Arabs (80 page)

The Palestinians disrupted the political and demographic balance in Lebanon in specific ways. The number of registered Palestinian refugees had grown from 127,600 in 1950 to 197,000 by 1975, though the true Palestinian presence was closer to 350,000 by 1975.
³⁷
The Palestinian refugees were overwhelmingly Muslim. Though they were never integrated into the Lebanese population or given citizenship, their presence on Lebanese soil meant a major increase in the country’s Muslim population. They had been politically quiescent until 1969, when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had negotiated terms with the Lebanese government for Palestinian guerrillas to operate from Lebanese soil against northern Israel. Lebanon became the operational headquarters of the PLO after the expulsion of Palestinian militias from Jordan following Black September. The Palestinian refugee camps became increasingly militarized and politically militant. They challenged the sovereignty of the Lebanese government in ways that led some to accuse the Palestinian revolution of constituting a state within a state in Lebanon.

 

There were many in Lebanon who placed the blame for the 1975 civil war squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinians. To former president Camille Chamoun, still
one of the most influential Maronite leaders in the mid-1970s, the conflict was never a civil war: “It began and continued to be a war between Lebanese and Palestinians” that, he argued, was harnessed by Lebanese Muslims to help them “seize the supreme authority over the whole of the country.”
³⁸
Chamoun was being economical with the truth. Differences between the Lebanese had grown so profound that the Palestinians were no more than a catalyst in a conflict to redefine politics in Lebanon.

In the early 1970s, Muslims, Druzes, Pan-Arabs, and Leftist organizations, including some Christians, forged a political coalition called the National Movement. Their goal was to overturn Lebanon’s outdated sectarian system and replace it with a secular democracy of one citizen, one vote. The head of this coalition was Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt. Born in 1917 in his family’s stronghold in the village of Moukhtara, Jumblatt studied law and philosophy in Paris and at the Jesuit University in Beirut before entering the Lebanese parliament in 1946 at the age of twenty-nine. “Only a secular, progressive Lebanon freed of confessionalism,” he maintained, “could ever hope to survive.”
³⁹
To his critics, Jumblatt’s call for a secular Lebanon was nothing less than a bid for Muslim majority rule—by the mid-1970s, Lebanese Muslims were estimated to outnumber Christians by a ratio of 55:45—and the end of Lebanon’s identity as a Christian state in the Middle East.

The Palestinians, in Jumblatt’s view, were but a contributing factor in a war that was fundamentally between the Lebanese. “If the Lebanese had not been ready for an explosion,” he reasoned, “there would have been no explosion.” The differences between Chamoun’s and Jumblatt’s views of Lebanon could not be more profound. The Maronite leader Chamoun was wedded to preserving the National Pact distribution of power—and through it the privileged position of Christians in Lebanon. Jumblatt and the National Movement called for a new order based on equal rights of citizenship that would advantage Lebanon’s Muslim majority. At root it was a power struggle over who would rule Lebanon, with both sides claiming the moral high ground. One contemporary described Chamoun and Jumblatt as “paragons to their supporters and monsters to their opponents” who “detest and cold shoulder one another, both entrenched in their palaces and in their certainties.”
⁴⁰

Conflict between defenders of the status quo and proponents of social revolution came to a head in the spring of 1975. That March, Muslim fishermen in the southern city of Sidon went on strike to protest a new fishing monopoly they feared would destroy their livelihood. The consortium was run by Camille Chamoun and a number of other Maronites, making a sectarian issue of what was at heart industrial action. The fishermen mounted demonstrations, which the Maronite-commanded Lebanese army was dispatched to quell. The National Movement condemned the military intervention as a Maronite army defending Maronite big business. The army fired on protesters and killed Ma‘ruf Sa’d, a Sunni Muslim leader of a left-wing Nasserist
party, on March 6. Sa’d’s death sparked a popular uprising in Sidon in which Palestinian commandos joined forces with Leftist Lebanese militiamen in pitched battles against the Lebanese army.

