‘A house of many mansions’

The long fuse of the civil war that exploded in Lebanon on April 13, 1975, was lit more than half a century earlier when the lands of the defeated Ottoman empire were parceled out to the victorious Western allies at the end of the First World War.

In 1920, the League of Nations granted Britain the mandate for the lands that would become Iraq, Jordan and — opening another disastrous chapter for the region — Palestine.

France was given control of the remaining Ottoman territories of the “Levant” and, in direct defiance of the wishes of the vast majority of the people of the region, created not one state but two: Syria and Lebanon.

The relationship of France with the predominantly Muslim region was anchored in its self-appointed role as protector of the Christian Maronites, an Eastern Catholic ethnoreligious group that for centuries had lived in relative isolation in the mountainous regions of Lebanon and Syria.

“From the 16th century onwards, France saw in the protection and the prosperity of the Maronites of Mount Lebanon a special calling for itself,” US diplomat David A. Korn wrote in a paper published in 1986 in the Chatham House journal The World Today.

When war broke out in 1860 between the Maronites and the Druze, another of the region’s ethnoreligious minorities, France came to the aid of the Christians, sending troops to Beirut. 

Under pressure from European states, the following year the Ottoman Empire created the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, an autonomous region with a Christian governor, as a protective homeland for the Maronites.

When France took over Ottoman Syria at the end of the First World War, “it promptly set about the business of creating a state for the Maronites,” wrote Korn, a former political officer at the US embassies in Beirut and Tel Aviv.

There was just one problem. The Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate was clearly too small to survive as a viable modern state. The French solution was “stretching the lines on the map to embrace areas to the north and south inhabited mainly by Sunni and Shiite Moslems and Druze.”

Makram Rabah, an assistant professor of history at the American University of Beirut, said the mandate system was “definitely a factor” in Lebanon’s subsequent troubled history, but not the only one.

“I believe that many of our tragedies are self-inflicted, simply because the Lebanese tend always to externalize problems, so they don’t really take responsibility for what’s happening,” he said.

Nevertheless, the creation of Greater Lebanon by France got the artificially conceived state off to a shaky, bloody start that set the pattern for the decades of sectarian conflict to come.

In 1919, an American commission appointed by US President Woodrow Wilson, concerned about the postwar imperialist ambitions of Britain and France, assessed the views and hopes of individuals and delegations in towns and villages across the former Ottoman regions.

As a result, on Aug. 28 that year the King-Crane Commission recommended to the postwar Paris Peace Conference that the predominantly Christian Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate should become a semiautonomous part of a large new Syrian state.

“For the sake of the larger interests, both of Lebanon and of Syria, then, the unity of Syria is to be urged,” the commission concluded. Its recommendation was ignored.

The Syrian National Congress, a gathering of Arab leaders from across the region that convened in Damascus beginning in May 1919, also wanted an independent Greater Syria state, to include both Palestine and Lebanon.

On July 2 the congress, “provided with credentials and authorizations by the inhabitants of our various districts, Moslems, Christians, and Jews,” passed a resolution asking the western powers that had gathered in Paris for the peace conference to grant “absolutely complete political independence for Syria” and “no separation of the southern part of Syria known as Palestine, nor of the littoral western zone, which includes Lebanon, from the Syrian country.”

It continued: “We desire that the unity of the country should be guaranteed against partition under whatever circumstances.”

It became clear, however, that Arab wishes would be ignored in Paris. Seeing no hope of support from the European powers, on March 8, 1920, the Syrian National Congress unilaterally declared the foundation of the Arab Kingdom of Syria, a constitutional monarchy. 

The man they chose as king was the Hashemite Prince Faisal bin Hussein, who during the war had led the Arab revolt in support of Britain against the Ottoman empire in the Hejaz, and had “striven so nobly for our liberation.”

The fledgling kingdom lasted just four months. Seasoned French troops, led by Gen. Henri Gouraud, defeated Syria’s impromptu army in a series of one-sided encounters, culminating in the final battle of Maysalun, 20 kilometers northwest of Damascus, on July 24, 1920.

Faisal was expelled from Syria and, in a classic piece of imperialist meddling, the British offered their former wartime ally a consolation prize: the throne of their newly invented Kingdom of Iraq.

On Sept. 1, 1920, in a ceremony conducted on the steps of the Pine House in Beirut, Gouraud, France’s first high commissioner of the Levant, proclaimed the creation of the state of Greater Lebanon.

In 1943, France declared both Lebanon and Syria to be independent. As Korn noted in 1986, a majority of Syrians had always “opposed separate status for Lebanon, and at the most would accept autonomy for Maronite Mount Lebanon within a Syrian state.”

