Arabs (96 page)

In trying to prevent one crisis Aoun’s coup was creating another. As a Maronite Christian, he was ineligible for the premiership, which under the terms of the National Pact was reserved for Sunni Muslims. The man who claimed to be upholding the National Pact was actually undermining the foundations of Lebanon’s sectarian system. Yet at the eleventh hour—at a quarter to midnight, to be precise—Amin Gemayel succumbed to Aoun’s pressures and signed his last two executive orders. The first dismissed the caretaker cabinet of Selim al-Hoss, and the second appointed General Michel Aoun as head of an interim government. Al-Hoss and his supporters rejected Gemayel’s last-minute decrees and claimed the right to rule Lebanon.

Overnight, Lebanon went from being a country with no government to a country with two governments, with mutually incompatible agendas: al-Hoss sought to replace Lebanon’s confessional system with an open democracy that would favor the country’s Muslim majority, under Syrian trusteeship; Aoun hoped to reestablish the Lebanese state on the basis of the National Pact, preserving its Christian dominance, with total independence from Syria.

The rival governments split Lebanon into Christian and Muslim statelets. Few Christians were willing to serve in the al-Hoss cabinet, and no Muslims would participate in the Aoun government. Al-Hoss ruled over the Sunni and Shiite heartlands,
and Aoun over the Christian districts of Lebanon. There was an element of farce in the rivalry, as both leaders appointed their own heads of the military, security apparatus, and civil service. Only the Lebanese Central Bank withstood the pressures of duplication, though it found itself financing the expenditures of both governments.

The real danger came from outside patrons. Al-Hoss’s cabinet was openly supportive of Syria’s role in Lebanon and enjoyed the full backing of Damascus. Aoun condemned the Syrian presence in Lebanon as a threat to the sovereignty and independence of the country, and he gained Iraq’s full support. Baghdad was intent on settling scores with Damascus for having broken Arab ranks to side with Iran in the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War. Lebanon’s many feuds provided the Iraqi government with ample opportunity to punish Syria. With massive stores of weapons and ammunition, the Iraqi government was able to provide military assistance to Aoun in his opposition to Syria’s presence in Lebanon, especially after the Iran-Iraq War came to an end in August 1988.

So emboldened, Aoun declared a war of liberation against Syria on March 14, 1989. Syria’s army responded by imposing a total blockade over the Christian regions under Aoun’s rule. The two sides began to exchange lethal volleys of heavy artillery, causing massive destruction to Muslim and Christian districts of Lebanon and displacing tens of thousands of civilians in what proved the heaviest bombardment since the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut.

Two months of horrific fighting and heavy civilian casualties galvanized the Arab states into action. In May 1989, an Arab summit was convened in Casablanca, Morocco, to address the new crisis in Lebanon. The conference gave a mandate to three Arab heads of state, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, King Hassan II of Morocco, and President Chadli Benjedid of Algeria, to negotiate an end to the violence and set in process the restoration of stable government in Lebanon.

The three rulers, dubbed “the troika,” ordered Syria to respect a cease-fire and demanded that Iraq stop arms shipments to Aoun and the Lebanese Forces militia. The troika’s efforts met with little success at first. The Syrians ignored the troika’s demands and stepped up their bombardment of the Christian enclave, and Iraq continued to supply its allies through ports under the control of Syria’s Maronite opponents.

After six months of fighting, the troika finally persuaded all sides to observe a cease-fire in September 1989. The Arab leaders invited Lebanon’s parliamentarians to a meeting in the Saudi city of Taif to initiate a process of national reconciliation on neutral ground. The Lebanese deputies, all survivors of the election of 1972, ventured from their places of exile in France, Switzerland, and Iraq, or from their safe houses in Lebanon, to assemble in Taif to decide the future of their country. Sixty-two deputies attended the meeting—half of them Christians, the rest Muslims—providing
the necessary quorum to make decisions on behalf of the Lebanese state. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, convened the opening meeting on October 1, 1989, warning that “failure was forbidden.”

