the authority structure. This image of conflict closely resembles Dahrendorf's classification of conflict groups into those who possess authority and those who are denied positions of power. This becomes a relationship of domination and subjugation, and Dahrendorf asserts that this inequitable distribution of power is the determining factor in social conflict. Asabiya is a normative concept that guides all actions in a prescribed way, but it is important to note that asabiya operates as a force for integration through consent, obedience, and loyalty within the group. On the other hand, Dahrendorf's concept of authority is more conflictive by

ASABIYA A N D AUTHORITY

11

nature; authority depends more upon coercion than it does on consent. By depending upon coercion to maintain law and order rather than the precepts of asabiya, Dahrendorf's formulation seems to assume that authority can be used to create new group values and norms reflecting the will of the ruler. Assuming the elite-mass relations defined by the conception of asabiya, a leader backed by strong asabiya might try to introduce changes to the social-value structure. He or she could impose these changes on the people by resorting to coercion, but it would inevitably lead to conflict. In such a situation, the masses' feeling of asabiya might well prompt them to deny their consent and obedience on the grounds that the changes violate the given communal normative value system. This sort of behavior would probably be read as deviant behavior, leading to the overthrow of this leader in favor of another with stronger asabiya, or recognizable communal identity (and traditional behavior). The notion of order employed by Talcott Parsons also has a coercive implication. He maintains that the normative value system can be functionally integrative, but if it fails to deliver internal peace, then coercive authority can be used to restore order and balance to the system. The consent, obedience, and loyalty implicit in asabiya accomplish the same cohesion and integration of the group that the coercion inherent in authority structures can achieve. Asabiya is a function of lineage affiliation, but, more importantly, it reflects a feeling of solidarity that is itself a function of the cohesion of the group. The relation between this and authority is complex because "such coherence cannot be maintained without the presence of a dominant element with a mandate to coerce." 3 An authoritative leader (who can coerce if necessary) is needed to gain the respect necessary to make coercion a marginal partner of consensus and willing obedience in maintaining group coherence. Ibn Khaldun treats asabiya as an abstraction that points to, rather than explains, a phenomenon: it is not reified as a substantive cause of conflict but is conceived of as a vitalizing characteristic of the group that influences intergroup relations. Most Khaldunian writers treat asabiya as a concept interlocked with tribal structure that is particularly associated with segmentation and clanship. Some treat it as a universal concept, 4 while others argue that it is best used in more specific, limited contexts. 5 Lacoste, for example, rejects the use of asabiya in generalized sociological discourse and argues that it is associated only with tribal societies and should only be used to examine such structures. In fact, he argues that its applicability is limited to the North African society where Ibn Khaldun developed the concept. 6 However, despite Lacoste's rejection of the universality of the concept, Ibn Khaldun's original study of medieval North African society was later expanded. Asabiya was used to explain the

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

establishment of the Mongol Empire in central Asia, and that empire's conquests in the Middle East. In his account of the Jaghatai dynasty and their descendants, Ibn Khaldun saw in their victories in central Asia and their conquest of Damascus in the early fifteenth century a "confirmation of his own theory of asabiya, of group loyalty, or solidarity, on which, according to him, the continuity of a dynasty depended." 7 In other words, there is no particular reason to put spatial or temporal limits on the applicability of the conceptual use of asabiya, and it certainly applies to modern Lebanon as well as medieval North Africa. Within the Lebanese context, it becomes clear that asabiya consists of four vital elements—lineage, social and political structure, family, and religion. First, asabiya is a function of lineage affiliation or something that fulfills the role of such an affiliation. This does not necessarily mean a reflection of pristine blood ties among individuals, but rather that it can be treated in terms of hierarchies leading to a centralization of authority. In familial terms it fixes a rank; for example, the Arabian Qureish Asabiya ranks highest in the larger Mudar tribe and the Umayyad Asabiya is the strongest in the Qureish tribe. The Lebanese social structure is composed of a number of groups whose blood relations are manifested through the expression of asabiya. These relations are in fact a precondition for group mobilization, and militias and conflict groups are structured around basic attributes of asabiya (though this is more conspicuous in some groups than in others). During the war period, most of the Druze families, and particularly the majority of the Jumblatt asabiya, contributed men and money to the formation and maintenance of the Progressive Socialist Party militias. The same is true of the Amal and Hezbollah militias. Members of these militias are linked by blood ties and religion, as well as by ideology and geographical affiliations. Loyalty of the militia members to their kin is the strongest tie in the group. It is followed and supplemented, in concentric circles, by loyalty to those who come from the same birthplace and region. The Lebanese Forces militias depended on family ties as well as on group feeling generated by the common experiences of its dislocated members and sympathizers. The backbone of the rank and file of the Lebanese Forces militias consisted of those who followed Samir Geagea when he was forced from North Lebanon. Members of all three militias were predominantly recruited from rural Lebanon. Second, asabiya is associated with a certain level of social and political structure within the group, and kinship is not enough to explain the conflict groups' formation. However, alternative forms of group consciousness in Lebanese society are still in an embryonic stage; individual identification with a class-based social structure has still not definitively been established in Lebanese society. It remains underdeveloped, although

ASABIYA A N D AUTHORITY

13

there are clear indications that asabiya is moving some classless sects into a class-based community whose main defining elements are wealth, power, and prestige. Those with stronger asabiya can move upward on the social ladder, while those with weaker asabiya may remain immobilized. Third, family is also an important factor in organization and asabiya because it gives a leader a fixed position from which to launch efforts at mobilization. The Jumblatt asabiya was the most capable of uniting the Druze faction under its power. The familial aspect provides an ideological framework by which order can be maintained, and it generates feelings of solidarity. Blood relations, however, are not the only foundation upon which group organization rests. Effective leadership is a vital element, and that leadership must be legitimate and authoritative—aspects most likely achieved through the prescriptions of asabiya: rightful authority is most likely to be genealogically conceived. In Lebanon, only a limited number of families were in positions of real authority between 1920 and 1980.8 Fourth, Ibn Khaldun argues that no religious or political cause could be successfully fostered or defended unless backed by asabiya. Asabiya is needed to establish political power within a group and over the whole community, and such authoritative legitimacy helps consolidate the influence of religion. Asabiya can be reflected in this sense as a group striving politically and militarily for power. Strong asabiya affords a group unity and dynamism, both of which can help it gain ascendancy over other groups. The losing groups may join with the stronger to form a larger identity. The Lebanese Forces defeated the Chamoun group and absorbed it; the forces joined with the Guardians of the Cedars and with the Tanzim. Walid Jumblatt patronized the Arsalan factions of his sect and absorbed them until a young leader within that group emerged at the end of the war. Once the asabiya achieves its aims by reaching full sovereign power, it shares the fruits of status among its members. As soon as they reach the hegemonic stage and settle into their positions of authority, the leaders promote their own men who were either their kin (asabiya by blood relations), their allies (asabiya by alliance), or their clients (asabiya by loyalty) to positions of power. Ibn Khaldun maintains, however, that once a ruler is firmly established in his position, he embarks on a campaign to destroy the asabiya of those who propelled him to power. This type of power struggle can be seen inside the Lebanese Forces militia. As soon as Bashir Gemayel was ensured of his role as the uncontested leader of the Lebanese Forces, he carried out a campaign of annihilation against those who helped him achieve this position. He tried to destroy the Marada militia by having its leader, Tony Frangie, and his family assassinated; after that he turned on the Tigers militia of Camille Chamoun and destroyed it completely. His successor, Samir Geagea, followed a similar path.

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

Asabiya comes about because of several factors. More than just blood relationships and loyalty, continual social intercourse, common occupations, and common home regions contribute to the rise of solidarity among the groups. Blood relations, religion, and geographical location may be the strongest ties among conflict groups, but some groups differ when it comes to alliance and loyalty. With the Druze militias, expressions of loyalty take precedence over formal alliance, but this formula is reversed within the Lebanese Forces militias. Geography is a natural condition for breeding solidarity: in Lebanese society, common birthplace and native towns engender strong feelings of solidarity. The Lebanese Forces, Amal, and Progressive Socialist Party memberships are all decided mainly on the basis of village or neighborhood identification. An integration of these aspects of asabiya paints a vivid picture of the complexities of the Lebanese social structure.

Asabiya and the Lebanese Social Structure In order to fully determine the relevance of the concept of asabiya for the analysis of the parties to the Lebanese conflict, it is necessary first to look at the social structure from which these groups emerged. In the Lebanese context, the roles of leadership, ideology, and outside threat in enhancing group solidarity are all highly significant. In Ibn Khaldun's original study of fourteenth-century North Africa, the emphasis was more on relationships between group members, rather than on the structure of the groups. However, asabiya is clearly a useful conceptual tool in explaining ethnic, sectarian, and communal conflicts today, because it is interlocked with the notion of segmentation and manifests itself most clearly in conflictive situations. Lebanese society is segmented along a wide range of social and political lines. The population of 3.5 million is divided by sectarian, genealogical, geographical, and political affiliations. The clearest dividing line, though, is the religious-sectarian identification that has left an indelible mark on the whole polity. Sectarian distinctions are officially recognized, but they are hardly accepted peaceably: even conflict over resources has tended to polarize along sectarian lines. Despite this, the conflict in Lebanon should not be attributed solely to sectarian parochial loyalties, for other factors have joined with these to bring about conflict. The segmentation of Lebanese society is a function of the origin and nature of its component sects. In tracing the roots of the various sectarian communities, Kamal Salibi concludes that the seventeen officially recognized sects in Lebanon are nothing more than "tribes in disguise." 9 These groups might be considered tribes not only in their social behavior, but

ASABIYA A N D AUTHORITY

15

also in their historical origins. Salibi goes even further to observe that these sects are in fact solidarity groups possessed by a sense of group feeling that reflects the will of the community for self-assertion, defense, and attack. Thus, he inadvertently points clearly toward the legitimacy of analyzing the groups through the lens of asabiya. Asabiya is reflected in this definition of the nature of Lebanon's sects, and the observation that their inherent solidarity reflects the community's perceived need for selfdefense and capacity for attack.10 Salibi tried to limit the particular influence of religion in describing the distinctiveness of the sects. Group solidarity, rather than religion, binds the sects together. Religion, from this perspective, was grafted onto already extant tribes to transform and perpetuate them as sects.11 Ibn Khaldun, however, held the view that religion is a motivating force superior to that of asabiya: religion is part of the social environment, determining political action and operating in conjunction with the interests of the group. 12 Religion in this sense can be seen as a partial explanation for the emergence of self-contained political conflict groups or their militias. Others have found that religious conceptualization has far-reaching consequences for the organization of political life in the country.13 However, it is fairly clear that sectarian distinctions in Lebanon are not based solely on religion; socioeconomic factors have also played a significant role in sectarian contrasts and in the development of long-term conflicts. Marxist writers such as B. J. Odeh and Samih Farsoun have argued that economic disparities between the Lebanese sects can be interpreted as class distinctions within the societal structure.14 In the 1960s, the top 4 percent of the Lebanese population earned 32 percent of the national income, while the lower 50 percent held only 18 percent of its wealth. 15 In 1971, the annual per capita income was U.S.$803 in Beirut, while it was $151 in the south.16 These differences have clear sectarian roots. In a 1975 study on national income and literacy rates in Lebanon, it was discovered that the average income of Christians was 16 percent higher than that of Druzes and 58 percent higher than that of the Shiites. 17 The literacy rate among the Muslim sects ranged between one-third and one-half that of the Christians. A study in 1982 revealed that Christians strongly dominated virtually all business and professional sectors in the Lebanese economy. 18 These economic disparités have certainly contributed to the emergence of cleavages in the social system, and they have provided fuel to the fire of dissidence for the underrepresented communities. Furthermore, they have provided the grounds for challenging the political system, but economic conditions alone cannot explain the outbreak of violence. The challenge to sectarian aspirations and entitlements, and to communal consciousness, did not evolve from economic disparities alone, but from a myriad of factors that center on the authority structure and asabiya.

16

THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

The force that motivated these groups to act and transformed them into contenders for authority and domination is their asabiya consciousness. Asabiya is a strong explanatory factor, because it not only shapes communal consciousness, but also determines whether or not a community will achieve hegemony. Its operation is similar to that of the Marxist mechanism that changes a class from a "class-in-itself' to a "class-for-itself' as well as turning Dahrendorf's quasi-groups into conflict groups. Lebanese society is also segmented across lines other than religious identification and economic disparity. The country is also arranged genealogically according to a system of patrilineal descent from a common male ancestor. Each family is divided into a certain number of branches and each branch is subdivided into a certain number of lineages that are segmented further down to the nuclear family level. Loyalty in such a system is expressed in an expanding series of concentric circles. The individual's loyalty is first to his or her family, then to the lineage, then to the branch, then to the clan, and then to the sect. The primary historical (or legendary) division of Lebanese society is between the Christian Maronites who believe themselves descendants of the Phoenicians, and the Orthodox Christians and Muslims who share the claim of a common Arab ancestry. Societal division is also evident in the geographical distribution of the various sects. Those who live in the mountains of northern and central Lebanon, as well as East Beirut, are predominantly Maronites. In the south and east, and in the southern part of Beirut, the people are predominantly Shiite, while those who live in Mount Lebanon to the east and south of Beirut are Druzes. The Sunnis, Orthodox, and other minority sects share the coastal regions and the cities: West Beirut, together with Tripoli (the country's second largest city) and Sidon, are predominantly Sunni strongholds. Lebanon's political culture is equally fragmented along party lines. Almost every Lebanese belongs to, is affiliated with, or sympathizes with one party or another. The major political parties of Lebanon reflect the sectarian segmentation of the country. The Phalanges Party is predominantly Maronite, the Progressive Socialist Party is mainly Druze, and the Amal Movement is primarily made up of Shiite Muslims. Quite a few smaller parties and movements also reflect sectarian composition. The National Liberal Party, Guardians of the Cedars, and the Tanzim have Maronite followers; followers of the Party of God (Hezbollah) are exclusively Shiite; and the Muslim Brethren are predominantly Sunni Muslims. 19 Among the non-Arab ethnic groupings in Lebanon, the Armenians are the most politically active, with three parties of their own: the Dashnak (Armenian Revolutionary Federation), the Hunchak (Social Democratic Hunchakian), and the Ramgavar Azadagan Party (Constitutional Democrat).

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There are other influential parties who disclaim any sectarian or ethnic composition and orientation, and these do enjoy some influence in the political life of Lebanon. This group includes the Communists, the Syrian National Socialist Party, and the Baathists. Since Lebanon's independence in 1943, these parties have been trying, without success, to send elected representatives to the parliament. When seats became vacant in 1991, positions were filled by appointment rather than by elections, and it was only then that the Baath and Syrian National Socialist Parties were able to gain representation. These were not the only appointed deputies: almost one-third of all deputies were appointed by the government pending new elections. In the past, rather than being active conduits to political power and representation, political parties in Lebanon have tended to be used as platforms to air grievances and as a means of communication. In this sense they both reflect and contribute to the segmented structure of Lebanese society. However, this changed as the elections of 1992 and 1996 brought many more elected party representatives to parliament. All of these lines of division have meant that Lebanese citizens are consistently faced with a range of groups that demand primary loyalty. In other words, the legitimacy of the central government is under constant pressure from the divisions inherent in the Lebanese social structure, making peace tenuous, and permanent national unity very difficult to attain.

Limitations to the Concept of Asabiya The concept of asabiya remains a valid scheme with which to analyze the Lebanese conflict, and particularly the conflict among groups and the formation of the different parties to the conflict. However, it is clear that some attributes of asabiya that Ibn Khaldun ignored were manifested through the Lebanese conflict. Among these attributes are leadership, ideology, and external threats. Leadership Strong leadership bestows on asabiya power and determination. This was highly visible in the Lebanese civil war. With the impact of violence, the warring communities came to see their leaders as the personification of their solidarity; this was particularly the case for the Lebanese Forces, the Druze militias, and Amal. The communities expected their leaders to reflect their collective will and lead them to victory. Each leader, in these cases, was also expected to show devotion to the community. He became a symbol and a subject of idealized fantasies (this was particularly true of Bashir Gemayel, the leader of the Lebanese Forces, who was assassinated

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

in 1982). The community responded to this devotion, and the leader became an object of veneration, thus enhancing the solidarity between the subjects and rulers.

Ideology Asabiya gains clarity of purpose and strength when the conflict groups adopt an ideological direction. In the Lebanese case, this primarily takes on a religious characteristic: common religion strengthens the asabiya. The significance of religion in the asabiya has waned over the centuries, but in the Lebanese conflict, many of the parties retained religious tenets as symbols of their communities. At one stage of the conflict, the Lebanese Forces adopted this slogan: "Christian community's security is above everything else." Other groups do not have a stated public ideology but rather retain a prescribed code of conduct that is tacitly understood and accepted.

External Threats The Lebanese war provided clear evidence that an external threat is a significant factor in the formation and decline of asabiya. At least two militias vividly solidified their internal structures when faced with external threats. When the Lebanese Forces threatened the Druze stronghold in the Chouf Mountains in the summer of 1983, the solidarity of the defense was strong and immediate. The external threat generated a united force that not only made defense possible, but also increased the likelihood of later offensive action. In another instance, the Lebanese Forces were able to galvanize Maronite public opinion and secure their support by playing on the Syrian threat.

Application of Ibn Khaldun's Concept of Asabiya to the Lebanese Conflict Groups The domestic factions engaged in the conflict at its peak were the following: • Muslim groups: Amal, Amal al-Islamiyyah, Al-Jama'ah al-Islamiyyah, Hezbollah, and Harakat al-Tehrir al-Islami. • Christian groups: Maronite League, National Block, Marada Militia, Christian Social Democratic Party, Wa'ad Party, and South Lebanon Army. • National Movement parties and groups: Progressive Socialist Party, Murabitoun, Communist Action Organization, Communist Party of

ASABIYA A N D AUTHORITY

•

19

Lebanon, Baath Party-Iraq Wing, Baath Party-Syrian Wing, Nasserite Corrective Movement, Nasserite Forces Council, Syrian Social Nationalist Party, al-Majilis al A'la, al-Tawari, Popular Nasserist Organization (united with the Arab Socialist Union), Union of Working Peoples Forces, and National Confrontation Front. Lebanese Front parties: Phalanges Party, Lebanese Forces, National Liberal Party, Guardians of the Cedars, and Al-Tanzim.

Many of these groups have been relevant in the Lebanese political landscape for long enough to carve themselves a position of authority in the current sociopolitical structure. However, the power of some has declined and others have ceased to exist altogether, most notably, the Lebanese Forces and Murabitoun. The surviving groups were able to merge or transform themselves into political entities; they relinquished their military agenda and joined the political process to become part of the nation-building process. The survival and relevance of these groups could be attributed to their asabiya characteristics. Each of them manifested at least one of the attributes of asabiya (consanguinity, kinship, group identity, or power). Until they were joined by Hezbollah in 1985, the Amal Movement, the Progressive Socialist Party, and the Lebanese Forces Movement were the main actors who had survived the turbulence of the conflict since its inception in 1975. These groups had roots going back a decade or two before the war, and their political consciousness had developed, initially, within the existing structures of their religious institutions. With the exception of Hezbollah, they broke away from the authority of the church, mosque, and majlis (the Druze religious institution) and reduced the power of these institutions to a symbolic level as soon as they gained the power to do so. The leadership, however, falls back on the religious organization to keep the cohesion and vitality of the group intact in case asabiya wanes. Hezbollah's position in the domestic conflict process was not central compared to the role played by other groups. This could be because Hezbollah's preoccupation with fighting Israeli incursions and American interests in Lebanon shifted the focus of its attention away from the main domestic issues. While Hezbollah only directly entered the domestic conflict in occasional clashes with the Amal Movement, other warring factions perpetuated the violence in an attempt to achieve their original aims. After the Taif Accord of 1989, Hezbollah reentered the political process. As soon as conflict retracted to a manageable and legitimate level under the accord, parliamentary elections were held in Lebanon in September and October 1992. Having shed its earlier reservations about the political system, Hezbollah joined the political process and, along with its

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

allies, won 12 out of 128 seats in the new parliament. Its political platform was the termination of Israeli occupation of parts of southern Lebanon and the winding up of Western influence in the country. In the 1996 elections, the party lost two seats but maintained a marked presence in the political landscape.