The conflict spread from Sidon to Beirut when a carload of gunmen made an unprovoked attack on Maronite leader Pierre Gemayel as he was leaving church on Sunday, April 13. Gemayel was the founder of the right-wing Maronite Phalangist Party, the single largest militia in Lebanon, with an estimated 15,000 armed members. The gunmen killed three people, including one of Gemayel’s bodyguards. Bent on revenge, the outraged Phalangists ambushed a busload of Palestinians that same day as they drove through the Christian suburb of Ain al-Rummaneh, killing all twenty-eight people on board. As news of the massacre spread, the Lebanese populace knew immediately that the sudden escalation of violence spelled war. The following day, no one went to work, schools closed, and the streets were empty as the people of Beirut followed events anxiously from their homes, reading the newspapers, listening to the radio, and relaying local news by telephone against the staccato background of gunfire.

Lina Tabbara was working in Beirut when the civil war began. After completing her tour of duty at the United Nations, where she had assisted Yasser Arafat with his 1974 speech, Tabbara had returned to Lebanon to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In many ways she typified the affluent, cosmopolitan Lebanese: well-educated; fluent in English, French, and Arabic; married to an architect; and living in one of the most elegant neighborhoods of downtown Beirut. She was thirty-four years old with two young daughters, ages two and four, at the outbreak of the war.

With her auburn hair and blue eyes, Tabarra could pass for a Christian, though she was in fact a Muslim of mixed Palestinian and Lebanese parentage. She wore her mixed identities with pride, and in the opening months of the war she refused to take sides, even as she watched society around her divide into two deeply entrenched camps. It was not an easy position to maintain. From its opening moments, the Lebanese civil war was marked by sectarian murder and the brutal reciprocity of revenge killings.

On May 31, after seven weeks of fighting between militias, Beirut witnessed the first sectarian massacres in which unarmed civilians were killed simply on the grounds of their religion. A friend called Lina Tabbara to warn her that Muslims were rounding up Christians in the Bashoura quarter of West Beirut. “There’s a barricade and an identity checkpoint,” Tabbara’s friend exclaimed. “The Christians have to get down. They are dragged off to the cemetery.” Ten Christians were executed in Beirut that day. The newspapers called it Black Friday. Much worse was to follow.
⁴¹

 

Throughout the summer of 1975, life in Beirut took on an unnatural normalcy as the city’s residents adapted to the constraints imposed by the war. One of the most
popular radio programs provided listeners with periodic updates on safe routes and no-go zones. “Dear listeners,” the reassuring presenter would announce, “we advise you to avoid this area and to take that route instead.” As the conflict deepened over the summer and into the autumn of 1975, his tone grew increasingly urgent. “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Today, Sunday, 20th October, you’ve all had a good time, haven’t you? Now you must go back home very quickly, very quickly!”
⁴²
The radio alert marked the start of a new battle in central Beirut in which rival militias fought over the tallest buildings as platforms from which to observe and bombard their enemies. The incomplete shell of a skyscraper called the Murr Tower, overlooking the commercial center of Beirut, became a stronghold of the Sunni Leftist Murabitun militia. The high-rise Holiday Inn, in the heart of the Beirut hotel district, was seized by the Maronite Phalangist militia.

Missiles and artillery shells were exchanged between the two towers in all-night battles, causing massive destruction to surrounding areas. National Movement forces—Tabbara called them the “Islamo-Progressives”—laid siege to the hotel district and trapped the Maronite forces in October 1975. The Christian militiamen were rescued by Camille Chamoun, who, as minister of the interior, had the authority to deploy 2,000 soldiers from the Lebanese army around the hotel district as a buffer between the combatants. Another cease-fire followed in November, but no one had any illusions that the fighting was over.

In December, the barricades were back in place and the mindless killing of innocents resumed. Four Phalangists were kidnapped and later found dead. Maronite militiamen retaliated by killing 300–400 civilians whose identity cards betrayed them as Muslims. Muslim militiamen responded in kind, killing hundreds of Christians. The day came to be known as Black Saturday. For Lina Tabbara, it was the day she finally took sides. “It’s no longer possible to ignore the yawning gulf separating Christians and Moslems; things have gone too far with this Black Saturday.” Henceforth, Lina identified with the Muslim cause. “I feel the seeds of hatred and the desire for revenge taking root in my very depths. At this moment I want the Mourabitouns or anybody else to give the Phalangists back twice as good as we got.”
⁴³

By the beginning of 1976 outside powers began to play an active role in the war between the Lebanese. The months of intense fighting consumed a great deal of guns and ammunition, jeeps and uniforms, and rockets and artillery, all of which were enormously costly. Lebanese militias sought arms from neighboring countries that were awash in weapons. One of the consequences of the oil boom was the rapid expansion of arms sales to the Middle East, and Lebanon’s neighbors seized on the deepening civil war to exercise influence over the country through arming its militias.