Success took longer than expected. What had been planned as a three-day conference turned into a twenty-three-day marathon that produced nothing less than the blueprint for Lebanon’s Second Republic. The terms of Lebanon’s political reconstruction, enshrined in the Taif Accord, preserved many of the elements of the confessional system set out in the National Pact but modified the structure to reflect the demographic realities of modern Lebanon. Thus, seats in parliament were still distributed among the different religious communities, but the distribution had been changed from a 6:5 ratio that favored the Christian communities to an equal division of seats between Muslims and Christians. The number of seats in parliament was increased from 99 to 108 so that the expansion of Muslim representatives could be achieved without any decrease in Christian seats.

The reformers failed in their primary objective of opening political office to all citizens without distinction by religion. It soon became apparent that such an assault on the confessional order would not gain consensus. The compromise solution was to preserve the distribution of offices as set out in the National Pact but to redistribute the
powers
of those offices. The president would remain a Maronite Christian, but the office was reduced to the more ceremonial role of “head of state and symbol of unity.” The prime minister and the cabinet, known as the Council of Ministers, were the main beneficiaries of the redistribution of power. Executive authority would now lie with the Sunni premier, who would chair the cabinet meetings and was charged with implementation of policy. Moreover, although the president still named the prime minister, only the parliament had the power to dismiss the premier. The speaker of the parliament, the highest post allowed for a Shiite Muslim, was also given important new powers by the Taif reforms, including a “kingmaker” role in advising the president on the appointment of the prime minister. With these changes, the Maronites could claim to have preserved their key offices, while Muslims could claim to hold more powers than the Christians. As a reform measure, the Taif Accord provided a compromise that all parties could accept, even if it left all dissatisfied.

Aoun’s supporters failed in their bid to force Syria from Lebanon through the Taif Accords. The troika found Hafiz al-Asad unwilling to compromise on Syria’s position in Lebanon, and recognized that an accord would be meaningless without Syria’s support. The Taif Accord gave formal thanks to the Syrian army for past services rendered, legal recognition to Syrian troops currently stationed in Lebanon, and left it to the Lebanese and Syrian governments to agree among themselves when to terminate the Syrian military presence in Lebanon at some unspecified point in
the future. The Taif Accord also called on the governments of Lebanon and Syria to formalize their “privileged relationships in all fields” through bilateral treaties. In short, the accord gave legal sanction to Syria’s position in Lebanon and bound the two countries closer together. The Lebanese politicians assembled in Saudi Arabia recognized the realities of their position and accepted a compromise solution in the hope of achieving better in the future. The final draft of the accord was approved by the Lebanese deputies in Taif without opposition.

The announcement of the Taif Accord set off the final round of fighting in war-torn Lebanon. From his battered enclave in the Christian highlands, General Aoun persisted in his claim to be the sole legitimate government of Lebanon. He rejected the accord outright for the legal cover it gave to Syria’s presence in Lebanon. He issued a presidential decree dissolving the Lebanese parliament in a bid to prevent the implementation of the Taif Accord, but to no avail. Aoun was now isolated at home and abroad as both the Lebanese and the international community put their support behind the framework for national reconciliation in Lebanon.

In a bid to forestall Aoun’s challenge, the deputies hastened back to Beirut to ratify the Taif Accord. On November 5 the Lebanese parliament formally approved the accord and proceeded to elect the sixty-four-year-old deputy from Zghorta, René Moawad, as president of the republic. Scion of a respected Maronite family from the north, Moawad was a consensus candidate who enjoyed the support of both Lebanese nationalists and the Syrians. Yet Moawad had dangerous enemies. On his seventeenth day in office, the new president of Lebanon was assassinated by a powerful roadside bomb detonated as he returned home from Lebanese Independence Day celebrations. Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Michel Aoun were all accused of the murder, but those responsible for Moawad’s assassination have never been brought to justice.

Moawad’s brutal murder risked provoking the collapse of the Taif process—as his assassins no doubt intended. The Lebanese parliament reconvened within forty-eight hours to elect a replacement before Moawad’s death could set back the reconstruction process agreed to in Taif. The Syrian authorities were even quicker than the Lebanese parliamentarians in finding a replacement for Moawad. Radio Damascus announced Elias Hrawi as the new president before the Lebanese deputies had put his nomination to the vote.
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By this deliberate gaffe, the Asad regime made clear to all that ultimate authority over Lebanon in the Taif era remained with Syria.