The Shifting Balance of Power over Time The struggle for power and authority in Lebanon's political culture bears some resemblance to a game of king of the mountain. While players are doing everything to gain the summit, they will resort to any method of winning, including collaboration with each other or the present leader or appealing to outside actors for help. For many years, the heights of the power structure of Mount Lebanon alternated between its two main communities, the Druzes and Maronites. After Lebanon was restructured following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, power was shared by almost all component communities. The Sunni, Shiites, and Christian communities emerged as active participants in Lebanon's political culture. The shift in power toward the Christian Maronite community, however, did not come overnight but was the result of a long sequence of historical changes. These changes were due to demographic and economic developments, as well as internecine rivalries and political happenstance. The hegemony of the Druze community over the area of Mount Lebanon remained unchallenged until the middle of the nineteenth century. The Maronites had begun their journey upwards on the ladder of power through bureaucratic influence, but the traditional Druze feudal lords remained the backbone of the polity until then. In the nineteenth century, it became apparent that the Maronite ascendancy was based on their growing numbers and social and economic relevance, while the Druze ranks had been weakened by internal conflict reflecting power rivalries between the two main asabiyas, as well as by the manipulations and suppression of the Chehab dynasty. The power distribution between the Druzes and Maronites in Mount Lebanon became a zero-sum game: what the Maronites gained, the Druzes saw as their direct losses. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the balance of power between the Maronites and the Druzes had begun to shift, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Maronites came to replace the Druzes as the predominant political power. 20 In reality, the Maronites' rise to power and dominance in the authority structure of Lebanon was achieved over a period of centuries. This historical process delineated the emergence and maturation of their religious ethos and communal consciousness, which developed along nationalist lines. 21

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21

There were three stages of the Maronite political development. The first stage ended in 1861 and was characterized by intense periods of intersectarian conflict, first between the Maronites and the Jacobites, then between the Maronites and the Druzes in Mount Lebanon. The Maronite church played a major role in the emergence of the community's consciousness and in forging its social coherence and nationalistic impulses. 22 In the twenty years before 1860, conflict between the Maronites and Druzes escalated. The political system became the focus of the conflict, as the Druzes rebelled against the authority of the Chehab dynasty while the Maronites embraced it. In a few years, the whole political order collapsed and with it the feudal system (iqt'a), which had been the backbone of the authority structure in Mount Lebanon. In an attempt to resolve the conflict in 1842, the Ottoman authority had divided Lebanon into two districts—a northern district under a Maronite ruler (qayem maqam) and a southern district under a Druze ruler. This cantonization did not last long, and conflict intensified as the Maronites in the south refused to accept the authority of a Druze governor. 23 At the same time, the Maronite peasants and landlords in the north fought each other. The clergy played a significant role in inciting the peasants in both districts to revolt against their feudal landlords, and the spiralling tension finally broke out into civil war between the Maronites and the Druzes on April 29, 1860. The civil war was resolved by the intervention of the major powers of the era (England, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria). The second period lasted from 1861 to 1920: it was distinguished by a consolidation of Maronite power and official status in the institutional structures of the government. The Maronites' connections with the European states, especially France, enhanced their domestic political and social status during this period. In the post-1860 polity, the Maronites were granted an influential political role. "It seems that the Maronites got the best of the deal. Under the new regime the Maronites began to mature politically. . . . They came to regard Lebanon as their exclusive homeland." 24 When the major states intervened in the civil strife of 1860, they established a new political order. This new order reunited the two cantons under a non-Lebanese Christian governor, appointed by the Ottoman authorities and approved by the intervening foreign powers. 25 The governor was to be assisted by an elected administrative council representing the major sects of the country. This arrangement remained in force until the end of World War I. The new administrative council itself played a central role in the stability of the country. It was meant to serve the dual objectives of resolving the communal conflict and establishing an alternative political system to the defunct feudal system. It was constituted on the basis of a sectarian and geographic distribution of the population: originally there were four

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

Maronite members, two Druzes, two Greek Orthodox, one Greek Catholic, one Shiite Muslim, and one Sunni Muslim. 26 Most importantly, the constitutional arrangement of 1861 introduced the principle of confessional representation to the political culture of Mount Lebanon. The third period, from 1920 to 1975, was marked by the entrenchment of Maronite authority in the constitutional, as well as institutional, structures. The system introduced after the civil war of 1860 collapsed with the demise of the Ottoman Empire, but many of the political and social concepts embodied in it were passed on to the political system of the newly formed Republic of Greater Lebanon and were enshrined in its 1926 constitution. The administrative council had moved into an increasing public role since the mid-nineteenth century, transforming itself into an actual decisionmaking body. It now assumed state functions and ran the country on its own until September 1, 1920—the day Lebanon was proclaimed the State of Greater Lebanon under French mandate. The council has been credited with ushering the country into its early experience as a parliamentary culture. Two years after the end of World War I (and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire), France was granted mandatory powers over Mount Lebanon by the League of Nations. 27 The French organized the administration of Greater Lebanon on a sectarian basis, and they actively promoted the interests of their Christian protégés. 28 The original administrative council was dissolved and replaced in March of 1922 by an elected representative council whose seats were also distributed proportionally along sectarian lines. The nature of this council was similar to the earlier administrative council of 1864. It was purely consultative and devoid of any legislative powers, but it had a profound influence on the political culture of Lebanon: the final confessional character of the electoral system was established by this council, which had ten Maronites, six Sunni Muslims, five Shiites, four Orthodox, two Druzes, two Catholics, and one other member. 29 The first Lebanese constitution was promulgated on May 24, 1926. It observed the sectarian composition of the country and created two legislative chambers. The various sects were proportionally represented in the chambers, but the presidency was consistently held by Christians. The first president, Charles Debbas (1926-1933), was a member of the Greek Orthodox Church. When a Muslim tried to run for the presidency of the republic in 1932, the French governor intervened and "refused to allow the Chamber to select" him. 30 Instead, a Maronite was elected to the post, and all but two of the subsequent presidents were Maronites. The two non-Maronite presidents were Ayoub Tabet, a Protestant, and Pedro Trad, a Greek Orthodox, both of whom ruled briefly in 1943. Muslims fared better in other offices: a Sunni was elected for the first time as a prime minister in 1937, and a Shiite as Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1943.

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It was in this third period that the contribution of the other Lebanese communities began to be seen and felt. Until then, their influence in the political life of Mount Lebanon was small due to their minor numerical strength and their dispersed demographic distribution. Until 1920, the Sunni community considered itself a part of the larger Islamic umma (nation), and the Shiites were perceived as politically marginal. It was only at the turn of the century that the Shiites began to develop an interest in the national life of Lebanon. Their active participation came only after the creation of the Republic of Greater Lebanon in 1920 and the enlargement of the political space of the central government to encompass their areas. However, both communities' contributions helped redress the imbalance of domestic power and the distribution of authority in the Lebanese system. After 1920, as citizens of a newly created Lebanon, the Sunnis found themselves outside the authority structure of the Ottoman state and in a position inferior to the Maronites. Their contribution to Lebanon's political culture became more apparent after 1936. Although the state structure in independent Lebanon was not as open to them as it had been under the Sunni Ottoman rule, they did attain the second highest position in the power structure of the new state. The contribution of the Shiites to Lebanon's political culture before 1920 was marginal. The community had traditionally focused on the sovereignty of the religious community, rather than that of the state.31 As a marginalized community (measured by underrepresentation in government and administration) the Shiites did not bother to actively enter the polity of Lebanon before independence. The 1943 National Pact accorded them third place in the legislative system, but they were still underrepresented in the distribution of state resources. In the 1960s, the Shiites started to develop political consciousness and began to organize. Since then, they have become an active player in Lebanese politics, demanding a larger share of the political pie. The change from a bipolar to multipolar power structure, and the shift of communal power from the Maronite-Druze axis to a Maronite-Sunni one, was epitomized by the National Pact. The communal consciousness of the Maronites gave them a deep interest in Lebanese nationhood. This was primarily due to their conviction that Lebanon could constitute a shield for their minority status in the larger Arab and Islamic environment. Their growing communal consciousness prodded the Maronites to conclude that they needed to dominate the Lebanese political order, and they did this effectively during the years of the French mandate and for a time afterwards. The attainment of independence in 1943, and the formation of the National Pact in October of the same year, institutionalized the status of the various communities, including that of the Maronites. What the Maronites could not accomplish constitutionally, they obtained institutionally. Their failure to have their newly

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

gained position of dominance explicitly enshrined in the 1926 constitution was mitigated by their success in having it institutionalized in the 1943 National Pact. The constitution provided for an equitable representation of the component sects in the cabinet and bureaucracy and aimed at ensuring the representation of the major religious communities and at preventing the dominance of any one community. 32 However, the constitution gave a large measure of authority to the chief executive, who was designated by the 1943 National Pact to be a Maronite. Article 18 gave the president the power to propose legislation, Article 57 enabled him to veto legislation, Article 55 empowered him to dissolve the parliament, Article 76 authorized him to propose amendments to the constitution, and Article 53 permitted him to appoint and dismiss the prime minister and any other minister as well. Placing in the hands of the chief executive such extensive powers involved substantial risks, especially if that person was simultaneously the leader of a particular sect. The Maronites reached the apex of their communal power with the attainment of Lebanon's independence in 1943, but a decade later they were struggling to preserve their dominant position. They were unable to maintain the status quo over time in the face of mounting claims from other groups. Soon they were in conflict due to the rising expectations of their rival communities. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, violence erupted in both intracommunal and intercommunal clashes. The civil war ended with the transfer of power to other communities, and the subsequent reduction in the status of the Maronite community.

Power Sharing Under the National Pact The National Pact was a verbal agreement concluded in October 1943 between the Maronite president of newly independent Lebanon, Bechara alKhoury, and his Sunni prime minister, Riyad al-Solh. Their agreement was to establish an independent state of Lebanon and distribute power proportionally on the basis of the numerical weight of its component communities. However, power sharing was part of a wider attempt to resolve the fundamental issues of Lebanese national identity and foreign policy. These issues were a significant source of disputes between the two main communal blocs, and I will return to them in a later chapter. The National Pact stipulated that: 1. Lebanon was a completely independent and sovereign republic, unattached to any other state. 2. Lebanon has an Arab face, its language is Arabic, and it is a part of the Arab world, but it has particular characteristics. Despite its Arab identity,

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it should maintain its cultural and spiritual ties with Western civilization since those ties contributed to Lebanon's enviable degree of progress. 3. Having secured recognition of its independent status within its present borders, Lebanon should cooperate with all Arab states and become a member of the Arab community. In its relations with the Arab countries, Lebanon should not side with one party against the other. 4. Government posts should be distributed equitably among the recognized sects. However, in recruitment for technical posts, expertise rather than sectarian affiliation should be taken into consideration. 33 The pact formally defined the political authority in Lebanon as well as its Arab and external policies. The 1926 constitution instituted confessionalism as a basic principle, but it did not specify a particular method for proportional representation. "In allocation [ o f ] governmental positions, justice will be observed among the sects. For technical posts expertise will be taken into consideration." 34 Based on this principle, the National Pact specified that legislative, administrative, judiciary, and army posts were to be distributed among the two main faiths according to a ratio of six Christians to five Muslims. This ratio was further subdivided to reflect the share of each sect within the two faiths. The formula was based on the 1932 census. The Christian population of the country had majority status, and the Maronites had a majority among the Christians, while the Sunnis were the majority group among the Muslims. A s a result of this census, the top political offices were allocated to the two largest communities, the Maronites and the Sunnis. However, after 1933 the presidency was granted to the Maronite community, and after 1936, the prime ministership was held by the Sunnis. The 1943 pact gave the post of Speaker of the House of Representatives to the Shiites, but this was not implemented until 1947.

Conclusion T w o issues central to our analysis are the significance of the conflict groups and the significance of the social structure. The question that needs to be addressed is whether the conflict in Lebanon is best understood by studying the active involvement of the conflict groups, or by investigating the contradictions and cleavages in the social structure. Have events been determined by the values and interests of the specific parties to the conflict, or are events the result of long-term structural cleavages in Lebanese society? The next chapter explores the sectarian composition of Lebanese society. This can help explain why cleavages and contradictions incapacitated the social structure and made it possible for factions to exploit it. In other

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

words, it tells how the quest for positions of authority and the rising asabiya consciousness became a source of conflict.

Notes 1. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, 2d ed., 3 vols., translated from Arabic by Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), vol. 1, p. 289. 2. Yves Lacoste, Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World (London: Verso Editions, 1984), p. 106. 3. Aziz al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldun: An Essay in Reinterpretation (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1982), p. 31. 4. See Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), vol. 3; Mohamed Abdulla Enan, Ibn Khaldun: Hayatuhu wa Turathuhu al-Fikry (Ibn Khaldun: His life and work), 3d ed. (Cairo: Lajnat ul-Taalif Press, 1965); Erwin Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam: An Introductory Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); Charles Issawi, trans., An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections from the Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of Tunis, 1332-1406 (London: John Murray, 1950); and Aziz al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldun in Modern Scholarship: A Study in Orientation (London: Third World Centre for Research and Publishing, 1981). 5. Lacoste, Ibn Khaldun, pp. 102-103. 6. Ibid., p. 103. 7. Walter J. Fischel, Ibn Khaldun in Egypt: His Public Functions and His Historical Research, 1332—1406: A Study in Islamic Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 103. 8. Naji K. al-Helu, Hukkam Lubnan, 1920-1980 (The rulers of Lebanon, 1920-1980) (Beirut: Khalife Institute for Publishing, 1980), p. 230. 9. Kamal Salibi, "Tribal Origins of the Religious Sects in the Arab East," in Halim Barakat, ed., Toward a Viable Lebanon (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 15. 10. Encyclopedia of Islam, new edition (Leiden, NY: E.J. Brill, 1960), vol. 1, s.v. "asabiya." 11. Salibi, "Tribal Origins," p. 26. 12. D. M. Dunlop, Arab Civilization to A.D. 1500 (London: Longman, 1971), p. 140. 13. Ralph E. Crow, "Religious Sectarianism in the Lebanese Political System," Journal of Politics 24, no. 3 (August 1962), pp. 489-520. 14. B. J. Odeh, Lebanon, Dynamics of Conflict: A Modern Political History (London: Zed Books, 1985), pp. 14-27; Samih Farsoun, "E Pluribus Plura or E Pluribus Unum? Cultural Pluralism and Social Class in Lebanon," in Halim Barakat, ed., Toward a Viable Lebanon (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 100-115; Samih Farsoun and Walter Carroll, "The Civil War in Lebanon: Sect, Class and Imperialism," Monthly Review 28, no. 2 (June 1976), pp. 12-37. 15. Michael Hudson, The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 242. 16. David C. Gordon, Lebanon: The Fragmented Nation (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 136. 17. Bassim al-Jisr, Al-Sira'at al-Lubnaniyyah wa al-Wefaq, 1920-1975 (Lebanese conflicts and détente, 1920-1975) (Beirut: An-Nahar Publishing House, 1981), p. 79.

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27

18. Boutros Labaki, "L'Economie Politique du Liban Independent, 19431975," in Nadim Shehadi and Dana Haffar Mills, eds., Lebanon: A History of Conflict and Consensus (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies and I.B. Tauris, 1988), p. 175. 19. The Tanzim and Party of God are now defunct. 20. Kamal Salibi, The Modern History of Lebanon (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1965), p. 14. 21. For a comprehensive view of the Maronites' definition of their national objectives see Jebrail al-Qila'i, Huroub al-Moqaddemin 1075-1450 (The wars of the Moqaddemin 1075-1450) (Beit Chabab, Lebanon: al-Alam Press, 1937); Istefan al-Doweyhi, Tarykh al-Tayfah al-Marouniyyah (History of the Maronite sect), edited by Rashid al-Khoury al-Chartouni (Beirut: The Catholic Press, 1980); Boutros Dao, Tarykh al-Mouwarinah al-Dini wa al-Syasi wa al-Hadary (The political, religious, and cultural history of the Maronites), 2d ed. (Beirut: An-Nahar Publishing House, 1977). Al-Qila'i and al-Doweyhi mention that while the Maronites emerged as a religious community in the eighth century, their appearance on the political scene as a structured social community had to wait until the eighteenth century. At this initial period, the Maronites were still far from the center of power. Their ascendance to power was associated with their communal development as an organized and socially coherent community. From the sixteenth century onward they began to assert themselves as a community and articulate their power, which allowed them, through the help of their church, to develop a communal self-awareness, dubbed by Dao as national conscience. For Dao, Lebanon became synonymous with the Maronite Nation and an extension of this nation. Other Maronite writers hold a somewhat different view of the early nationalistic trends of the Maronite community. See Antonios Abi Khattar al-Aintoury, Moukhtasar Tarykh Lubnan (A concise history of Lebanon), edited by Father Agnatius Tanous al-Khoury (Beirut: "N.a," 1953); Shaiban al-Khazen, Tarykh Shaiban al-Khazen (History of Shaiban al-Khazen), edited by Boulos Mass'ad and Nasib al-Khazen (Beirut: Samia Press, 1958); Tannous al-Chidiac, Akhbar al-A'yan f y Jabal Lubnan (Narrations of notables in Mount Lebanon), 2 vols. (Beirut: Lebanese University Publications, 1970). These three writers believe that the Maronites were an integral part of a political system. Their existence as a community was subordinate to the political system of autonomous Mount Lebanon. Other writers, particularly clergy intellectuals, advocated the need for assimilating Lebanon into the Maronite national consciousness. Bishop Nicholas Murad (Bishop of Mount Lebanon, 1841-1845) worked very hard for the establishment of a Christian princedom in Lebanon on the grounds that such an entity existed in the past and the role of the non-Christian inhabitants of the area, that is the Druzes, was insignificant due to their minority status. See Abbas Abu Saleh, Al-Tarykh al-Syasi Lil-Imarah al-Chehabiyyah f y Jabal Lubnan, 1697-1842 (The political history of the Chehab Emirate in Mount Lebanon, 1697-1842) (Beirut: Service Press, 1984), p. 338; Marie-Christine Aulas, "The Socio-Ideological Development of the Maronite Community: The Emergence of the Phalanges and the Lebanese Forces," Arab Studies Quarterly 7, no. 4 (fall 1985), p. 11. 22. Helena Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1985), p. 18. 23. Matti Moosa, The Maronites in History (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986), p. 285. 24. Ibid., p. 287. 25. Melhim Qurban, Tarykh Lubnan al-Syasi al-Hadith (The modern political history of Lebanon), 2d ed., 3 vols. (Beirut: The University Institute for Studies, Publishing and Distribution, 1981), vol. 1, p. 120.