The Soviets and the Americans had long provided weapons systems to their allies in the region. Other states were quick to enter the lucrative market, with European producers competing with the Americans for sales of heavy weapons to West-leaning
“moderate” Arab states. Saudi defense spending, for instance, increased from $171 million in 1968 to over $13 billion by 1978.
⁴⁴
Surplus weapons began to make their way to supply the warring Lebanese militias, as regional powers sought to influence developments in Lebanon. Lina Tabbara reported rumors of Saudi support for Christian militias “as the regime in Riyadh prefers to support the opponents of Islam for fear of a hypothetical takeover by the Communists.”
⁴⁵
The Maronites also received arms and ammunition from the Israelis, to assist in their fight against Palestinian militias. The Left-leaning National Movement secured arms from the Soviet Union and through Soviet client states like Iraq and Libya. The internal conflict between Lebanese was getting dragged into the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the struggle between revolutionary and conservative regimes in the Arab world.

The Lebanese war dissolved into an exterminationist conflict in the course of 1976, in which massacre begat retaliatory massacre. Christian forces overran the Muslim shantytown of the Karantina in January 1976, killing hundreds and using bulldozers to obliterate the slum quarter from the map. The National Movement and Palestinian forces retaliated by laying siege to Camille Chamoun’s stronghold at Damour, a major Christian town on the coast to the south of Beirut. Five hundred Maronites were killed when Damour fell to the Palestinians and Muslim militias on January 20. Five months later, Maronite forces laid siege to the isolated Palestinian refugee camp at Tal al-Za‘tar, set in the midst of Christian neighborhoods. The camp’s 30,000 inhabitants suffered a fifty-three-day campaign of relentless violence before surrendering, after weeks without medical relief, fresh water, and dwindling food supplies. No reliable casualty figures were available for the siege, though an estimated 3,000 died in Tal al-Za’tar.
⁴⁶
In all, some 30,000 people were killed and nearly 70,000 wounded between the outbreak of the war in April 1975 and the cessation of general hostilities in October 1976—an enormous toll in a population of 3.25 million.
⁴⁷

The end of the first stage of the Lebanese civil war, in October 1976, came as a result of a political crisis. In March 1976 the Lebanese parliament passed a vote of no confidence in the president of the republic, Suleiman Franjieh, and asked for his resignation. When Franjieh refused, Kamal Jumblatt threatened all-out war, and dissident army units began to shell the Presidential Palace in the Beirut suburbs. The Syrian president, Hafiz al-Asad, sent his troops into Lebanon to protect Franjieh and to secure a cease-fire.

The Lebanese parliament met again under Syrian protection and agreed to hold early elections to resolve the political deadlock. The Lebanese president was, and still is, elected by the members of parliament, who assembled in May 1976 to cast their votes for a new leader. There were two candidates—Elias Sarkis, who was supported by conservative Christians and the Maronite militias; and Raymond Eddé, the preferred choice of the reformists and the National Movement. Much to the surprise
of the Muslim forces in Lebanon, Asad of Syria put his full support behind Elias Sarkis and ensured his victory over Eddé. It was a critical turning point, as Syria began to intervene directly in Lebanese politics and to secure its influence over the country by deploying its troops in strategic points in Beirut and across Lebanon.

In giving their support to Elias Sarkis, the Syrians were in effect taking sides against Jumblatt’s National Movement and the Palestinians. It was an astonishing reversal of positions, for the Syrians had always stood for Pan-Arabism and the Palestinian cause. Yet here they were coming to the defense of the West-leaning, anti-Arabist Maronites. For Lina Tabbara, the reality of the situation was brought home when she watched Syrian forces in the Beirut Airport “using Soviet-made Grad ground-to-ground missiles bought with Soviet aid to shell Palestinian refugee camps and the Beiruti areas held by the [Muslim] Progressives.”
⁴⁸
Lina quickly recognized that the Syrians were not supporting the Maronites in their own right so much as using the Maronites as a means to extend their own domination over Lebanon.