One of President Hrawi’s first acts would be to take on Michel Aoun, now widely recognized as a renegade and an impediment to Lebanon’s political reconciliation. The day after his election, Hrawi dismissed Aoun as commander of the army and ordered him to withdraw from the presidential palace in Baabda within forty-eight hours. Ignoring Hrawi’s command, Aoun turned to his Iraqi patrons for resupply, securing arms, ammunition, and antiaircraft defenses through his own port near
Beirut to reinforce his position against outside attack. The human shield surrounding Aoun—thousands of his civilian supporters camped out around the presidential palace in Baabda in a festival atmosphere—proved the greatest deterrent to Hrawi in facing down Aoun’s defiance.

The Lebanese president did not have to take any action. Rivalries between Aoun and the Maronite Lebanese Forces militia turned into open conflict when the Lebanese Forces commander Samir Geagea declared his support for the Taif Accord in December 1989. Geagea, like Aoun, was supplied by the Iraqis. In January 1990, the rival factions went to war in fighting more intense than at any time since the outbreak of the civil war. Iraqi rockets, tanks, and heavy artillery were deployed with utter disregard for the safety of noncombatants in heavily populated neighborhoods, inflicting heavy civilian casualties. The fighting continued for five months before a tenuous cease-fire between the rival Christian factions was mediated by the Vatican, in May 1990.

Though he faced isolation and growing opposition, Michel Aoun took some satisfaction in knowing that his battle with the Lebanese Forces had, for the moment at least, derailed the Taif Accord.

 

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 proved the watershed in the Lebanese conflict. At war once again, Iraq could no longer afford to arm its Lebanese clients. Moreover, Saddam Hussein’s attempt to link Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait to a general resolution of regional problems, including the Syrian “occupation” of Lebanon, was a transparent bid to divert international pressure onto Syria to withdraw from Lebanon.

The Syrians were far too adept at regional politics to succumb to Saddam Hussein’s ploy. Hafiz al-Asad was using the Kuwait crisis to improve Syrian relations with Washington, and Washington fully supported the Taif Accord. Al-Asad thus decided to give his government’s full support to implementing the Taif framework and cast Iraq’s ally Michel Aoun as the main obstacle to peace. The Lebanese and Syrians conferred, and on October 11 President Hrawi formally requested Syrian military assistance, under the terms of the Taif Accord, to oust General Aoun. Two days later, Syrian aircraft began the bombardment of Aoun’s positions while Syrian and Lebanese Army tanks advanced into territory held by Aoun’s forces. Within three hours, General Aoun had capitulated and sought asylum in the French Embassy while his partisans continued the struggle. The fighting—often very intense—was over within eight hours. When the smoke cleared over the empty presidential palace in Baabda on October 13, the people of Lebanon enjoyed their first glimpse of a postwar world, if still under Syrian occupation.

It was only after the defeat of Michel Aoun that the postwar reconstruction envisaged by the Taif Accord could begin in earnest. In November 1990 the government
ordered all militias out of the capital, Beirut, and in December the army cleared the barricades separating Muslim West Beirut from Christian East Beirut, reuniting the city for the first time since 1984.

On Christmas Eve 1990, Omar Karami, brother of the assassinated reformist premier Rashid Karami, announced a new government of national unity. With thirty ministers, the cabinet was the largest in Lebanon’s history, and it integrated the leaders of nearly all the country’s main militias. The advantages of forming a government from the very warlords responsible for the worst atrocities of the conflict soon became apparent when the government decreed the disarmament of the militias—again, in accordance with the Taif Accord. The militias were given to the end of April 1991 to disband and surrender their weapons; in return, the government promised to integrate those militiamen who wished to serve in Lebanon’s army. However much the militia leaders might have objected, they did not oppose the government or resign from the cabinet.
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Only one militia was allowed to continue military operations: Hizbullah, which enjoyed Iranian and Syrian support, retained its weapons so that it could continue its resistance to the Israeli occupation in the south of Lebanon. The Shiite militia agreed to confine its operations to the territory Israel claimed as part of its South Lebanon “security zone,” which at any rate lay beyond the writ of the Lebanese government. Hizbullah would continue its jihad against the Israeli occupier, with growing sophistication and lethal effect.