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26. Engin Akarli, "The Administrative Council of Mount Lebanon," in Nadim Shehadi and Dana Haffar Mills, eds., Lebanon: A History of Conflict and Consensus (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies and I.B. Tauris, 1988), p. 80. 27. See Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, in Alfred Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 1918-1935 (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 523. 28. Roger Owen, ed., Essays on the Crisis in Lebanon (London: Ithaca Press, 1976), p. 24. 29. Qurban, Tarykh Lubnan, p. 187. 30. David R. Smock and Audrey C. Smock, The Politics of Pluralism: A Comparative Study of Lebanon and Ghana (New York: Elsevier Scientific, 1975), p. 44. 31. Fuad I. Khuri, Imams and Emirs: State, Religion and Sects in Islam (London: Saqi Books, 1990), chapter 5. 32. Article 95 of the 1926 Lebanese Constitution as amended in 1990. 33. Georges Nassif, "Min Ajl Mithaq al-Tanazulat al-Mutabadalah" (For a pact of mutual concessions), Al-Minbar, special edition (May 1988), p. 55. 34. Bassam Abdel-Kader Namani, "Confessionalism in Lebanon, 1920-1976: The Interplay of Domestic, Regional and International Politics," Ph.D. dissertation (New York: Columbia University, 1982), p. 115.

3 Cleavages in the Lebanese Social and Political Structure

This chapter looks at the structure of the main Lebanese sects in order to identify the sources of conflict and determine the social process through which the war was ended. The several religious and ethnic communities in Lebanon are organized in a hierarchical fashion that reinforces their conflicts in "a system that promotes sectarian identification."1 Intragroup relations have historically alternated between accommodation and conflict. None of these communities individually constitutes a majority in the country's population. Lebanon is one of the few countries whose population is so pluralist as to make every ethnoreligious group or sect a minority. Seventeen of these sects are officially recognized by the state and, apart from a minuscule Jewish sect, the officially recognized sects are broadly divided between Christian and Muslim groups.2

Historical Development of the Communal Structure The political significance of the many sects of Lebanon lies in the role they play as social organizations through which personal and group security can be achieved. Over the years, they have evolved into semiautonomous sociopolitical communities with distinct political and administrative functions. This evolutionary process began in the early seventeenth century under the Ottoman Empire. The Christians in the Ottoman Empire were recognized as autonomous sects governed by the "millet" system. They were granted independent jurisdiction in the field of personal status, and this authority is maintained to the present day. World War I brought Ottoman rule over Lebanon to an end. The Arab territories of the old empire now came under the control of France and Britain, and Lebanon and Syria fell within the French mandate. The local French authorities extended the semiautonomous status of the Christians to every other component religious group in the country.

29

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Under Ottoman rule, the non-Sunni communities (including Shiites and Druzes, as well as Christians and Jews) were in an officially inferior, but still recognized position. 3 "All Ottoman citizens defined themselves according to their religions and sects. . . . The religious leadership of these communities represented them at the seat of power and were held responsible for the lawful behavior of their community." 4 Religion was essentially the frame of reference for one's identity and a major reference point in social interaction with the whole of the population. This common social pattern did not wither with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the transformation of its colonies into nation-states. The legal system of Lebanon and its polity still recognizes religious organization. Communal distinctions feature prominently in the personal status laws of Lebanon. Contracting and dissolving of marriages, guardianship, legitimation of children, religious endowments, and inheritance and wills are all exclusively the domain of religious courts. Each recognized community has the right to make and alter its own regulations in these matters, establish its own courts, and codify its own laws. The advantage of such a system is that it allows each group to conduct its own affairs, but the arrangement basically hinders the development of the sort of common law that is a necessary glue to hold together a modern state. 5 Since personal status matters lie within the precincts of organized religions, it is the case with some religious groups that the final authority for many domestic matters lies in the hands of religious officials or institutions outside Lebanon, and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of the Lebanese government. The seat of the Greek Orthodox patriarch, for instance, is in Syria, and the seat of the Greek Catholic community lies in Syria and Egypt. Communal attachment in Lebanon remains an overriding force in the present-day conflict. Until 1975, these communal loyalties and national interests were more or less reconcilable. The war of 1975 created conditions where communal and national commitments were in conflict, and time after time the balance has tipped in favor of communal loyalties. Basically, Lebanon's political culture reflects the sectarian composition of the country. This does not mean that all things political in Lebanon are fundamentally religious, but the role of religious identification and institutions must be addressed in any analysis of Lebanese politics. This phenomenon is not unique to Lebanon, but it is instead a characteristic of the whole region. In some countries it is latent and remains well managed by means of a healthy regulatory mechanism in the state. In others, like Lebanon, the system has failed to meet the challenge. In the Middle East, the primary social divisions have not changed in a thousand years: people are either Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, and further, they belong to particular Muslim, Christian, or Jewish sects. 6 The social structure preserves those loyalties. Political institutions have not only reflected but fostered them. In 1943, the National Pact

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL STRUCTURE

31

attempted to institutionalize a system of checks and balances in order to help the various communities adjust to political and social competition resulting from the development process and social change. Its immediate goal was to constrain the rising conflict among the various communities; its ultimate aim was to develop a national identity by reconciling divisive issues and establishing a minimum level of consensus as a prelude to full national integration. In retrospect, this pact proved to be too brittle for the communities to support. This failure lies in the boundaries of the communities and the fact that they refused to use the pact as a platform to cooperate and develop crosscutting interests. The strength of communal loyalties and identities eclipsed the integrative potential inherent in the National Pact. The result has been a hardening of the communal cleavages, precluding the process of nation building and the development of a national identity. The differences between the communities and their roles in the political process can probably best be understood by looking at their historical development. The centrifugal and centripetal forces between each community and the central government have evolved from specific historical conditions. The historical development established, rather than merely reflected, the communities' behavioral patterns and the course of relations. A l l the sects were involved in the Lebanese conflict, but only four played a central role—the Maronites, the Druzes, the Sunnis, and the Shiites. The Orthodox and Catholic sects played an active, but essentially marginal, role. The Palestinians were a force to be reckoned with as well when the war came.

The Maronites The Christian Maronites, named after the early fifth-century ascetic monk St. Maroun, appeared in the sixth century in the northern parts of presentday Syria, which was already inhabited by some Christianized Arab tribes. 7 They probably settled there in the Orontes Valley to avoid a conflict with the Greek church in Antioch shortly after Maroun's death. 8 A s the number of converts swelled, they clashed with the Jacobites over interpretation of the nature of Jesus Christ, a fairly common occurrence in early Christian churches. The Jacobites maintained that Christ was Godbecome-man, suggesting that he had only a divine nature, and that his human nature was merely an assumed form. The Maronites, being Orthodox Melkite, believed that Christ had two natures, divine and human, but one energy (energia) and one will (thelema). In the seventh century, the Maronite monks separated from the Melkite Church and established a separate organization. 9 In the twelfth century they abandoned the Monothelite formula and returned to the Catholic Church, accepting the papal supremacy.

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However, as with the rest of the Uniate churches in the Arab countries, they retained their own oriental rites and customs and were granted autonomy under their own elected patriarchs. As early as the sixth century, the Maronites came into conflict with other Christian denominations that had adopted Monophysitism (as had the Jacobites). In one confrontation in 517, 350 Maronite monks were massacred by the Jacobites. 10 Renewed feuds with the Jacobites in the second half of the seventh century, and the failure of the Islamic state (established in 638) to provide them with adequate security, resulted in the migration of a considerable number of Maronites to North Lebanon. Christians and some Maronites were already in this area since two disciples of St. Maroun were sent to northern Lebanon to preach the teachings of their saint in the early fifth century. 11 St. Maroun may be the father of the Maronite sect, but Yuhanna Maroun was the founder of the community in northern Lebanon and the first elected patriarch. 12 It was under his leadership that the organization of the Maronites emerged and developed the sect into an independent community. Yuhanna Maroun mobilized his people in northern Lebanon into a fighting force of 12,000 men. In 694 they defended the territory against the Byzantine armies under Justinian II, who destroyed Maronite monasteries in Syria and killed five hundred monks before invading their stronghold in northern Lebanon. After that, the Maronites became a more isolated, mountain people. 13 The communalization of the Maronites in Lebanon was complete by the second half of the seventh century. By 900 C.E., the basic tenets of their nationhood had emerged with the complete transfer of their headquarters from the Orontes Valley in northern Syria to Qannubin, a monastery carved in the solid rocks of the Qadisha Valley in northern Lebanon. Throughout this initial period, common religion was the only real bond providing social cohesion among the peasants of the highlands. 14 Boutros Dao claims that they had become a "nation" in the sense that they possessed the main elements of nationhood: land, population, civilization, and separate identity. 15 The Maronites found a natural ally in the Crusaders of the twelfth century, and they provided those first invading armies with guides and archers. 16 Upon landing in Acre (Palestine), King Louis IX received a welcoming delegation of 25,000 Maronites with provisions and presents. He rewarded them by bringing their community under France's protection in 1250.17 They were accorded a privileged position in the established kingdom of Jerusalem and were ranked first among the Christian denominations after the Latins. This involvement of the Maronites with the Crusaders, not surprisingly, had a lasting negative impact on Christian-Muslim relations in the region.

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33

Pressed from all sides by Byzantine persecution, the massacre of their monks by the Jacobites, and the tidal wave of Arab conquests, the Maronites found the Crusaders convenient protectors of their faith and nationhood. However, Islamic orthodoxy was not particularly dangerous to them. 18 Before its downfall in 750, the Islamic state under the Umayyad dynasty was "on the whole unusually tolerant. Its liberalism and tolerance transcended the political into the religious and intellectual spheres." 19 However, Maronite fears were not unfounded. The Mamlukes dynasty (who terminated the Crusaders' occupation of the Orient in 1291) harassed all non-Sunni groups, but they were particularly unreceptive of the Christians and Jews. In 1283, they invaded the Maronites' stronghold in northern Lebanon and destroyed their villages. 20 They also uprooted the Shiite population from the neighboring Kisrewan region and forced them to migrate south. The few who were left were forced to take refuge by integrating into Sunni society. 21 In spite of these pressures, the Maronites in northern Lebanon remained able to develop their social structure and their communal identity. In the sixteenth century, they started expanding outside the security of their immediate region. Groups of Maronites ventured into the neighboring Kisrewan region to fill the vacuum left by the deportation of its indigenous Shiite inhabitants; they encountered the Shiites when they tried to expand further east to the Beq'a Valley. To the south, they came to the Druzes' stronghold, lured into the area by the need for their skills and professions. They lived in harmony under Druze hegemony until the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, the Maronites' power grew while that of the Druzes weakened because of internal feuds and the persecutions of the ruler of Mount Lebanon, Bashir Chehab. The Maronites strengthened their relations with France and established firm relations with the Vatican. Pope Gregory XIII acted as patron to the Maronite Church in Lebanon. A Maronite college was established in Rome in 1584 to educate Maronite clerics from Lebanon and send them back as missionaries and reformers. As they grew in number and power, the Maronites began to challenge the Druze supremacy in their only stronghold, the Chouf region.

The Druzes The Druze faith originated in Cairo in the closing phase of the reign of alHakim, the Fatimid caliph of Egypt (966-1021). The Unity of God (Tawhid) is the basis of this faith, and the Druzes like to be known as Muwahidun (Unitarians). The principal messenger of the new faith was Hamza bin Ali, a Persian born in the province of Khurasan. He was assisted by five missionaries.

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The best-known of those missionaries was Nashtakin al-Daraziwas. He was a confidante and apostle of al-Hakim, but was himself later discredited, denounced, and killed. The Druzes differ from the Sunnis and Shiites in their approach to the message of Islam. They contend that by the year 1017, the task of the Shiite Imams to allegorically interpret the religious law was completed. Prophet Muhammad delivered the religious law, and the Imams after him interpreted it allegorically. A new era was now to begin; it was time to convey the truth (al-haqiqa) without allegorical interpretation. 22 This haqiqa is the knowledge of the One, the knowledge of the Unity of God, and it is the goal of all knowledge. The new sect met opposition in Cairo, both from followers of the other sects and from the successor of al-Hakim, who persecuted the believers and forced them into hiding. Outside Egypt, however, in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, there was a more positive response. Five years after the proclamation of the new faith, al-Hakim mysteriously disappeared. Shortly afterwards Hamza bin Ali went into seclusion, leaving the faith in the hands of one of his disciples, al-Muqtana Bahauddin. For a time he too lived in concealment, though he addressed his teachings to prospective believers all the way to India. 23 The Druzes were heavily persecuted: death was the penalty for refusing to recant. Al-Muqtana spent seventeen years as a missionary (da'i) trying to keep the faith alive among his believers. Partly because of the persecution, new converts were not allowed after 1043. By then Druzism was well established in the mountainous areas of Lebanon. The Druzes soon acquired the traits that distinguished them for centuries: "intense community loyalties, [a] high sense of solidarity, vigorous spirit of independence, [and] endurance in the face of adversity." 24 They were basically an agricultural community and more organized than the other sects with both religious and feudal hierarchies. 25 The conflicts of the Druze community led to a strengthening of their asabiya consciousness and the sharpening of their tendency to engage in conflict. From the beginning, the Druze faith had met with antagonism, and its followers were subjected to substantial oppression. This persecution led to the disappearance of the Druze community in India and Egypt, as well as other parts of the world. The center of the community remains in Lebanon, with satellites in Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. Three incidents strengthened Druze group solidarity and sharpened their concern with self-defense. The first was the thirteenth-century persecution by the Mamluke rulers, who subjected them to the harshest of discriminatory measures on the grounds that they were not orthodox Muslims. Then, in the nineteenth century, they were exposed to physical persecution at the hands of the invading Egyptian army commander. Six

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35

hundred notables were massacred for refusing conscription into his army. The Druzes of Syria rose against Ibrahim Pasha. To crush their uprising he armed 7,000 Maronites and sent them to fight the Druzes. Finally, there was a thirty-year conflict between the Druzes and Maronites that culminated in the 1860 civil war. These episodes of violence took sectarian form, but the issues had no real religious content. By then the two communities had developed separate mature social structures with distinctive social characteristics and different political orientation.

The Shiites and the Sunnis Following the death of Muhammad, the community of Islam was divided by the question of who should succeed him and the nature of the successor's role. The Sunni Muslims argued that Islam was a religious and a political phenomenon, as its rasul (messenger) was a prophet and a statesman. Therefore, the head of the community of Islam should remain a religious personality: the leader should be elected by the community and empowered to implement the religious law (shari'a), defend the community of the faithful, and propagate the religion of Islam. In other words, the head of the community should be both religious leader and statesman. In addition, the caliph was owed the allegiance of every Muslim as long as he remained committed to both his religious and state functions. This caliph or imam was elevated to office by ikhtiyar (selection). 26 The Shiites, on the other hand, claimed that the prophet's successor was to preside over the community and to interpret the divine message allegorically. 27 Only imams, designated by the prophet through his successors, were capable of grasping the intrinsic and esoteric meaning of the message of Islam. The imam was not only a leader in prayers, but he was the epitome of religion, a means for salvation and a model to imitate. An imam in the Shiite doctrine was a divinely illuminated person who acquired his insights from the prophet Muhammad by succession. Though the message of Islam was sealed with Muhammad, interpretation of its inner meaning is a continuous process of divine revelation. "For the contact between God and man is not at a point of intersection but in a continuous line, not in a single individual but in an uninterrupted series of Imams." 2 8 The Sunnis rejected this divine power of the imam and the principle of allegorical interpretation of the Quran (Koran). They hold that "salvation is officially and externally sought through the observation and application of divine law." 2 9 Divine law, when necessary, could be interpreted by a specialist. In his interpretation of the divine message, the mujtahid, or legal-jurist, had to comply with the Quran, the Hadith (prophet's tradition), al-Qyas (analogy with

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THE LEBANESE CONFLICT

the Quran), and Ijm 'a (consensus), while adhering to one of the four officially recognized interpretations of Islam. 30 The dogmatic difference between the two sects is also reflected in their organizational structure and their conception of legitimate authority. The Sunnis identified themselves with the state structure and centrality of authority, whereas the Shiite have over the years associated themselves with the sovereignty of the community and have attuned themselves to a more diffused sense of religiosity. 31 Religious achievement to the Shiites is positively associated with social achievement, and their religious ranks are reflected in a social hierarchy. Each rank in the religious hierarchy (imam, ayatollah, mujtahid akbar, or hujjat al-islam) carries social status as well as religious authority. Movement within the hierarchy is characterized by a high degree of flexibility, and this is how the high reaches of power became attainable for Shiite leaders in Iran as well as in Lebanon. On the other hand, mobility in the Sunni structure is circumvented to a certain degree by the dictates of the state bureaucratic system. The Muslim officials who are designated to officiate on divine law are part of the bureaucratic structure and elite class. The Grand Mufti, the head of the Islamic Shia Superior Council, and Sheikh al-Akl are all appointees endorsed by the government. Shiite and Sunni Muslims parted company on the question of the succession, and friction and conflict have remained characteristic of the relationship for more than 1,300 years. Upon the death of the prophet in the year 632 C.E., the Sunnis elected one of his comrades, Abu Bakr, as the caliph and imam of the community of Islam, a position with both religious and political functions. The Shiites reluctantly recognized the imamate of Abu Bakr but considered Ali Ibn Abi Taleb, the prophet's first cousin and son-in-law, the true imam because he was senior in his adherence to Islam. They argued that Ali deserved the position for his piety, learning, and bravery, not to mention the fact that the prophet had designated him as successor. 32 The institution of the caliph came into existence with the election of Abu Bakr as the first of four pious caliphs. He was followed by Umar, Othman, and Ali Ibn Abi Taleb. Their combined rule extended over a period of forty years. Under the first two caliphs, the party of Ali (Shiite Ali) remained clandestine, but active. It was only under the rule of the third caliph, Othman bin Affan, that they started to show their impatience. Othman was accused of nepotism and partiality to the Sunni Umayyads who were clearly adverse to the followers of Ali. This led to his downfall, and he was succeeded by Ali in the year 656 C.E. (35 A.H.). The imamate in Islam did not stay with Ali and his descendants. A civil war broke out between Ali and the Umayyad governor of Syria, Mu'awiya bin Abi Sufian. 33 It was soon resolved by arbitration in favor of Mu'awiya, much to the

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37

chagrin of A l i ' s supporters: he lost his position and was assassinated by one of his own dissatisfied followers. The Umayyad house ruled the Muslim world for nearly a century. The Shiites never acquiesced and continued to deny the Umayyads legitimacy. They maintained the conviction that the house of A l i was the rightful heir to the caliphate, and that the Umayyads were usurpers of power. This attitude brought them further misfortune. A l i ' s son and heir, al-Husein, together with his family and two hundred supporters, were massacred in a battle with the Umayyad troops in Karbala, Iraq, in 680 c.E.34 The birth of the Shiites is dated to the death of al-Husein, and the Shiite commitment to vengeance for those deaths contributed to the eventual downfall of the Umayyad dynasty.35 It indefinitely affected their orientation toward authority and legitimacy and furthered their passion for political and religious involvement. Shiism arrived in Lebanon from its chief center in Iraq in the middle of the seventh century; it became dominant in the two areas that are now southern and eastern Lebanon, and this arrival basically coincided with the Maronite migration from northern Syria. The Shiite and Sunni populations of Lebanon have lived outside Mount Lebanon, the nucleus of the present state. The southern and eastern parts of the country, as well as a few places in the north, are predominantly Shiite of the " t w e l v e r " denomination. 36 The Shiites were subjected to persecution under the Umayyads in Damascus and their successors, the Abbasides, in Baghdad. However, their coreligionists, the Fatimides, who had themselves been victims of Abbaside persecution, established a state in Egypt and extended their patronage to the Shiites of Lebanon. This protection came to an end with the demise of the Fatimide rulers at the hands of the Crusaders in the early thirteenth century. Two new successive Sunni dynasties, the Ayoubides and the Mamlukes, were able to expel the European Crusaders and unite the Islamic world under their leadership. The Shiites once again were subjected to persecution and dispersed from their regions in the northern and central part of present-day Lebanon and forced to move south and east. Many converted to Sunnism to escape persecution. The remainder were not only persecuted because of their purported heterodox religious views, but also because of their disloyalty to the Sunni state at the height of its jihad (war against the Christian Crusaders).37 The Shiites had virtually no connection with the political system of the country until 1920. They were marginalized by their lifestyle and political culture, as well as by the neglect of the central government. They were basically a peasant society characterized by little social mobility, with both a feudalistic social structure and a parallel hierarchy of clerics. The Shiites were poor, exploited rural peasants; they were underrepresented politically and were the least-educated group in Lebanese society.38 However, in the

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twentieth century, Israeli incursions in the east and south, along with modern urbanization, have destabilized their traditional lifestyles and led many to move to Beirut. "There the Shiite newcomers jostled for living space and jobs with other communities whom they often found had arrived before them. Three particular areas near Beirut quickly became transformed into vast Shiite-dominated suburb-slums." 39 These areas of the city became the spawning grounds for activist political movements: first, the Communists and Baathists, and later the Hezbollah (Party of God) and the Amal Movement. As a result of prolonged persecution and deprivation, the Shiites became the center of an undercurrent of discontent and protest. In pre-1920 Lebanon, they had not participated in the larger community and were reluctant contributors to national life and were only distant beneficiaries of national rewards. Even with their formal incorporation into the new state of Lebanon, they sustained their own culture and cultivated their own communalism. Memories of persecution and suffering would not be abandoned in favor of the new national status, which offered little in the way of real material improvement. Their participation in the new state did not give them sufficient security to lure them out of their cultural enclave. They were unwilling to risk persecution or forcible assimilation into cultural norms not their own. Their feudal social and economic life isolated them from the mainstream of political culture, and they remained strangers in their own polity. For its part, the new state did little to bring them into the political process or lure them into contributing to the national life. 40 The persistent perception of deprivation continued to shape the attitudes of the Shiites toward state authority until the late 1960s. They experienced political awakening under the leadership of Imam Mousa al-Sadr. Al-Sadr was able to mobilize the community, to give voice to their grievances, and to crystallize their demands to restructure the communally skewed political system. Together with the clerical hierarchy of the southern Shiites, he founded the Amal Movement in 1975. 41 This was the political successor of his earlier group, the Movement of the Disinherited (Harakat al-Mahroumin). The movement's power grew, and traditional Shiite authorities were forced to reckon with the rising force along with the other communities. The movement loudly questioned the Maronite's ascendancy at the expense of the disinherited and demanded extensive changes to the political system in order to restore balance to the communal structure. 42 The long overdue political awakening of the Shiites contributed significantly to the political environment in Lebanon prior to the civil war.

The Sunnis Sunni Islam became well defined during the rule of the tenth Abbaside caliph, al-Mutawakil (846-861), although various interpretations of the

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39

divine law had appeared prior to the al-Mutawakil period. The controversy was not over the source of law, which was the Quran and the Tradition (Sunnah, precedents based on the prophet's reputed decisions and utterances), but over its use. Several schools emerged, each professing its own version of the implementation of the Shari'a (Islamic law). The Shiite sect developed its own school, while the Sunnis followed the Sunnah—which implies (among other things) compliance with the authority of the state as long as it remains orthodox. 43 This Sunni ideology can be traced in the structural relations of the Sunni with other communities in Lebanon. The majority of the Sunni Muslim population of Lebanon has lived outside the central Mount Lebanon area, the sanctuary of Maronite and Druze communities. Some claim that their existence is associated with the invasion of the region by the Arab-Islamic armies between the years 634 and 639. 44 The increase of Lebanon's Muslim population continued under the rule of the Umayyads and the Abbaside Sunni dynasties. During their reign (660-750 in Damascus and 750-1258 in Baghdad), many Arab tribes settled in the Beq'a Valley, Wadi al-Taym, the south of Lebanon, Beirut, and the Chouf Mountain. 45 When the Sunni Abbaside dynasty in Iraq was replaced by the Selucide dynasty, and the Shiite Fatimide dynasty in Egypt arose, loyalty to Eastern Islam (including Lebanon) was split in two. Those who professed allegiance to the Fatimide were the Shiites; the other expressed their loyalty to the Sunni Selucides. After the middle of the eleventh century, Lebanon fell under the competing influence of the Fatimides and the Selucides. This resulted in the establishment of autonomous emirates in Lebanon and the region under the influence of each external dynasty. The Shiites of Lebanon grew stronger and more numerous under the Fatimide rule, but their position collapsed with the fortunes of the Fatimide dynasty. It was the Sunni Mamlukes in Egypt who succeeded in wresting the country from the Crusaders, and they ruled the region for three hundred years until 1517. Sunni power was further enhanced under the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world until the end of World War I. The Sunni position in Lebanon can mainly be attributed to the patronage they received from the Mamluke rulers, coupled with government reprisals against the Christians and other non-Sunni sects. There were several other factors that contributed to Sunni dominance. First, as soon as the Mamlukes had firmly established their authority after defeating the Crusaders in 1291, they attacked the Christians for supporting the Crusaders against the Muslim armies, and they turned on the Shiites for failing to contribute to their holy war against the foreigners. In order to avoid state persecution and oppression, members of both communities converted to Sunnism in relatively large numbers. The Mamlukes persecuted other sects as well: the Druzes, the Isma'ilis, and the Nusayris

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all suffered their wrath. They insisted on conformity and would not tolerate schism within their state. Second, there was considerable migration of traders and businessmen from the interiors of Syria, Egypt, and Morocco to Lebanon. They settled in the urban centers of Beirut, Tripoli, and Sidon, contributing to Sunni dominance in the area. Resettlement of Turkoman and Kurdish tribes along the coastal areas and in northern Lebanon by the Mamlukes was a third factor. These settlements were meant to establish order in the country and to guard against any turbulence in the hinterland. 46 The new Sunni settlers helped develop a real Sunnite community in Lebanon, which was further strengthened by Ottoman patronage. The Sunni Muslims of Lebanon enjoyed special security under Ottoman rule because they belonged to the official state religion. Although Christian citizens of the Ottoman Empire had autonomy and security in matters of personal-status law, in matters of state authority and power they were locked into inferior status. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the Arab territories were divided between the French and the British. While Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine came under the British mandate, Lebanon and Syria became part of the French colonial system. In response to pressures from the Maronites, the French mandatory power annexed the previously Ottomancontrolled provinces of Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, and the Beq'a Valley to the territory of Mount Lebanon and created the state of Greater Lebanon within its present frontiers on September 1, 1920. It was reconstituted as the Republic of Lebanon in 1926.47 The Maronites hailed this as a rightful retrieval of lost areas. The population of the annexed areas, however, was largely Sunni, who resented the act, presumably for fear of losing their majority status and becoming a subservient minority in a Christian-dominated state. 48 With the creation of the modern state of Lebanon, the Sunnis' political status was diminished. Under both the Mamlukes and the Ottomans, they had belonged to the ruling class and dealt with other communities from a position of strength. Their advantage changed with the advent of the new state of Lebanon in 1920. They lost the dominant status they had enjoyed simply by being part of the community of Islam. With the loss of this status, they also lost their proximity to state positions of authority. Their diminished role in the affairs of state eventually led to decreased access to government resources. The new government would try to restrict their parochial loyalties and allegiances and constrain their ties with the Islamic and Arab worlds. After 1926, the Sunnis were on a collision course with the Maronites over the power-sharing arrangements of the new country. The 1943 National Pact managed to resolve the issue, but only temporarily. The

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problem of power sharing (al-Musharakah) resurfaced in the late 1960s and continued through the war years. These conflicts, sometimes latent and sometimes out in the open, have always shaped Lebanon's political culture. In 1975, the Sunni community in Lebanon entered the war, but with little centralized military preparation. The Sunni contribution to the political conflict stood on the issues of Arab identity and political reform, while their militias were localized and scattered: Qulilat's Murabitoun militia in Beirut, the Sha'aban Islamic Unification Movement in Tripoli, Sa'ad's Popular Naserist Organization in Sidon, and two other minor Sunni neighborhood-based military groups in Beirut. The Sixth of February Movement organized by Shakir Birjawi and the Islamic Military Council led by Sheikh Abdul-Hafiz Qasim (the head of the Muslim Ulama Association) appeared only briefly on the scene before disappearing without successors. The Murabitoun militia played an important role in repelling the Phalangist assaults on the seafront hotel areas in Beirut in 1976 and was an active member of the Lebanese National Movement. They were also strongly related to the Palestine Resistance Movement and lost their lifeline in the enforced departure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other Palestinian factions from Lebanon in 1982. Three years later, the militia was decimated by the Amal and Progressive Socialist Party militias, who established their hegemony over predominantly Sunni west Beirut after the defeat of the Murabitoun. The Sunni community in Beirut openly resented the Shiite control of west Beirut. The Grand Mufti of Lebanon openly criticized the Shiites for their intrusion into the Sunni stronghold. He "charged that Amal and 'gunmen' were waging war against the Sunni community in west Beirut to compensate for their defeat in their war against the Palestinians in the camps." 49 Tripoli, Lebanon's second-largest city, had a predominantly Sunni population. In 1982, Sheikh Said Sha'aban founded the Islamic Unification Movement there and swiftly got into a conflict with the Shiite Alawi community and the city's Communists. They adopted a fundamentalist platform calling for the establishment of a Muslim state in Lebanon. 50 This movement did not last long; it was defeated in 1985 by its local enemies with Syrian help. 51 In the southern port city of Sidon, the Sunni militia of Mustafa Sa'ad joined with the Palestinian armed resistance to control the city. In the early stages of the war in Lebanon, the Sunni community cultivated relations with the Palestinians there to the extent that the PLO itself acted as a Sunni militia. 52 Sa'ad's opponents in the region were basically the Christian Lebanese Forces east of Sidon.

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Other Communities These four communities—the Maronites, Druzes, Shiites, and Sunnis—can be distinguished from the other thirteen sects by their level of participation in the conflict. 53 The smaller groups had little input into the war, but their position in the conflict environment makes their role important nonetheless. Eleven of the thirteen sects were Christian, one was Alawite, and one Jewish. Numbering around 300,000, the Greek Orthodox sect was the largest of the other Christian groups. Like the Sunnis, they were geographically scattered between the urban centers and rural areas. As well as having a large community in Beirut, they flourished in the al-Koura district south of Tripoli and el-Metn area to the northeast of Beirut. For the most part, though, they remained a minority in other Christian or Muslim areas. The Greek Orthodox sect provides a good representation of the overall communal structure of Lebanon. Their existence in the region predates the advent of Islam, and they consider their sect in Lebanon part of a wider community extending to Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world. Their historical identification with the Arab world may explain their flexibility in dealing with Arab culture to this day, although their national church still maintains links with other centers of orthodoxy like Moscow and Athens. While the Greek Orthodox contributed to the administration and national life of modern Lebanon like other communities, it did not take active part in the 1975 civil war. The participation of the community in Lebanese political culture dates to the nineteenth century when two of the twelve representatives on the administrative council of 1864 were Greek Orthodox. This contributed to a national awakening against the Ottoman rule of Lebanon and the Arab world, and the first president of the Republic of Lebanon was a Greek Orthodox. Overall, however, the Greek Orthodox role in Lebanese political life was less a result of their own power and numbers than it was their continued relationship with the Sunni majority and the Shiites of the annexed territories. When it came to the question of Lebanon's sovereignty, the Orthodox "lacked the passionate emotions and total identification of the Maronites towards Lebanon. . . . On the other hand they did not adopt the hostile Sunni attitude [toward the creation of the new state] and were willing to accept their inclusion in Lebanon as long as their vital interests were safeguarded." 54 The Greek Orthodox communities in the Arab world were closely associated with Islam by virtue of their symbiotic existence with the Sunnis. This harmonious coexistence was probably due to a mastery of survival skills in an overwhelmingly Sunni society: the Greek Orthodox managed to identify with their Arab environment while at the same time preserving

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their own identity. 55 In the 1975 conflict, the Orthodox masses maintained their prewar allegiances. While the bourgeoisie allied itself with the Maronite right, the other segments of the community sided with the secular and progressive forces. 5 6 The remaining sects—the Greek Catholic, the Alawites, the Protestants, and other Christian minorities such as the Nestorians and Assyrians, as well as ethnic groups like the Armenians and Kurds—all contributed to the conflict by providing money (and sometimes soldiers) to the three main militias. Some of these communities (the Armenians and the Assyrians, for instance) made a brief independent appearance during the war, but they merged with the main warring factions who overwhelmed their smaller forces.

The Palestinian Community Any look at the basic causes of the war in Lebanon would be incomplete without a discussion of the Palestinian role. Their organization and ideology meant that the position of the Palestinians in Lebanon was comparable to that of the domestic militant communities. After the Arab armies were defeated by the Israelis in Palestine in 1948, 780,000 Palestinians fled to neighboring Arab countries, and 200,000 ended up in Lebanon. 57 They settled around Lebanon's major cities in sixteen camps administered by the specially created United Nations Relief and Work for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). The 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the Palestinian clashes in Amman, Jordan, in 1970 brought fresh waves of Palestinian combatants to Lebanon, as well as the PLO infrastructure. This was not the first time Lebanon had opened its borders to refugees. Thousands of Christian Armenians, fleeing the 1894-1895 Turkish massacres and deportation from Alexandretta from 1915-1921, found sanctuary in Lebanon. Homeless Kurds (Sunni Muslims) and stateless Assyrians (Christian Orthodox) found a home in Lebanon. The Armenians and Assyrians were legally and socially integrated, but the Palestinians were not. The Arab host countries denied the Palestinians legal assimilation on the grounds that permanent integration in the receiving states would compromise the ultimate aim of return to their homeland. This was not the only reason for the lack of a permanent welcome. In Lebanon, many of the refugees were assimilated into the country's economic life, but to accept this largely Muslim group as citizens would have upset the delicate communal political balance. 58 It did not take more than fifteen years for the Palestinians in Lebanon "to develop their own social and cultural institutions, organs of selfgovernment and security, and a powerful economic presence." 5 9 By the

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early 1960s they were establishing political institutions and military bases inside their refugee camps. Unlike the situation of Palestinian refugees elsewhere, they were free to organize politically and militarily as they chose. 60 In 1965, the Palestinians in Lebanon found themselves catapulted into the Lebanese political process. Their organization and military power grew in strength, as did their involvement in Lebanon's domestic affairs. This expansion was encouraged and facilitated by the Lebanese National Movement and the Muslim masses, and by other Arab regimes who supported the "sacred" Palestinian cause in return for their failure to stop the exile. 61 The mushrooming of Palestinian power in Lebanon, along with domestic communal rifts, eroded the credibility of Lebanon's political, economic, and military institutions. The Muslims pressured the Maronite-dominated legal authority for political reform and adjustments to the power-sharing arrangements, and this was augmented by concrete Palestinian support for the Muslims. The legitimate authorities were finally embattled when the Lebanese army clashed with the Palestinian resistance movement. 62 A succession of clashes between the army and the Palestinians (and their sympathizers) followed. Coupled with pressure from some Arab states, the Lebanese government concluded the secret Cairo Agreement with the PLO in 1969. Under the provisions of this agreement, Lebanon relinquished its sovereignty over parts of the south and the refugee camps in return for some control over the activities of the Palestinians throughout the country. 63 This gave legal cover to the growing power of the Palestinians in the south, though Christians considered it a terrible threat to Lebanese sovereignty. 64 From the government's point of view, the main aim of the agreement was to regulate and supervise the armed Palestinian presence in the country. This was not accomplished. A later amendment to the agreement set out strict limits to the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, but the breaches of both the agreement and its protocol were notorious. In July 1977, an understanding was worked out for the implementation of the Cairo Agreement between the Lebanese government, the PLO, and the Syrians. The main provision of the understanding was the suspension of PLO operations against Israel across the Lebanese border, and the PLO retreat from the borders, both to be carried out under Syrian surveillance. 65 Overall, the Palestinian presence and activities in the country increased the tension between the status quo and reformist coalitions and led to further political polarization of Lebanon's policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Political Institutions The structural preconditions for the emergence and perpetuation of conflict were consistently manifested in the political institutions of the country,

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and the institutions in turn reinforced the conflict between the component groups of the population. The political parties and movements in Lebanon have been numerous, but generally ineffective in the legislative life of the country. Contrary to the political systems of many states with a majority ethnic group, Lebanon's political culture has a marked tolerance toward a variety of political parties. However, these parties have been less oriented toward capturing seats in the legislature than toward preserving the sectarian value system outside the political institutions. 66 No more than one-third of the members of the 1991 parliament (elected in 1972) were members of a political party. The parliament elected in 1992 had fewer than that, but the 1996 parliament had eleven political parties represented in it. Political parties in Lebanon have been distinguished by their ideology and orientation rather than by their organization: there are both parliamentary political parties and cadre parties. Parliamentary parties strive to win elections and actively campaign for this goal, whereas cadre parties just seek to spread their ideology and increase their membership. 67 There is also a third group of parties in Lebanon that represents more international movements. It includes the Communists, the Baathists, the Syrian Social National Party, and the three Armenian parties. A simple differentiation of parties like this, however, tends to neglect the significant role these parties have played in generating conflict. Michael Suleiman classifies Lebanese political parties into four categories: transnational parties, exclusively Lebanese parties, religious organizations and movements, and ethnic parties. 68 The first group includes the Communist Party of Lebanon; the Communist Action Organization; the Syrian Social National Party (whose main aim is to re-create Greater Syria, including Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine); and the Baath Party, whose aim is to unify the whole Arab world under the ideology of socialism. In the second category is the Al-Najjade Party, which started as a Muslim boys' group and developed into a paramilitary organization, nominally to invigorate the Arab identity of Lebanon. Al-Najjade championed the cause of Muslims in Lebanon and called for a Lebanese federation with the Arab world, but this party has long been defunct and it had virtually no role in the conflict. The Progressive Socialist Party, founded by influential Druze politician Kamal Jumblatt in the late 1940s, aims at the ultimate creation of a new socialist society in Lebanon. The Phalanges Party (al-Kataeb) was established as a youth organization by Pierre Gemayel, a Lebanese pharmacist, who came back from a trip to Berlin in 1936 enchanted with Nazi discipline. Upon his return to Lebanon, he founded the Kataeb Party "to foster and safeguard the Lebanese homeland" in the face of dividing forces represented by other Lebanese parties and international movements in the country; the party has attracted an almost exclusively Maronite membership. It was, however, the

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Constitutional Union Party that led Lebanon to independence from France in 1943, and its leader, Bechara al-Khoury, became the first president of independent Lebanon. It was an elite party with a flexible organization that supported a republican political system and free enterprise. In addition, its ties with the Arab world were stronger than those of the other Christian parties. Suleiman's third category includes Hezbollah; Ibad al-Rahman (Worshipers of the Merciful); al-Ikhwan al-Muslemin (Muslim Brethren); Hizb al-Tahrir (Liberation Party); and al-Jama'ah al-Islamiyyah (The Islamic Group). They are strictly Shiite and Sunni Muslims. The fourth category consists mainly of parties whose followers are ethnic immigrants such as Kurds, Assyrians, and Armenians. 69 The Lebanese sociopolitical structure absorbed and offered these groups equal access to the country's resources. The Armenian community was able to consolidate its communal identity in the country by forming political parties. The Armenian migration to Lebanon followed their massacres by the Turks at the end of the nineteenth century and their subsequent deportation from Turkey. In 1915 and 1921, thousands settled in Lebanon, and in 1924, the French mandatory government granted them Lebanese citizenship despite the opposition from the Muslims, "who accused the French mandatory government of deliberately increasing the Christian population of Lebanon." 70 In 1937, and as a result of the annexation of the Alexandretta region by Turkey, some 27,000 Armenians came to Syria and Lebanon. More Armenian immigrants came to Lebanon from Palestine after 1948. The community in Lebanon today numbers around 150,000, the majority of whom belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church, though the Lebanese government officially recognizes both Orthodox and Catholic Armenian communities. The Armenians have been politically active, and their influence is significant. Their three main political parties were formed outside the country, and they aimed at the liberation of Armenia from foreign rule. When they came to Lebanon, they brought the parties with them. The Armenian parties resisted assimilation because they maintained the identity of parties-in-exile, not really part of the Lebanese landscape. The anti-Marxist Dashnak Party was established in Russia in 1890 to maintain and vitalize Armenian culture; the Hunchak Party, formed in 1887 in Geneva, intended to liberate Turkish Armenia and establish a socialist regime there; and the Ramgavar Azadagan set the goal of restoring an independent Armenia's historic boundaries after it was founded in 1921. Although their ideologies are deliberately disengaged from the Lebanese political milieu, these parties have contributed to the political process through active participation in local politics. They have not been directly involved in the local conflict, but they have played a supportive role in the disputes.

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Conclusion This incredibly diverse structural base has provided fertile ground for the generation of conflict in Lebanon. It reflects the intractable communal tendencies toward conflict that have been kept alive over the years by asabiya (as communal consciousness) and the sectarian drive for positions of power and authority. The politicization of communal identity in Lebanon was the product of the divergence between demographically determined entitlements and the actual socioeconomic and political distribution of resources: in other words, intercommunal inequalities. The communal entitlements and power distribution were themselves by-products of the authority structure and asabiya. It is clearly a reciprocal relationship: authority and asabiya served to propel their communities into positions of power and domination, and this unequal distribution of power, in turn, led to strengthened asabiya consciousness. This situation was exacerbated by external forces that contributed to both the intensity and the violence of the conflict. The Arab-Israeli conflict, the large-scale Israeli military incursions into Lebanon, inter-Arab discord, and the armed Palestinian presence in the country have all led to more pressure on intercommunal relations within Lebanon. The next chapter will further discuss these inequalities and the development of asymmetries in communal entitlements, as well as these external influences.

Notes 1. Halim Barakat, "The Social Context," in P. Edward Haley and Lewis Snider, eds., Lebanon in Crisis: Participants and Issues (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1979), p. 5. 2. Decision No. 60/L.R., dated March 13, 1936, enumerates these sects as follows: Christians are composed of the Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics, Armenian Gregorian, Armenian Catholics, Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholics, Nostorions, Chaldeans, Latin, and Protestants. The Muslim sects are made up of Sunnis, Shiites, Druzes, Alawites and Ismaelites. The Jewish sects are composed of Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut synagogues. The unrecognised sects are Protestants, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Bahais. 3. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, 2 vols. ( N e w York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1982). 4. David McDowall, Lebanon, A Conflict of Minorities (London: Minority Rights Group, 1983), p. 7. 5. Ralph E. Crow, "Religious Sectarianism in the Lebanese Political System," Journal of Politics 24, no. 3 (August 1962), p. 500. 6. Albert Hourani, A Vision of History: Near Eastern and Other Essays (Beirut: Khayats, 1961), p. 73. 7. Salibi argues that the Maronites took their name from their first patriarch, Yuhanna Marun al-Sarumi, rather than from St. Maroun, the fifth-century Syrian

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saint. See Kamal Salibi, "Tribal Origins of the Religious Sects in the Arab East," in Halim Barakat, ed., Toward a Viable Lebanon (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 15-26. 8. Philip Hitti, Lebanon in History (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 248. 9. Salibi maintains that the immediate cause of their breach with the Melkites might have been a contest over the succession to the principal Syrian patriarch. See Kamal Salibi, Syria Under Islam: Empire on Trial, 634-1097 (New York: Caravan Books, 1977), p. 29. 10. Boutros Dao, Tarykh al-Mouwarinah al-Dini wa al-Syasi wa al-Hadary (The political, religious, and cultural history of the Maronites), 2d ed. (Beirut: AnNahar Publishing House, 1977), p. 174. 11. Ibid., chapter 3. 12. Ibid., p. 358. 13. Hitti, Lebanon in History, p. 249. 14. Marie-Christine Aulas, "The Socio-Ideological Development of the Maronite Community: The Emergence of the Phalanges and the Lebanese Forces," Arab Studies Quarterly 7, no. 4 (fall 1985), p. 2. 15. Dao, Tarykh al-Mouwarinah, p. 389. 16. David C. Gordon, Lebanon: The Fragmented Nation (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 153. 17. The text of Louis IX's letter to the Maronites reads: "Nous sommes persuadés que cette nation que nous trouvons établie sous le nom de St Maroun est une partie de la nation Française." In Hitti, Lebanon in History, p. 321. 18. Salibi, Syria Under Islam, p. 28. 19. Hitti, Lebanon in History, p. 256. 20. Ibid., p. 324. 21. Mohammad Ali Mekki, Lubnan: Min al-Fath al-Arabi ila al-Fath al-Osmani (Lebanon: From Arab conquest to Ottoman conquest) (Beirut: An-Nahar Publishing House, 1977), p. 230. 22. Sami N. Makarem, The Druze Faith (New York: Caravan Books, 1974), p. 13. 23. Hitti, Lebanon in History, p. 260. 24. Ibid., p. 262. 25. Albert Hourani, Minorities in the Arab World (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 66. 26. Caliph in Arabic means successor. 27. Shiite in Arabic means party. 28. Encyclopedia of Islam, new edition (Leiden, NY: E.J. Brill, 1965), vol. 2, p. 536. 29. Fuad I. Khuri, "The Ulama: A Comparative Study of Sunni and Shia Religious Officials," Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 3 (July 1987), p. 293. 30. The Sunnis of Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt follow the Shafi' school, whereas the Sunnis of North Africa follow the Maliki, in Saudi Arabia the Hanbali, and in Turkey the Hanafi (this school is the more tolerant in relation to the rights of non-Muslims in an Islamic state). 31. Khuri, "The Ulama," p. 293. 32. The designation took place on 18 dhi al-hujja of the year 10 A.H. (Hijra, anno hegirae) in what is known, in Shiite sources, as hadith al-Ghadir where the prophet had said, "He whose master (mawlah) I am, Ali is his master (man ana mawlah, fa Ali Mawlah)." Khuri, "The Ulama," p. 303. 33. It is known in the annals of Islam as al-Fitna, the first civil war in Islam.

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34. The Shiites observe the first ten days of Muharram as days of lamentation in which a variety of rituals depicting this massacre are enacted. The rituals involve a passionate self-inflicting act of pain, stressing the suffering of al-Husein. The presiding mullah starts the function by recalling events of a particular imam, focusing on instances of oppression and persecution by the authorities; then he moves on to narrate again and again the story of the battle of Kerbala and the mutilation and decapitation of the body of al-Husein until everyone in the audience goes into a deep trance, sighing and crying. 35. Philip Hitti, History of the Arabs, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 191. 36. The "twelver" Shiites are those who follow the line of imamate from Ali to Muhamad bin Hasan al-Askari, the twelfth imam who disappeared in 260 A.H. (874 C.E.). His followers claim that he went into occultation (Ghaiba) and are awaiting his return as the expected Mahdi (messiah). The twelvers form, numerically, the majority of Shiites in Iran, about half of those in Iraq, the absolute majority of the Shiites in Lebanon, and about half of those of Syria. The total number of Shiites in the world is estimated to be around 60 million. See Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), pp. 45-46. 37. Kamal Salibi, Tarykh Lubnan al-Hadith (The modern history of Lebanon), 6th ed. (Beirut: An-Nahar Publishing House, 1984), p. 17. 38. McDowall, Lebanon, p. 8; Augustus Richard Norton, Amal and the Shia: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), pp. 16-18. 39. Helena Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1985), p. 21. 40. For an elaborate discussion of the Shiite deprivation and neglect by the state machinery in Lebanon and its impact on their communal consciousness, see Helena Cobban, "The Growth of Shia Power in Lebanon and Its Implications for the Future," and Augustus Richard Norton, "Shi'ism and Social Protest in Lebanon," both in Juan R.I. Cole and Nikki R. Keddie, eds., Shi'ism and Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 137-155 and pp. 156-178, respectively. 41. Amal is an acronym for Afwaj al-Muqawamah al-Lubnaniya (Lebanese Resistance Battalions). In its abbreviated form, Amal means "hope." Essentially it is a protest movement but its main aim is to reinvigorate the Shiite role in Lebanon's political life and to raise its stakes in the government's rewards. 42. For the Charter of the Amal Movement, see Norton, Amal and the Shia, pp. 144-166. 43. Khuri distinguishes between the Sunni ideology and other Muslim ideologies on the basis of their adaptation to state authority: Sunni Islam is adapted to the sovereignty of the state, whereas Shiite Islam is adapted to the sovereignty of its communities. See Fuad I. Khuri, Imams and Emirs: State, Religion and Sects in Islam (London: Saqi Books, 1990), chapters 12 and 13. 44. Mekki, Lubnan, chapter 2. 45. Ibid., p. 70. 46. Salibi, Tarykh Lubnan, p. 17. 47. For an elaborate account of the pressure exerted by the Maronite clergy and politicians over the French mandatory power to enlarge Lebanon's territories and grant it independence, see Meir Zamir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon (London: Croom Helm, 1985), chapter 2; Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988), chapters 1-5.

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48. Salibi, A House of Many Mansions, pp. 99-100. 49. Tabitha Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), p. 377. 50. Daily Star (Beirut), November 14, 1984, as quoted in Norton, Amal and the Shia, p. 138. 51. Ibid., p. 139. 52. Ibid., p. 136. 53. Khuri makes a distinction between sect and minority when discussing the different confessional groups in Lebanon. He defines "sect" as a geographically compact instrument of moral control operating in peripheral territories lying outside the domain of state authority. He contends also that all sects in Islam appeared as rebellious groups against the Sunni dogma. Sects are therefore not to be studied as a religious phenomena but rather as a historical reality. Minorities in the Arab-Islamic societies differ from the sects in form and context (organization, ideology, and general orientation). They normally are geographically dispersed, live in cities, and relate to the state more than to the community. On this basis, Khuri contends that there are in Lebanon only three sects—the Maronites, the Shiites, and the Druzes. Accordingly, the Sunni Muslim, as well as the rest of the seventeen sects are religious minorities. See Khuri, Imams and Emirs, chapter 6. 54. Zamir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon, p. 132. 55. Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, pp. 26-28. 56. Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon, p. 153. 57. The figures on the number of Palestinians in Lebanon are not precise. The U.S. Department of State estimates them to be 400,000, of whom 239,000 were registered with United Nations Relief and Work for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) as of June 30, 1983. 58. Harry N. Howard, "The United Nations and the Arab League," in P. Edward Haley and Lewis Snider, eds., Lebanon in Crisis: Participants and Issues (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1979), p. 270. 59. Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians in Lebanon: Social Repercussions of Israel's Invasion," Middle East Journal 38, no. 2 (spring 1984), p. 255. 60. Ibid., p. 258. 61. Anne Moselt Lesch, "The Palestine Problem," World Politics 34, no. 4 (July 1982), p. 567. 62. Abbas Kelidar and Michael Burrell, Lebanon: The Collapse of a State: Regional Dimension of the Struggle, Conflict Studies, No. 74 (London: Institute for the Study of Conflict, August 1976), p. 6. 63. For the full text of the agreement see Walid Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon: Confrontation in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1979), pp. 185-186. 64. Monday Morning (Beirut) 774, June 1-7, 1987, p. 6. 65. This agreement, the protocol, and the Shtaura Accord were abrogated by the Lebanese parliament in 1987. Law No. 25/87, to this effect, was promulgated in the official gazette, no. 25, dated June 18, 1987. 66. Jalal Zuwiyya, The Parliamentary Election of Lebanon, 1968 (Leiden, NY: E.J. Brill, 1972), p. 10. Lebanon, 67. Abdo Baaklini, Legislative and Political Development: 1842-1972 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1976), pp. 153, 154. 68. Michael Suleiman, Political Parties in Lebanon: The Challenge of a Fragmented Political Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967).

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69. An ethnic group is defined as a distinct category of population in a larger society whose culture is usually different from its own. David L. Sills, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan and the Free Press, 1968), s.v. "ethnic groups," vol. 5, p. 167. 70. Suleiman, Political Parties, p. 185.

4 Communal Relations and the Generation of Conflict

Chapter 3 emphasized the manner in which the historical development of the main Lebanese communities led to a segmented overall social structure. It is only through our understanding of the past that we can identify and understand those events responsible for creating the schisms that still define Lebanese society and link particular historical moments to the recent socioeconomic and political factors that caused and maintained the 1975 civil war. Historical analysis highlights the fact that the segmented social structure reinforced the asabiya consciousness of the various component communities and strengthened their desire for power and authority. However, it should not be assumed that asabiya and authority were only reflective surfaces mirroring the conflictive reflexes of the social structure. Each actively contributed to the development of the conflict. Aziz al-Azmeh maintains that asabiya is a "cohesive force" and a medium through which a communal group gains power and domination; asabiya and authority both played a significant role in transforming segments of society into powerhungry and power-wielding factions. 1

Assessing Other Contributing Factors to the Civil War Socioeconomic and political factors in the generation and perpetuation of Lebanon's conflict have remained in the background of this study and now need to be addressed in full. In addition, the role played by external intervention, which has been clearly portrayed to an outside audience gathering their information from international media, needs to be assessed in terms of its real contribution to the enduring conflict. As with every country, Lebanon's political culture has been shaped by the interplay of historical and social processes, and the civil war of 1975 53

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was but a stage in a continuous and ubiquitous process of social conflict in the country. The repeated violence has generated an abundance of literature on Lebanon and its wars. As mentioned in Chapter 1, there are three overriding hypotheses that dominate the conventional views of the nature and causes of the war in Lebanon. The first places the core of the conflict in a collapse of the domestic sociopolitical and economic structures. The second introduces the role of outside influences and argues that it was the interplay of regional events and domestic politics that led to the collapse of functioning government in Lebanon. And the last places the blame for the cause, intensity, and violence of the war on the intervention of foreign powers. There is no doubt that foreign military and political intervention have intensified and prolonged the conflict. However, blaming these for the war is unrealistic. The root causes were inherent in the historical evolution of a social and political structure that engendered behavioral patterns that led to an overall tendency toward conflict in the system. This tendency reinforced and reinvigorated a process of fragmentation of the sociopolitical structure. Communal boundaries were hardened and factional loyalties strengthened. In the plural, multicommunal composition of Lebanon, tendencies toward conflict found a spawning ground and spilled over into all walks of life. Inherent conflict weakened the social structure and made it vulnerable to pressure from the outside. As the structure of Lebanese society grew more rigid, it became less and less able to cope with internal pressures resulting from socioeconomic change and external pressures resulting from regional political crises. The conflict was triggered by myriad factors, both internal and external. Domestically, there were social and economic problems and disputes over communal entitlements. External political and military contributions to the conflict played catalytic and supportive roles in determining the balance of forces between the groups, as well as influencing the intensity and duration of the conflict.

Internal Factors The internal elements of Lebanon's conflict were often provocative or catalytic events or situations, or they were structural characteristics that contributed to the maintenance of a tense situation. Structural conditions, interests, and value perceptions of the contending parties have been influencing Muslim-Christian relations in Lebanon throughout its modern history. Muslims of the Republic of Lebanon saw themselves as marginalized, perpetually in an inferior position deprived of status, power, and the rewards system in a Christian-dominated state. And the Christians, at an

COMMUNAL RELATIONS

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early stage, regarded the Muslims as distant from the core value system of the independent state of Lebanon. From the point of view of the Christians, particularly the Maronites, equal Muslim access to the halls of power was perceived as a threat to both their communal political status and to the independence of Lebanon. All these views were heavily influenced by economic asymmetry, an educational imbalance, and clear political disparity. Not unlike the economic experiences of other postcolonial societies, the economic institutions inherited from the French mandate and Ottoman rule, as well as those that emerged during thirty-two years of independence, failed to function as early leaders had hoped and expected. The deregulated and privatized economic system led to a considerable disparity of wealth and economic inequality in Lebanese society. A national income study in 1975 showed that Christian Lebanese were conspicuously better off than their Muslim fellow citizens. While 61 percent of Christians earned an annual income of less than L6,000, 82 percent of the Shiite, 79 percent of the Sunnis, and 69 percent of the Druzes earned less than that. Similarly, 34 percent of the Christians earned an annual income of between L6,001 (6,001 pounds) and L25.000, compared with 27 percent of the Druzes, 17 percent of the Sunnis, and 16 percent of the Shiites. The Christian dominance in industry was also highly visible: where there were 105 Christian employers in industry, there were only twentyone Muslims. In the banking sector, there were two Muslim employers for every eleven Christians. And for every forty Christian employers in the services sector there were only five Muslims. 2 Another industrial study reveals that seventeen of twenty-five large industries were Christian-owned, and that Christians were dominant in many other industries. This sectarian disparity was clearly manifest in the economic structure of Lebanon at the time of independence. The Islamic component of the economy was predominantly small businessmen and petit bourgeois peasants; Christians had a relatively larger middle class, a higher literacy rate, and were more involved in the public sector activities, companies, and banking. 3 And prior to that, in the colonial regime the "bulk of economic, including commercial, activity remained mainly in the hands of native Lebanese, mainly Christians." 4 The decentralized and very diverse educational system also reinforced the sectarian composition and identification of Lebanese society. Lebanon has enjoyed the highest educational level among the Afro-Asian countries, and the present system has a tradition extending back well over a hundred years. However, the structure of the educational system reflected the country's social and ideological division: many schools were established by religious institutions, foreign missionaries, and religious orders as early as the turn of the twentieth century. After their establishment in the second

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half of the nineteenth century, foreign universities and schools nurtured conflicts by splitting the political and cultural socialization between native and foreign influences. Postindependence Lebanon saw a further mushrooming of schools and colleges. These educational institutions were divided into four categories: state-run, parochial (both Christian and Muslim), private secular, and foreign-run. All schools were supposed to conform to government-established guidelines and curriculum. The foreign schools catered primarily to resident foreign nationals and their dependents. However, all the schools followed distinctive curricula. Their diverse natures, their curricula, and their educational philosophies precluded them from socializing their students to any sense of national unity or secular identity. They served only to perpetuate sectarian differences. 5 Even in the mid-1970s, illiteracy among Muslims remained higher than among Christians. Thirty-one percent of Shiite men and 70 percent of Shiite women were illiterate, compared to 13 percent of Christian men and 20 percent of Christian women. Four times as many Christians as Muslims (8 percent, compared to 2) held university degrees. 6 Among the Muslim population, this inequality in educational attainment created perceptions of injustice, deprivation, and denial. In postindependence Lebanon, this translated into an understandable demand for more public schools and educational facilities geared toward Muslim children. 7 Cultural divergence in education goes back to the nineteenth century. Muslims sent their children to schools and universities in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, while Maronites and Catholics sent theirs to France and Italy. In the 1830s, French Jesuits and American Protestants established schools and printing presses in Lebanon. In 1866, Americans established the Syrian Protestant College, which became the American University of Beirut in 1920, and the French followed suit by establishing the University of St. Joseph in 1875. In 1960, a Muslim religious endowment opened the private Arab University of Beirut under the auspices of the University of Alexandria in Egypt. These three universities continue to have predominantly sectarian identities. The students of St. Joseph's are primarily Christians, while enrollment at the Arab University of Beirut is dominated by Muslim students. The American University of Beirut is comparatively more cosmopolitan, with students who are Sunnis, Shiites, Druzes, Greek Orthodox, and Protestants. Unquestionably, the heterogeneous ethno-religious composition of Lebanese society has provided fertile ground for the rise of interconfessional friction and conflict, but Lebanon has still enjoyed some long periods of communal tranquility. The eighteenth century and the last forty years of the nineteenth century witnessed periods of peace among the communities. This peace was the result of a strong central authority. The

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government maintained vertical links to the communities in a well-defined feudal system and distributed political power through a confessional system that approximated that of modern Lebanon. Further, there was some class consciousness that cut across religious lines and provided a basis for interconfessional cooperation. This led to relatively organized, or at least common, opposition to foreign rule: first to that of Egypt between 1832 and 1840, and later to the suzerainty of the Ottomans. This stability continued throughout the major part of the eighteenth century, despite the appearance of some evidence of sectarian self-consciousness toward the end of the period. The country was battered when the collapse of the feudal system led to civil war in 1860. Peace was restored by the intervention of foreign powers who imposed a new power structure on Mount Lebanon: the Druzes suffered a loss in status, and the Maronites achieved substantial gain. In spite of the change, the communities lived in relative tranquility for many years. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the constitutional and demographic changes to Mount Lebanon, the communities drifted apart. This was particularly evident in their relationships with the newly created Republic of Greater Lebanon and its distribution of power among the component communities. The creation of modern Lebanon in 1920 was perhaps one of the most contentious issues of the decade following World War I. It took more than twenty-five years for the two communal blocs to come to terms with the new state: the new Lebanon meant something different to each. The Muslims saw it as a blow to their aspirations for a united and independent Arab Muslim world. On the other hand, the Christians saw the new state as a realization of their national aspirations for independence and a guarantor of their economic interests. David and Audrey Smock suggest that the French created Greater Lebanon in order to strengthen the position of Lebanon's Maronite community as well as to reward the Maronites for their faithful allegiance to France. By separating Mount Lebanon from Syria the French assured that the Maronites would not be engulfed by Syria's predominantly Sunni population. By annexing additional territories to Mount Lebanon to create Greater Lebanon, the French saw themselves securing the economic viability of the new state. 8

The creation of the state of Lebanon satisfied the historical aspirations of the Maronites for a national home but fell short of providing them with long-term security against political and cultural assimilation into the surrounding Muslim world. By extending Mount Lebanon's borders, the French mandate created a problem for the Muslim population by transforming them into a minority, thus leading to fear of loss of identity, status, and cultural links in a predominantly Christian state. These fears were strengthened by the fact that "many Christians particularly Maronites . . .

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continue to believe that Lebanon was primarily a Christian state linked more to the Christian West than to the Muslim East." 9 Such fears and suspicions led both communities to seek allies outside Lebanon to enhance their positions. The Maronites turned to France for protection, and the Muslims sought enhancement of their status by moving closer to the surrounding Arab world. This predicament was compounded by the failure of the French mandate to create an appropriate atmosphere for both groups to cooperate and make a meaningful contribution to national unity. The gap between the Christians and Muslims turned out to be far more difficult to bridge than Lebanon's founders had assumed. 10 In 1926, the mandate authority approved a constitution and enshrined in it a clear reference to the communities' entitlements in the power structure. 11 As it has turned out, this rule has had a seriously adverse impact on the political system of Lebanon by rigidifying the boundaries of the communal groups. By recognizing the group rights of each community and establishing differential access to the political hierarchy, the legitimate authority not only transferred part of its functions to those communities, but it also promoted intracommunal loyalties and identities. By 1943, the divergence between communal interests had become a major threat to national cooperation and accommodation. The 1926 constitutional provisions did not specify a precise formula for the appropriate (equitable) distribution of political resources between the two communal blocs. The provision for group rights was insufficient to placate contradictory communal demands and could not diffuse the burgeoning conflicts. The atmosphere of mistrust and fear engulfing both communal blocs was further enhanced by the changing political regimes in some Arab countries in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A succession of coups d'état in Syria and Iraq and the 1952 Egyptian revolution brought to these countries a new generation of young leaders genuinely and seriously committed to Arab nationalism and the Palestinian cause. Furthermore, the establishment of Israel in 1948 created a Palestinian refugee problem, which only served to exacerbate the intercommunal conflict in Lebanon. The impact of these regional developments left an indelible mark on Lebanon's domestic politics by exposing the country's already vulnerable sociopolitical structure to external pressure. The political structure failed to transform the contradictions in the Lebanese system into a dynamic force for necessary change. When the domestic and regional situation became untenable, it also failed to activate the mechanism for accommodation that was incorporated into the National Pact. Instead, this mechanism was relegated to the status of a stopgap measure intended to appease the anti-status-quo forces. What could have been an effective safety valve, releasing stress in the system, was lost to the Lebanese cause instead of becoming a vehicle for adaptation in a changing region.

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The failure of the integrative mechanisms of the Lebanese system (the National Pact) caused radicalization of the anti-status-quo forces. This led to the emergence of such movements as the Amal, the Lebanese Forces, Hezbollah, and other militant organizations and groups. These events confirmed that cultural pluralism enhanced the dissonant value systems by precluding the normal communication of ideas between the various communal groups; it increased their discriminatory tendencies and accentuated their intragroup identities to the detriment of an integrated Lebanese society. The factors that provoked the conflict process are mainly grounded in the social structure. It represents an abstract reflection of the denied expectations that became a prime motivation in the conflict. The Shiite sect experienced frustration under the political system and this translated into increased perceptions of deprivation. These were not the only motivations for the rise of Shiite communal consciousness and its involvement in the conflict. The Israeli invasion of the hinterland and Palestinian disregard for the Shiite plight added to their predicament. Other communal groups experienced similar economic disparities and loss of substantive rewards, and the system's failure to address their grievances lured them into an alliance with the Shiites. 1 2

External Factors The impact of regional and international factors on intercommunal relations merits a separate investigation. External pressure and outside influence on Lebanon's domestic politics are hardly new, and history shows a continuity in political patterns there. As previously mentioned, the 1860 civil war in Mount Lebanon led to the intervention of the nineteenthcentury great powers, and they played a decisive role in bringing about a solution that provided Lebanon with intercommunal peace for seventy years. Regional politics in the 1950s and 1960s contributed to the intensity of the war and influenced both its direction and its duration. The Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian situation, Israeli incursions into Lebanon, and inter-Arab discord all had a strong impact on the war. The Arab-Israeli conflict, with its Palestinian component, promoted the internal Lebanese conflict because of rising expectations of Lebanon's capabilities. Already-precarious sectarian relations were strained. Lebanon's involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict was mostly nonmilitary. Compared to the frontline states of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, Lebanon's role in the four Arab-Israeli wars was minimal. Lebanon had little military capability and was fairly reluctant to make itself a target by allying against Israel's forces: it based its policy on the much-publicized Phalangist

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assertion that Lebanon's weakness could be its strength. The 1948 ArabJewish war in Palestine caught Lebanon's mass population off guard—it came on the heels of Lebanese independence, at a time when social energies were directed mainly toward nation building and the fulfillment of domestic national goals. The Lebanese army contributed some troops to the Arab military efforts to thwart the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, but in the wars of 1967 and 1973, the country refrained from joining the hostilities. This incited demonstrations and riots from the Muslim masses, who protested against "the decision not to aid Syria, Jordan and the United Arab Republic." 13 Relations between Sunni Muslim political elites and the predominantly Maronite military command were further strained. Despite the internal strains, the authorities embraced the view that Lebanon ought to continue to seek security by exploiting its weakness and taking a nonthreatening position toward Israel, as well as by seeking guardianship from the West and the UN. After his 1982-1988 term of office, President Amine Gemayel regretted this policy: One of the assumptions we made was that Lebanon's weakness is its strength. The Lebanese believed that the creation of a strong Army would be seen as a threat by others. The absence of such an army would be an earnest of our dedication to peace, it was believed, guaranteeing that we would remain outside regional hostilities. This philosophy left us unprepared, unequipped and unable to deal with the anomic forces that exploded in Lebanon in the early 1970s. 14

The Muslim masses rejected the policy, considering it callous and dishonorable; they preferred an active policy of self-reliance and dependence on the Arab states rather than on the West for defense. Muslim insistence on Lebanon's active participation in the Arab-Israeli wars was probably motivated by two goals. The first was to bring the country closer to the Arab fold because of the internal impact this might have on Muslim status and their overall demands for a more equitable power-sharing arrangement. They also hoped to prevent the sociopolitical structure, with its Maronite dominance, from becoming ossified since this would permanently relegate Muslims to the lower rungs of the political ladder. The Palestinian

Problem

The Christian groups publicly expressed their wariness of an organized Palestinian military presence in Lebanon. Their anxiety was compounded by the inability of the government to contain the upsurge of Palestinian power and to foreclose its collaboration with the anti-status quo forces. 15

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The failure of the Lebanese government to control the situation prompted the Lebanese National Front to claim for itself the responsibility of curtailing the rising Palestinian power. It publicly declared that the Palestinians in Lebanon had become a "state within the state" and their behavior was incompatible with the country's territorial sovereignty. The Lebanese Front's attack on the Palestinians sprang not only from their concern for territorial integrity, but from their anxiety over the disruption of the communal balance of power within Lebanon. When they recognized their minority status, the Maronites realized that the presence of about 400,000 Palestinians, 95 percent of whom were Sunni Muslims, could tip the balance of power in favor of the Muslims. Their fears were enhanced by the Muslims' empathetic and sedulous brooding over Palestinian aspirations. 16 Furthermore, the Palestinian involvement in Lebanese internal politics strengthened irredentist claims for pan-Arabism. This gave the Maronites strong grounds to claim that they were the only community that could truly guarantee Lebanon's sovereignty. Basically, in these policies, Christian conflict aims were deflected from the Lebanese Muslims in general to the Palestinians in particular; by redirecting their hostility toward the Palestinians, the Christians managed to gain some release of internal tensions. Clearly, the Maronites had a vested interest in defending the existing sociopolitical order. Israeli Incursions and Invasions

Records kept by the Lebanese army show that there were one or two Israeli violations of Lebanese territory every day between 1968 and 1974. This increased to seven border violations a day in the two years before the civil war. For the first eight months of 1975, there were 1,101 violations of air space, and 215 violations of territorial waters, as well as artillery shelling, machine-gun fire, and air and naval raids. This amounted to an average of seventeen violations of Lebanese territorial integrity per day.17 Israeli violations of Lebanese territory, particularly in the border areas of the south and western Beq'a, had clearly increased in frequency and intensity after 1968. They created havoc in the border area and caused mass dislocation of the regional population, who were predominantly Shiite Muslim. 18 The incursions interrupted and curtailed the economic activities of the people and forced thousands to desert their homes in the south and move north to settle in the shantytowns of Beirut, where they lived in squalid, miserable slums. The Shiite migrants in Beirut's slum areas were largely tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers: they were not well educated, they were unskilled, and they were poor. Until the 1960s, the Shiite community as a whole was ignored by the central government. Their regions were

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deprived of substantial development projects, and "Lebanon's Shia had long been considered the most disadvantaged confessional group in the country." 19 They were dismissed as politically irrelevant, and part of their share of power from the 1943 National Pact was allowed to slip into the hands of the Sunni Muslims. However, over a period of twenty years, the Shiites were transformed from a nonparticipant sect to a highly politicized community. This emancipation was the direct result of the disruption of their traditional way of life by Israeli military activity in their home region, as well as the general processes of modernization in Lebanon after the mid-1950s. But above that, it was due to the strong leadership that the community has had with Imam Mousa al-Sadr and Nabih Berri. The poverty belt around Beirut was inhabited by the Shiites from South Lebanon and their coreligionists from the Beq'a Valley in eastern Lebanon, who had migrated voluntarily in search of better opportunities. Those urban quarters provided fertile soil for the political mobilization of the Shiite community. Urbanization stimulated increased perceptions of needs and widespread participation. 20 The Lebanese case seems to support the argument that urbanization is instrumental in lifting the ceiling of the newcomers' aspirations and expectations, as well as offering the possibility of enhanced status. Disappointed expectations redirect the focus of demands into the political arena. 21 Before the establishment of the Movement of the Deprived in 1974 and the Amal Movement in 1975, a large number of the Shiites joined the Lebanese Communist Party, the socialist Baath Party, and other antiestablishment organizations instrumental in the Shiite awakening. Many Shiites also joined the different Palestinian splinter groups; however, once the Amal Movement gained power and started to dominate Shiite politics in Lebanon, most recruits gravitated toward it instead of the secular parties. The politicized Shiites, around Beirut and in the south, were capable of translating their incipient politicization into political action through the Amal political organization. Inter-Arab

Discord

A series of coups d'état swept Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya following the Israeli defeat of their armies in 1948. The coups were prompted by the contempt of the armies for their political leaders' failure to combat Jewish militarism and designs and the loss of Palestine to non-Arab settlers, and they had a snowball effect on the process of political change in the Arab world. The other Arab countries resorted to a policy of appeasement by giving credence to Palestinian grievances and by embracing their demands.

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The rift between the nascent military regimes and the rest of the Arab world grew wider as the new rulers introduced sweeping reforms to political institutions and economic organizations within their countries. These changes set the military regimes on a collision course with the conservative Arab countries. For a time, Lebanon stayed out of the struggle, but not for long. Lebanon's relations with the Arab world had been clearly defined and institutionalized by its participation in the charter of the League of Arab States. At the founding conference of the league in Alexandria in 1944, a special resolution was introduced into the protocol pledging unanimous respect for the independence and sovereignty of Lebanon within its present frontiers. The formal recognition granted to Lebanon and the acceptance of its peripheral role in Arab affairs did not immunize its population from reaction to the political changes in the region. The Muslim masses of Lebanon still dreamed of pan-Arabism and yearned for a unified Arab world; these desires were inflamed by the incendiary slogans for Arab unity by the new revolutionary military regimes, particularly Nasserism. This was a serious source of tension between the Muslim and Christian communities in Lebanon. The Christians accused the Muslims of rescinding their pledge to refrain from agitating for the merger of Lebanon with Syria or any other Arab state; this did not deter the Muslim community. They were galvanized by the upsurge of pan-Arab nationalism, and this was utilized by the military elite to manipulate events in the region. Soon the Arab world was clearly divided into two groups. The new radical progressive and socialistoriented regimes were represented by Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, the newly independent Algeria, and by the late 1960s, Libya. The conservative regimes were led by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Morocco. On the other hand, the prominent rise of the PLO in the mid-1960s gave credence to the Palestinian cause and further strained relationships between the two main communities in Lebanon. The Lebanese Muslims found a vehicle to communicate their demands for political reform in the revived pan-Arabism and the change in the region. Acting on the surging Palestinian power in Lebanon, they were able to challenge the existing confessional arrangement and the National Pact itself. This upsurge in Muslim activism was met by a calculated and typical response from the Maronites. They fortified their position and reiterated their attachment to the National Pact, the confessional system, and the inviolability of the Lebanese state. Simultaneously, they preserved a close link with the conservative Arab regimes, as well as non-Arab countries, including Israel, with whom they quickly cultivated pragmatic relations. The progressive states of the region could not remain a unified front for long, however. Fundamental internal differences soon eroded the cohesive posture.

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Cooperation withered as the euphoria dissipated and traditional rivalries reemerged. In the decade preceding the civil war in Lebanon, the Arab world was checkered with disputes and rivalries. Rivals such as Egypt and Libya, Algeria and Morocco, Iraq and Kuwait, Egypt and Syria, Syria and Iraq, and Iraq and Iran, all found themselves in repeated conflict. Some of these rivalries had only marginal effects on Lebanon's communal and state politics, but others lasted longer and had an intense impact on the country. Syria was at the center of a network of rivalries, and many of its quarrels with other Arab countries had their effect on Lebanon. Syria's rift with Iraq's co-ideological Baath regime, for example, split the Lebanese Baath Party and its sympathizers. The aftermath of the 1973 October War and the Sinai Accord caused a deep rift between Syria and Egypt. Failing to convince Syria of the need to conclude a comprehensive settlement with Israel, Egypt moved alone toward a separate peace. This infuriated Syria, but it caused consternation in both communities in Lebanon. By this time, many ideological movements in Lebanon—the Baathists, the Syrian nationalists, Nasserites, Arab nationalists, and the socialists—had rallied behind the Palestinian movement there. The Palestinians and their allies in Lebanon felt that a separate agreement between Egypt and Israel did not augur well for their cause. They began fortifying their front in Lebanon by helping their Lebanese allies establish their own militias. They also established a functional relationship with the Syrian regime to thwart Egypt's move toward an Egyptian-Israeli agreement. The Christian right was alarmed by Palestinian cooperation with the Lebanese National Movement and the Palestinian-Syrian collaboration. Tension between the two groups developed into fights with the conclusion of the second Sinai Agreement. The Palestinian-Syrian left collaboration was enhanced by their proposal that Lebanon "must remain an active front-line state in the struggle against Israel." 22 This deepened the anxiety of the Lebanese Christian right and spurred their attempt to find external support for their cause. None of the Lebanese factions insulated itself from the influences of regional conflicts. Rather, each cultivated external patrons and espoused policies that reflected the positions of those patrons. Fouad Ajami argues that this is a chronic characteristic of Lebanese politics: Lebanon has always been a theatre for the ambitions of more powerful Arab states and interests; all of them have been, in one way or another, involved in recent crises either as backers of certain movements or as anxious intermediaries trying to patch up the system and keep it together. 23

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The Syrian Factor Syria has a long history of involvement in the internal affairs of Lebanon. Both geographical proximity and historical and economic ties between the two countries contribute to this involvement. After the demise of the Ottoman Empire, Lebanon and Syria both fell under the power of the French mandate. They both achieved their independence in the mid-1940s, but as that independence became more solid, the countries developed different foreign policy goals. In 1949, Syria opted out of the French currency zone, while Lebanon remained a part of it. Until then, the countries had shared a central bank, a customs union, one railway administration, coordinated farm policies, and a common labor market. In 1951, these institutional ties were completely severed, and each country sought to create its own infrastructure and domestic and foreign policies. Lebanon retained a Westernstyle multiparty system, while Syria experienced a succession of coups that transformed it into a one-party state. A complete history of Syria's involvement in Lebanese affairs is beyond the scope of this study, but the implications of its intervention for intercommunal relations need to be discussed, particularly in the war years from 1975 to the present. Syria's activities in the Lebanese war progressed from early mediation, to interference by proxy, to direct military and political intervention. With each new policy, Syria found itself plunging deeper and deeper into the Lebanese quagmire, whether by accident or design. As the intensity of violence escalated, Syria's role became central and predominant. Later, Syria played an effective role in the regional efforts at conflict resolution. Syria's motivations for involvement in the Lebanese crisis were complex, but on July 20, 1976, President Hafez al-Assad revealed to members of the newly elected Syrian provincial councils that he interfered in the crisis to prevent the partitioning of Lebanon along sectarian lines. He also stated that he intended to thwart the establishment of a radicalized regime in Lebanon that might have a destabilizing effect on Syria, or draw it into a war with Israel for which it was not prepared. 24 The Lebanese factions assessed the Syrian intervention from the perspective of their own interests. While the status quo coalition initially welcomed it, it was opposed by the reformist camp and the Palestinian resistance. Later, these positions were reversed. For most of the war, Syria backed the Reformist camp but restrained it from administering a crushing defeat to the status quo supporters by holding back military assistance. The leadership of the coalition, already suspicious of Syria's designs on the territorial integrity of Lebanon, accused the reformist camp (particularly the Muslim component) of yielding its authority to the Syrians. Pierre Gemayel, the leader of the Phalanges Party and a pillar of the coalition

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leadership, accused Syria of harboring ulterior motives on the independence and sovereignty of Lebanon, and he requested the withdrawal of Syria's troops from the country. 25 This position reflected the attitude of the entire status quo coalition. It intensified over time, and the dispute over the role of Syrian troops in the country snowballed into military confrontation in Beirut and the surrounding region. Syrian intervention in Lebanon at first polarized the conflict environment, as did that of other regional actors, including Israel, Iraq, and Iran. By the time the civil war officially ended in October 1976, the status quo coalition was still supported by the Syrian forces in Lebanon. It was shortly after that that Syria's support shifted to the reformist camp, and the status quo coalition strengthened its relationship with Israel. The coalition established strong relations with Iraq during the last years of the conflict, and that country replaced Syria as the coalition's principal Arab backer. The civil war of 1975-1976 essentially passed through four stages. 26 For the first two phases of the conflict, Syria's role was basically intermediary. It was only in the third phase of the civil war that Syria clandestinely introduced contingents of its own militia, al-Sai'qa as well as the Syrian-based Palestine Liberation Army, into Lebanon in order to prevent the partition of Lebanon. 27 At the same time, Syria continued its mediation and was able to persuade the status quo coalition to accept some amendments to the power-sharing agreement. The Lebanese National Movement and its allies rejected the settlement on the grounds that it did not adequately address sociopolitical grievances and fell short of the basic demand for total secularization of the state. 28 The fourth stage of the civil war witnessed direct and massive Syrian military intervention in Lebanon. This was requested by the legitimate Lebanese authorities. On June 1, 1976, up to 15,000 Syrian troops entered Lebanon and penetrated the regions dominated by the Lebanese National Movement amid some fierce resistance. Their presence temporarily tilted the balance of forces in favor of the coalition, which went on the offensive and achieved considerable gains, primarily against the Palestinians. There was major contradiction in Syria's intervention. As Peter Heller states, It should be noted that by siding with the Maronite Christians at this time against the Palestinian-Lebanese leftists, the stated goals of the Syrians— to prevent the partition of Lebanon (sought by the Maronites), to preclude the installation of a Palestinian-backed leftist regime, . . . and to achieve peace—[all] tended to nullify each other. 29

Nevertheless, this intervention brought the clashes between the two warring parties to an end, and the Syrian military involvement was legalized by the newly elected president of Lebanon, Elias Sarkis. 30 A mini-summit of six heads of Arab states in Riyadh also granted it regional standing. 31

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In mid-October 1976, Syrian involvement was endorsed by a full Arab Summit Conference in Cairo. 3 2 One of the main resolutions of that conference was to create an Arab Deterrent Force (ADF) to supervise the ceasefire and oversee the disbanding of the militias. Representatives agreed that the force should be composed of 30,000 troops drawn from several Arab countries. Syria contributed half of the number, or all those troops already in Lebanon. However, other Arab forces pulled out of the ADF, leaving it entirely Syrian. Although the civil war officially ended in October 1976, the conflict persisted for fourteen more years, during which new issues and factions emerged as old ones vanished. The conflict itself changed both form and direction. Between 1976 and 1989, when the conflict was resolved, there were a number of significant developments in the conflict environment. The Syrians played a decisive role in these changes. The first was the Syrian reassessment of its support for the status quo coalition. In 1978, Syria broke its relations with the coalition and shifted its support back to the Palestinians and the reformist camp. The shift can probably be attributed to the fact that the coalition had allied itself to Israel at the expense of the "already frayed Syrian connection." 33 From that time, the forces of the status quo coalition had a confrontational policy with the Syrian troops in Lebanon. The coalition demanded the eviction of the Palestinians from Lebanon and challenged the Syrian army in the areas they controlled. Syria retaliated with force and vengeance. It attacked the predominantly Maronite militia's position in east Beirut and the rural town of Zahle. It inflicted heavy damage, but due to Saudi pressure and Israeli threats, the Syrian army retreated from east Beirut and the main Maronite heartland of the Kisrewan region. 34 At this stage Syria transformed its relationship with the reformist camp into an elaborate alliance with the anti-status quo forces. With this, Syria's role shifted from mediator and arbiter to active participant in the Lebanese conflict. The massive 1978 Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in retaliation for a Palestinian commando attack on a bus in Tel Aviv was another major juncture in the conflict. A sharpening of Lebanese communal polarization was an immediate effect of this invasion: positions further diverged over the Palestinian and Syrian presence in the country. The invasion brought relations between Syria and the Maronite "hawks" to the brink. 35 The hawks still hoped to liberate Lebanon from both the Syrians and the Palestinians. Rising tension developed into armed clashes in the suburbs of Beirut between the Lebanese National Movement and coalition forces. Under these circumstances the reformist camp dropped its opposition to the Syrian presence in Lebanon and moved closer to that country's position. Former president Frangie disengaged himself from the Lebanese Front and joined the reformists. A new alignment of forces, based on

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political expediency rather than sectarian issues, emerged. This added vigor to the newly formed Syrian-PLO strategic alliance, an alliance also directed against Egyptian President Sadat's peace plan with Israel. Israel's second invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 caused another shift. At the time, the polarization of the domestic conflict was at its height. On June 6, 1982, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon from the south and southeast and advanced northwards toward the capital. Within a week they laid siege to west Beirut, the Chouf Mountains, and part of the Beq'a Valley. Israel's basic aims were to destroy the PLO in Lebanon, to resurrect a Phalangesdominated central government that would sign a peace agreement with Israel, and to oust the Syrian forces from the country. 36 Accusations of collaboration with Israel flew in every direction among the Lebanese Forces militias of the Phalange Party. One source reported that several Christian leaders met with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1981 to ask him to send Israeli forces as far as Beirut to rid the country of the PLO and Syrian troops. 37 Another stated that "Lebanese Forces and other rightist militias acted during and after the invasion as auxiliaries of the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces]." 38 Others argued that the Lebanese Forces were not privy to the Israeli invasion plan. 39 And some claimed that "the Lebanese Forces refused to be directly involved or even associated with the Israeli forces." 40 However, the evidence suggests that this might not be true. The invading army encircled and trapped the resisting reformist militias and the PLO along with the 600,000 inhabitants of west Beirut. Israel achieved one of its three declared objectives of the invasion: it destroyed the military and political infrastructure of the PLO in Lebanon. In addition, it pushed the Syrian army out of Beirut and part of the Chouf Mountains, and placed itself in a position to conclude a peace agreement with the Lebanese government as a price for its total withdrawal from the country. Negotiations between Israel and Lebanon for the withdrawal of Israeli forces began toward the end of December 1982 under the auspices of the United States. An agreement was drawn up and signed by the delegates of the three participating states on May 17, 1983. However, the agreement was never ratified, and it was later abrogated by the Lebanese government. 41 The reformist camp was shaken by the invasion and took an uncompromising stance against the treaty, and Syria strongly opposed the agreement and successfully worked against its acceptance. Thus the agreement became the new focal point of contention for the warring factions. The reformist camp, supported by Syria and a wider Arab audience, opposed the agreement and demanded its annulment as a precondition for reconciliation. The status quo coalition held onto it as a bargaining chip in its attempt to secure Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. The

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treaty was finally blocked by an alliance of Syrian and domestic pressure. President Gemayel was forced to renounce it, and this development gave Syria and the Muslim groups in Lebanon a symbolic win at the expense of Maronite power. In general, the Israeli invasion probably failed in all its main objectives. This was certainly so in regard to its attempt to place in power an Israeli-influenced Maronite regime. 42 Although the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon eclipsed the Syrian role in the Lebanese crisis temporarily, Syria regained its prominence as an actor in the domestic conflict once Israel withdrew from Beirut and the 1983 agreement was annulled. The invasion had just reinforced the communal disputes and sharpened the resolve of the factions. In 1984, the Lebanese army was split along sectarian lines—almost all of the Shiite and Druze elements and many Sunnis broke with the central command, refusing to accept orders. This left the rump army predominantly Maronite. The conflict continued unabated with intermittent violence until the last quarter of 1988. Political confrontation between the two camps escalated, leading to total immobilization of government functions as the cleavage in the communal structure crept into the cabinet. The Sunni prime minister, supported by the reformist ministers, boycotted the Maronite president's meetings, and no cabinet meetings were held from mid1985 to September 1988. On September 22, 1988, the presidency was rendered vacant. A military government was appointed by the outgoing president to fill the vacuum, but the existing government of Sunni Muslim prime minister, Salim al-Hoss, had not been dismissed. This step was denounced by the reformist groups and declared illegal. They refused to recognize the government of Maronite Michel Aoun or to submit to its authority. For the next two years, Lebanon had two governments but no president. The Muslim-led government represented the reformist camp and was fully supported by Syria, the Arab countries (with the exception of Iraq and the PLO), and the world community. The rival military government could not extend its authority beyond the Maronite enclave in east Beirut and the Kisrewan region. With the presence of two rival governments, each claiming legitimacy, the conflict escalated to unprecedented levels of violence. The Maronite military prime minister, General Michel Aoun, commanded the loyalty of five out of the eleven well-equipped and highly trained, predominantly Maronite, brigades. He attempted to impose authority over the militias both in his enclave and over the rest of Lebanon. In this venture, he had to fight a two-pronged battle: first he fought the Lebanese forces militias who shared his turf; then he battled the reformist camp militias who were supported by the breakaway Sixth Brigade and the

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Syrian troops in west Beirut. The clashes had a devastating effect on the Maronite community and on east Beirut in particular. Aoun's war with the Lebanese forces lasted four months, from February to May 1990. The confrontation ended without a victory for either side but caused enormous destruction to east Beirut, as well as the death of more than eight hundred people in the Christian enclave. Both sides were weakened, and the Maronite community was trampled. However, while his political predicament became more acute, Aoun's popularity skyrocketed. He shifted his attention from the coreligionist Lebanese forces to the Syrians. Clashes with Syrian troops in Lebanon ensued, and he demanded their total and complete withdrawal from the country. He was able to mobilize popular support, but this was not enough to give him political gains. Aoun's struggle for power finally failed, largely because the political landscape had been changed by the conclusion of the Taif Accord in 1989, and later chapters will discuss how this came about.

Notes 1. Aziz al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldun in Modern Scholarship: A Study in Orientation (London: Third World Centre for Research and Publishing, 1981), p. 173. 2. Bassim al-Jisr, Al-Sira'at al-Lubnaniyyah wa al-Wefaq, 1920-1975 (Lebanese conflicts and détente, 1920-1975) (Beirut: An-Nahar Publishing House, 1981), p. 78. Al-Jisr quotes the figures from a study entitled The Entrepreneurs of Lebanon. Although there is no mention of the period to which this study refers, it was most likely conducted in the early 1960s. 3. Al-Jisr, Al-Sira'at al-Lubnaniyyah, p. 234. 4. Charles Issawi, "Economic Development and Political Liberalism in Lebanon," in Leonard Binder, ed., Politics in Lebanon (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), p. 71. 5. Ralph E. Crow, "Religious Sectarianism in the Lebanese Political System," Journal of Politics 24, no. 3 (August 1962), p. 512. 6. Al-Jisr, Al-Sira'at al-Lubnaniyyah, p. 79. 7. Michael Suleiman, Political Parties in Lebanon: The Challenge of a Fragmented Political Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 33. 8. David R. Smock and Audrey C. Smock, The Politics of Pluralism: A Comparative Study of Lebanon and Ghana (New York: Elsevier Scientific, 1975), p. 42. 9. Meir Zamir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 222. 10. Ibid., p. 221. 11. Article 95, before its amendment in 1990, stipulated: "As a provisional measure and for the sake of justice and concord, the communities shall be equitably represented in public employment and in the composition of the Cabinet, such measure, however, not to cause prejudice to the general welfare of the State." 12. For a thorough description of these disparities, see al-Jisr, Al-Sira'at alLubnaniyyah, pp. 78-79; David McDowall, Lebanon, A Conflict of Minorities (London: Minority Rights Group, 1983), pp. 12, 13.

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13. Michael Hudson, The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 99. 14. Amine Gemayel, "The Price and the Promise," Foreign Affairs 63, no. 4 (spring 1985), p. 763. 15. Joseph Abu Khalil, Qissat al-Mouwarenah f y al-Harb (The story of the Maronites in the war), 3d ed. (Beirut: Charekah al-Matboua'at Lil-Tawzy'a wa alNachr, 1990), pp. 23-30. 16. Walid Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon: Confrontation in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1979), p. 94. 17. Fiches du Monde Arabe, April 19, 1978, no. 933. 18. Norton argues that before the war of 1975, about 40 percent of the population of South Lebanon emigrated. See Augustus Richard Norton, "Harakat Amal," in Edward Azar et al., eds., The Emergence of a New Lebanon: Fantasy or Reality? (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1984), p. 166. 19. Augustus Richard Norton, Amal and the Shia: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), p. 17. 20. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: The Free Press, 1958), p. 61. 21. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 47. 22. Lewis Snider, "Inter-Arab Relations," in P. Edward Haley and Lewis Snider, eds., Lebanon in Crisis: Participants and Issues (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1979), p. 183. 23. Fouad Ajami, "Between Cairo and Damascus: The Arab World and the New Stalemate," Foreign Affairs 54, no. 3 (April 1976), p. 448. 24. Hafez al-Assad's speech, Radio Damascus, July 20, 1976. Excerpts from the speech were reported by all Lebanese newspapers on July 21, 1976. 25. Pierre Gemayel, Mawaqif wa Ara, 1975-1980 (Stances and opinions, 1975-1980) (Beirut: Dar al'amal Lil-Nachr, 1982), pp. 162-185. 26. Hudson delineates the four phases of the civil war according to the new entrants into the conflict, focusing mainly on the Palestinian participation. See Michael Hudson, "The Palestinian Factor in the Lebanese Civil War," Middle East Journal 32, no. 3 (summer 1978), pp. 270-273. Khuri analyzes the social contradictions created by the successive phases. See Fuad I. Khuri, "The Social Dynamics of the 1975-77 War in Lebanon," Armed Forces and Society 7, no. 3 (spring 1981), pp. 399-405. Rasier utilizes a similar classification of the sequence of the civil war. See Karen Rasier, "Internationalized Civil War: A Dynamic Analysis of the Syrian Intervention in Lebanon," Journal of Conflict Resolution 27, no. 3 (September 1983), pp. 426-431. As to the progress of the fighting during these four phases, see Helena Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1985), pp. 145-149. 27. Rasier, "Internationalized Civil War," p. 431. 28. Hudson, The Precarious Republic, p. 272. See also Peter Heller, "The Syrian Factor in the Lebanese Civil War," Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 4, no. 1 (fall 1980), p. 62. 29. Heller, "The Syrian Factor," p. 67. 30. Inaugural speech by President Elias Sarkis, September 23, 1976. See Khalidi, Conflict and Violence, pp. 63 and 193-195. 31. For the full text of the resolution, see Munir Abu Fadel, Lubnan alQadiyyah f y al-Mahafil al-Arabiyyah wa al-Dawliyyah (Lebanon: The cause in Arab and international forums) (Beirut: al-Khalil Press, 1984), pp. 135-139.

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32. Ibid., pp. 121-125. 33. Raymond A. Hinnebusch, "Syrian Policy in Lebanon and the Palestinians," Arab Studies Quarterly 8, no. 1 (winter 1986), p. 8. 34. Ibid., p. 9. 35. Khalidi, Conflict and Violence, p. 140. 36. Ze'ev Schiff, "The Political Background of the War in Lebanon," in Halim Barakat, ed., Toward a Viable Lebanon (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 160-166. 37. Ibid., p. 161. 38. Tabitha Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), p. 281. 39. Abu Khalil, Qissat al-Mouwarenah, p. 197. 40. Wadi Haddad, Lebanon: The Politics of Revolving Doors (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985), p. 80. 41. The agreement would have ended the state of war existing between Lebanon and Israel since 1948! It envisaged a security zone in the region adjacent to the Israeli borders and gave Israel certain rights within this zone. The Israelis undertook to withdraw from Lebanon. In a secret exchange of letters between the contracting parties, it was expressed that the Israeli withdrawal was conditional on the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. See Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, pp. 195-196, and Elie A. Salem, Violence and Diplomacy in Lebanon: The Troubled Years 1982-1988 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995). Salem describes in detail the negotiating process and its outcome. 42. George W. Ball, Error and Betrayal in Lebanon: An Analysis of Israel's Invasion of Lebanon and the Implications for US-Israeli Relations (Washington, DC: Foundation for Middle East Peace, 1984), p. 86.

5 Conflict Management in a Multicommunal Society: Lebanon's National Pact

In the last several years, the nation-state as a government of one people with a common ancestry and tradition has been shown to be a much rarer occurrence than many in the West had long assumed. Within the AngloAmerican model of majoritarian democratic theory, multicommunalism within one state was often discussed as an unfortunate problem that essentially left heterogeneous countries beyond the pale of the dominant approach. However, countries from Fiji to Belgium have populations with different ethnicities, histories, languages, or traditions, and they have grappled with the problem of creating a just society in that context for decades, or even longer, with mixed degrees of success. In a multicommunal society, the issues that divide the population may be swept under the carpet for as long as possible, the country may be partitioned along ethnic lines, one group may dominate or try to destroy another, or the country may seek a long-term solution for reducing communal friction. In Lebanon, the government attempted a combination of the first and the last possibilities. While the National Pact of 1943 was clearly an attempt to reduce communal conflict in the long term, it also unfortunately tended to steer away from major controversial issues that arose. These problems were ignored until they festered and ultimately threatened the existence of the state, and certainly the lives of Lebanon's citizens, by leading to civil war. The wave of democratization in the 1990s has shown us the importance of considering the experience of those multicommunal societies whose politics were not determined along the lines of the Cold War. As well, the literature on conflict resolution in multicommunal societies has grown since the 1960s, when the model of consociational democracy was presented as an alternative to the majoritarian model. Rather than treating

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multicommunalism as an intractable problem, consociationalism assumes that communal pluralism can be a legitimate and feasible structure of healthy political systems. Consociational thought forged a place for itself in the face of the integration and nation-building theories that dominated Western models, and Lijphart's consociational democratic model has given rise to an alternative approach to explain (and create) stability in deeply divided societies. The fundamental principle upon which theories of consociation rest is that any society characterized by deep divisions and cleavages can achieve a sufficient degree of stability if its leaders can harness and learn to live with these divisions and schisms. In Lebanon, for long periods at a time, there has been coherence and stability within the system, while at the same time, there is conflict and sometimes an immobilized, deeply divided society. To a great extent, it is not the disorder that needs an explanation, but rather the periods of stability and the persistence of the system over time. The relevant question for students of deeply divided societies is how to explain the native stability of Lebanon until 1975, when the country was always characterized by divisions and cleavages. Lewis Coser's conflict approach stresses the impact of crisscrossing conflicts and multiple loyalties on the amelioration of the conflictual tendencies, but it does not constitute an adequate model for the explanation of stability in the system. Integration models are also incapable of offering a relevant framework; they stress socialization and assimilation and assume the eradication of intergroup differentiation as a prerequisite for social and political stability, a situation untenable to Lebanon and other divided societies. Arend Lijphart's consociationalism provides an alternative by taking as its starting point the segmentation of society, as well as the existence of competition between groups. 1 Consociational theory is not only useful in explaining stability in deeply divided societies but also provides a "challenge [to] the pessimistic view that democracy [stability] must fail in ethnically divided Third World countries." 2 Until this contribution, political theory was dominated by the contention that social homogeneity (with its assumed corollary of political consensus) is conducive to political stability, whereas deep divisions and cleavages within a pluralist society inevitably lead to instability and breakdown of the system. Lijphart's work successfully challenges the majoritarian proposition in democratic theory by arguing that it is possible to forge and maintain political stability in pluralist, sharply-divided, and multicommunal societies. He endorses the conclusions of Robert Melson and Howard Wolpe that stability in a pluralist society is threatened not by the existence of a structure characterized by communalism, but by the failure of the existing institutions to recognize, accommodate, and regulate the cleavages and the ensuing divergent interests that this particular structure spawns. 3

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Lijphart defines consociational democracy as "government by 'elite cartel' designed to turn a democracy with fragmented political culture into a stable democracy." 4 The role of the elite is vital in achieving and maintaining the required stability because it is they who engage in "deliberate efforts to counteract the immobilizing and destabilizing effects of cultural fragmentation." 5 Consociationalism in a pluralist society is characterized by a grand coalition (elite cartel) of all component communities, mutual communal veto in decisionmaking, proportional representation and allocation of resources and civil service, and segmental autonomy. 6 A political system that is based on these provisions greatly increases the chance of successful management of conflict and the stability of the system. It is, however, the role of the elite that is critical: although historical (Gerhard Lehmbruch and Hans Daalder), structural (Val Lorwin), and cultural (Daalder) conditions can be effective in establishing and maintaining consociational democracy, it is the "creative and constructive act of free will by the elites" that can bring about democratic stability.7 Even in the presence of sharp societal divisions, close cooperation between the elite can diffuse societal conflict. They cooperate to counteract the perils of cleavages, assuming that such cleavages translate themselves into conflicts. For this strategy to be successful, there must be a distinct line of cleavage between subcultures, a multiple balance of power among the subcultures, and popular attitudes favorable to government by grand coalition. Further, the success of such a system assumes at least a modicum of supracommunal national identity. 8 As a system of compromise and accommodation, consociationalism serves two purposes: it enables all communal groups to play a meaningful role in the national life of their society, and it keeps communal conflict in divided societies within manageable limits. The contribution of the consociational model to an understanding of Lebanese politics is joined by certain other theories of politics in divided societies: Robert Dahl's delimitation of options for dealing with subcultural conflict, 9 Milton Esman's regime objectives, 10 Hrair Dekmajian's prescriptions for constitutional engineering, 11 Paul Salem's consociational imagery for maintaining peace and the suppression of sectarian loyalties and identities, 12 and Eric Nordlinger's conflict regulation practices. 13 Several of the conflict management devices proposed by these models are clearly related to Lijphart's consociational model. As any modest investigation of politics in divided societies shows, recognition and accommodation are not the only options in multicommunal countries; also possible are institutionalized dominance of one community over the other(s), forced assimilation of minority groups, and attempts at integration that eliminate ethnic pluralism by shaping a new national identity. Drawing on Lijphart and Nordlinger, Dekmajian discusses eleven factors that are conducive to the establishment and maintenance of stability

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and peace in a Middle Eastern society such as Lebanon. These are the elite cartel, controlled competition, subcultural cohesion, multiple balance of power among groups, circumscribed state power, system legitimacy and elite effectiveness, a passive electorate, private bargaining, high encapsulation, low mobilization, and minimal environmental turbulence. Each of these factors contributed to the success of the consociational experience in Lebanon before 1975. The important contribution here is the concept of "environmental turbulence," or rather the regional climate and its impact on the communal balance of power in Lebanon. The Lebanese case has attracted the attention of scholars of divided societies from the beginning. Lijphart, Nordlinger, and Lehmbruch all included Lebanon in their studies. Lebanon was, for many years, perceived as a successful consociational experience, although at least one scholar argued that the system was instrumental in exacerbating the divisions within the country and had hastened the collapse of the state.14 As a conflict-regulating mechanism, did consociationalism fail in Lebanon as Michael Hudson suggests? For a meaningful answer to this question, it is necessary to investigate the specific historical conditions under which particular conflict resolution proposals were applied to the settlement of disputes in Lebanon. Lehmbruch suggests that "under certain historical circumstances 'fragmented' political cultures generate methods of conflict management which permit the survival and continued existence of the political system." 15 Conflict management is not a newly invented concept in Lebanon, though the language of the process is of modern origin. In practical terms, many of the policies for managing conflict in the modern Lebanese political system had their roots in the Ottoman tradition of the "millet system," whereby religious communities were granted autonomous powers to administer their internal affairs. In addition, the administrative council of Mount Lebanon of 1864 provided for a multiconfessional system of representation, and this council represented a long tradition of elite accommodation. Lebanon's twentieth-century consociational model recognized the multicommunal tradition as a significant foundation to build upon, rather than as an obstruction to overcome.

The National Pact of 1943 As with any political system in a multicommunal society, the 1943 National Pact had two purposes: achieving a just society and creating a mechanism for nation building. To do this, it had to address the two main areas of contention between Lebanon's communal groups: the confessional distribution of government rewards and the country's foreign policy. The pact

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was meant to bring the conflict in these areas to manageable levels by attempting to provide a balance for achieving social justice and a compromise between the ideologies of Lebanism and Arabism. The pact laid down the foundations for sharing power not only between the two communal blocs—Muslims and Christians—but among the various component sects within each bloc. It also defined the parameters of Lebanon's external relations and specified its foreign and Arab policies. Although this agreement was never committed to writing, it was accepted as a given of Lebanese political life for more than thirty years, and it conditioned political behavior and dictated government policies until the outbreak of the civil war in 1975.16 Before the conclusion of the National Pact, the distribution of government and civil service posts, as well as the overall power-sharing arrangement, was a major source of discord among the various confessional communities in Lebanon. The 1926 constitution provided for equal opportunities of employment and representation in the government as well as its institutions, but the system was flawed in practice. 17 The aim of balancing the interests of the various confessional groups became a source of constant friction among them and strained the relations between their elites. It frequently spurred the less privileged communities to seek remedy, sometimes through violent means. The pact was intended to distribute government posts; parliament seats; and bureaucratic, military, and judicial positions proportionately between the various Lebanese confessional communities on the basis of the 1932 census. This census counted the Christians as the majority community. Under that census, the presidency of Lebanon was allocated to the Maronite sect, the Speaker of the House of Representatives was a Shiite Muslim, and the prime ministership went to the Sunni Muslims; the rest of the sects would share the ministerial portfolios according to their numerical strength. The parliament's composition, as well as that of the civil service, army, and judiciary enrollment, were established on the basis of a ratio of six Christians to every five Muslims in office. Controversy over Lebanon's foreign policy was also a source of considerable discord between the two communal blocs. The Maronites passionately sought to keep an independent Lebanon with strong ties to France, while the Muslims (primarily the Sunnis) did not conceal their desire for a union with the Arab world. The Christians were spurred by their minority status, as well as their religious connections to the West, especialy France. Under these circumstances, they believed that a union with the Arab world would destroy their independent identity and threaten their existence as a nation. The Muslim position was that they had been stripped of their majority status by being detached from the wider community of Islam and grafted onto a small country under Christian domination. 18

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The pact offered both communal blocs a compromise by which they were able to preserve their interests within an independent and sovereign Lebanon. This was to be realized through a trade-off in which the Muslims gave up their demand for making Lebanon a part of a larger Arab and Islamic state (recognizing the independence and sovereignty of Lebanon), while the Christians reciprocated by accepting the Arab character of Lebanon. 19 These concessions produced a national settlement that explicitly rested on the assumption that both blocs had abandoned their loyalties to external powers in favor of an independent and sovereign Lebanese state. The pact was meant to reflect this and to pave the way toward integration and nation building. Lebanon, as created by the French, was seen by the majority of its Muslim inhabitants as an artificial state, and it took more than fifteen years to convince them of the viability of the new country. 20 Until then, the Muslims continued to insist on Lebanon's union with Syria. 21 The reaction of France was to draw up an agreement with the Lebanese government in November 1936 to grant Lebanon independence within its existing borders while tying it to the French Republic by an alliance and friendship agreement. To ameliorate Muslim fear of Christian hegemony in the new republic, President Emile Edde exchanged letters with the French high commissioner expressing the readiness of his government to guarantee equality of civil and political rights to all confessional groups in Lebanon without discrimination, and to ensure just representation in public affairs. 22 It was only then that the Muslims became willing to acknowledge the majority status of the Christians in exchange for recognition of Lebanon's Arab affiliation and the equitable distribution of government rewards and resources between the two major sectarian blocs. 23 As it turned out, the 1936 agreement was not ratified by the French parliament, and the provisions of the exchanged letters were not implemented. However, their spirit was retained, particularly in relation to civil and political rights and equal distribution of government rewards, and the agreement was a trenchant motivation for the Muslims to move closer toward the 1943 National Pact settlement. Thus the year 1936 was a turning point in the relations between the Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. For the first time, the communities moved toward a mutual understanding on the new Lebanese polity. This rapprochement was evident in the Maronite patriarchate relations with Syria and in the emergence of a new trend among the Sunni Muslim community calling for the total independence of Lebanon. These events were crowned with the appointment, for the first time, of a Sunni prime minister.24 The National Pact was fundamentally preoccupied with the question of how to bring the conflict over social justice and national identity under control, and how to move from there toward nation building. Some students

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of Lebanese politics lent more weight to the question of Lebanon's identity than to the question of social justice. Michael Hudson and Clovis Maksoud acknowledged the importance of the constitutional arrangement and the 1936 exchanged letters that promised Muslims an equal share with the Christians in the government rewards, but they believed that this issue was secondary to that of national identity. 25 They saw the real role of the 1943 National Pact as the settlement of the more profound issue of Lebanese national identity. The pact's resolution of the question of Lebanon's national identity was supposed to resolve the question of loyalty to the country. The pact stipulated unequivocally that members of the two main confessional blocs should dissociate themselves from any external loyalty in favor of an independent Lebanon; furthermore, loyalty to Lebanon was intended to supersede loyalty to the various confessional identities. The National Pact was a clear attempt to construct a national identity by promoting loyalty to the country as a whole. 26 The integrative intent of the National Pact was explicitly acknowledged in President al-Khoury's inaugural speech to the parliament on September 21, 1943: The National Pact was not merely a settlement between two confessional communities but the fusion of two ideologies: one that called for melting Lebanon into another state, and the other called for its retention under foreign protection. It was assumed that, by mutual understanding and agreement, the Pact would transform the two conflicting trends into one national Lebanese Faith. 2 7

The Sunni prime minister, al-Solh, however, did not consider his faith in an independent Lebanon "incompatible with his own adherence to Arabism." 28 For him, "Lebanon [was] a country with an Arab face that [enjoyed] the good emanating from the West." 29 He shared President alKhoury's confidence that by granting recognition to the existing sectarian institutions, the pact would inevitably have a nation-building function: the institutions of just communal representation would facilitate integration in due time. When he launched the National Pact in his ministerial statement to the parliament on October 7, 1943, al-Solh stated that the eradication of sectarianism was a decisive stage toward the attainment of integration. In his subsequent address to the parliament, he described sectarianism as the first evil and considered it a hindrance to national progress and a poison to interconfessional relations. The National Pact would instead create a Lebanese nationalism that would cause the dissolution of sectarianism. 30 Loyalty to the system, national unity, harmony, and cohesion—all themes of the National Pact—were promoted by virtually every politician of the independent, sovereign state of Lebanon.

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Long before the National Pact, the forces for integration in Lebanese society existed side by side with the disintegrative forces in the country. Al-Jisr has observed that the problems were usually harnessed, but they were never explicitly addressed in any formal text. The 1958 conflict and 1975 war both revealed how previous settlements, including the 1943 National Pact, were not as benign or innocuous as often assumed. Their arrangements were often informal and sometimes nebulous; while this granted them a degree of flexibility, the ambivalence exposed their weakness in times of extreme political tension, 31 and they became sources of conflict. 32 A reexamination of the National Pact in light of the 1975 war has revealed that the federalist tendencies in the pact may not have been conducive to integration. One argument is that the designers of the National Pact were simply too ambitious in their vision of creating an integral society out of two distinctive cultures. The pact was no more than a consociational attempt at resolving the conflict in Lebanese society and a mechanism for containing the various conflictive tendencies. The National Pact attempted to transform a multicommunal society into a nation-state by means of the political process. It was not an easy task. Power within Lebanese society was divided between the two communal blocs and the state. While the state was supposed to maintain a balance between the groups, in reality, the Christians were traditionally closer to the seat of authority in Lebanon than the Muslims. Thus the Christians were habitual allies of the state and its ardent supporters. For the Muslims, the state was not a neutral mediator of communal conflict, but a Christian stronghold, and hence the subject of conflict and division in an unstable situation. 33 As a balancing mechanism for the interests of communal groups, the state was supposed to invite all sects to join the nation-building process. This step would have reduced the confrontational tendencies between the different sects and strengthened both the power and the legitimacy of the state institutions. Instead, the perception of state support for the Christian cause meant that the conflict shifted from the arena of intercommunal relations to conflict over the state institutions themselves. A fight over the political system ensued, with the Christians striving to maintain the status quo in the face of Muslim challenges. The state had become the focal point for efforts at integration because it could act as a counterbalance to the clear duality in Lebanese society. 34 It was assumed that a centralized administration could bring together all confessional groups. By incorporating the diverse communal groups within the state structure and by harmonizing their interests into a single policy, it was hoped as well that the social structure would gradually be integrated. The state institutions failed to deliver on their promise, and the task was left to the informal National Pact.

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The outcomes envisaged by this process were the erosion of the role of the confessional groups as independent, dynamic forces, and the elimination of the role of the confessional groups as a means by which their members could access state resources. Thirty-two years later, however, Lebanese society was still dominated by multicommunalism, and neither the state nor the National Pact had effected the desired integration. In retrospect, some students of Lebanese politics after the 1975 war argue that the process of integration was doomed at the outset. By institutionalizing the role of the Muslim bloc within the power structure of Lebanese society, the National Pact created a vague form of federalism that replaced the conception of a strong central government as envisioned by the 1926 constitution. 35 Segmental autonomy is a kind of federalism, not limited to territory, but extended to religion, culture, and ideology. 36 This federalist interpretation of the pact reflected to a certain extent the direction of Maronite radical thought in the wake of the war. 37 Perceived federalism was not the only weakness in the pact's integrative features. Other deficiencies appeared and were attributed by George Charaf to the basic assumptions upon which the concept of integration was based. He contended that two aspects of communal reaction should have been explored before an integrative role was assigned to the pact: communal resistance to change, and the communal ability for adaptation to exogenous stimuli. 38 Neither of these factors was investigated, and Charaf contends that such an investigation would have revealed characteristics clearly not conducive to successful integration. 39 One problem is that the confessional groups existed prior to the state and thus were self-sufficient and able to survive on their own. Furthermore, the confessional group is not like a political allegiance where continuity is derived from evolving individual interests. Confessionalism is a national identity in itself, with a whole that is greater (or, rather, different) than the sum of its individuals. A third characteristic that makes integration difficult is the historical fact that the various confessional structures in Lebanese society originated from different sources, and they developed distinct ideologies. Despite the failure of the integrative mechanism of the National Pact, its consociational arrangement brought intercommunal conflict over the issues of national identity and power sharing to a manageable level. In foreign policy, the Muslims gave up their Arab irrendentism while the Christians gave up their Western protection inducement. This meant that the two communal blocs acquiesced to a negative consensus that required loyalty to the newly independent and sovereign state of Lebanon. In the area of power sharing, consociationalism aimed to establish a balanced system of rewards. It offered the communities the best possible opportunity to make a contribution to the political culture from within the

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system. In his analysis of the public administration in Lebanon, Ralph Crow observed that since independence, the Lebanese public service has been reasonably open to all segments of society both in terms of the various communities and social classes. . . . It serves as an adjustment mechanism which brings particularistic elements of society together into a working relationship without overriding interests or submerging their identities.40 This power sharing was also applied to the legislative body. While individual communal entitlements were observed, they could only be realized in cooperation with other communities, and an electoral law was established to supervise this process. The Lebanese electoral system was based on a strategy of stability through exploitation of cross-cutting cleavages. The system (which was amended three times) encouraged moderation, competition, and cooperation, and it was intended to prevent the polarization of parliamentary sectarian loyalties. 41 The proportional electoral arrangement took into consideration the numerical strength and geographical distribution of each sect. 4 2 Donald Horowitz found in this system a reasonable vehicle for interethnic competition and cooperation. 43 The confessional composition of the parliament was prescribed also by the fixed ratio of six Christians for every five Muslims, regardless of the number of deputies. The regional distribution of members of parliament was also assigned. Table 5.1 shows the number of deputies by region and sect. The total number of members, as well as the constituencies, were changed four times after independence—the distribution was modified in 1989 to a 6:6 ratio. The voting procedure was changed as well. In the 1943 election, the whole of Lebanon was one constituency sending fourty-four deputies to the house of parliament, and candidates were packed onto one "Grand List." This system underwent gradual changes: there are now twenty-four constituencies within the five provinces, and the number of deputies has been increased from 44 to 128. The ticket composition reflected the sectarian structure of each constituency, though it did cultivate a certain degree of sectarian cooperation. The voters in Mount Lebanon, for instance, selected slates of thirty-five representatives that included two Sunnis, three Shiites, five Druzes, nineteen Maronites, two Catholics, three Greek Orthodox, and one Armenian Orthodox. This structure promotes compromise because a candidate needs the votes of other sects as well as his or her own communal group to be elected. One of the major consequences of the list system is that it encouraged sectarian moderation. 44 Competition takes place within each reserved office: a Sunni cannot compete with a Maronite for the presidency, but another Maronite can. A

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