Upon achieving independence in 1943, Syria “would gladly have undone the handiwork of French colonialism on its western border” but the French “gave the Syrians no chance to do so” — Lebanon’s independence was declared just a few hours ahead of Syria’s.

The leaders of the newly independent Lebanon embraced France’s colonial legacy, with detrimental results.

“When we got rid of the French high commissioner, we appointed a president in his stead who, rather than ruling with the rest of the constitutional institutions, decided to rule as a Lebanese high commissioner, and this was in itself a recipe for disaster because power corrupts,” said Rabah.

In 1943, in a bid to balance the many competing cultures and factions in a country that had been created by the French with little concern for its lack of historic or sectarian cohesion, the leaders of Lebanon’s Christian Maronites and Sunni Muslims agreed a “National Pact” designed to ensure that all 18 religious communities in the country were represented in government, the civil service and the military.

This established the principle that the president of Lebanon should always be a Maronite Catholic, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the deputy prime minister a Greek Orthodox Christian, the speaker of the parliament a Shiite Muslim, and the chief of the general staff of the armed forces a Druze. The pact also determined that there should be a 6:5 ratio of Christians to Muslims and Druze in parliament.

“The 1943 National Pact was not a proper power-sharing formula,” said Rabah. “It was just an arrangement between two gentlemen who belonged to the political elite. They never actually cared about the peripheries, which were mixed religiously.”

Karim Bitar, a professor of international relations at Saint Joseph University of Beirut and a lecturer in Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, agreed that “the reason why the 1943 National Pact failed to properly redress the imbalance is that it was ‘unity’ imposed from above, just like in 1920 when the French proclaimed the state of Greater Lebanon.

“Even when Lebanon got its independence in 1943, it was the result of an agreement at the top between (the country’s first president, Christian Maronite leader) Bechara El-Khoury and (its first prime minister, the Sunni leader) Riad Al-Solh, and it failed to build cohesion from below.”

Worse still, this framework, which handed Christians control of the government and parliament, was based on an already out-of-date 1932 census. In time, shifting demographics would further undermine the credibility of the arrangement and its acceptability to certain groups who felt increasingly underrepresented.

In his 1968 book “The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon”, Michael Hudson, who in 2010 would become the first director of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore, presciently wrote: “The great difficulty with the Lebanese political system was that it became inappropriate for this developing society. It was too static to accommodate the enormous social and political forces unleashed by social mobilization.”

As time passed, the proportion of the population that was Christian declined while Muslim numbers increased, and another of the seeds of the civil war was sown.

Two lines written in the early 20th century by the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran summed up Lebanon’s seemingly intractable dilemma and presaged the horrors to come: “Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion … Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.”

There were, said Bitar, “many reasons” for the civil war that erupted in Lebanon in 1975.

“People often say that the main issue was the Palestinian presence. But one should also not underestimate the fault lines within Lebanese society that were not merely sectarian fault lines but were also social, economic and regional divides,” he explained.

“The fact that Lebanon was unable to build a strong, inclusive state that would protect all its citizens, regardless of their sect, regardless of where they lived, was also one of the reasons.”

As a result, “Lebanon’s militias across all sects tended to find their members in the disenfranchised, abandoned, peripheral rural areas.”

Nevertheless, the shifting demographics that ultimately would undermine the stability of Lebanon’s power-sharing arrangement were accelerated dramatically by the fallout from the 1967 Six Day-War, as a result of which large numbers of Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters took refuge in Jordan and, ultimately, in southern Lebanon.

The PLO, said Rabah, “were thrown in our lap.” 

During talks between the organization’s leader, Yasser Arafat, and Lebanese army commander Emile Bustani, arranged by Egyptian President Gamal Nasser in Cairo in November 1969, an agreement was reached that allowed the PLO to operate in Lebanon and launch attacks on Israel from the southeast of the country.

Founded in Jerusalem in June 1964, the PLO had relocated after the 1967 war to Jordan, from where it continued its attacks against Israel. By 1970, however, it had outstayed its welcome in the Hashemite kingdom; the final straw for King Hussein was the hijacking by the PLO in September 1970 of three aircraft, which were forced to land in Jordan.

Over the next 10 months, the Jordanian Armed Forces fought the PLO to a standstill, at the cost of hundreds of lives on both sides. By July 1971 the last of the PLO fighters had been driven out of Jordan and, given safe passage through Syria, regrouped in southern Lebanon.

Yet another of the seeds of civil war had been sown.

“Ultimately, we opened the front door for the PLO,” said Rabah. “To be fair, I don’t think the PLO or the Lebanese ever thought Jordan 1970 would happen — the PLO would always be a Jordanian problem. But overnight it became a Lebanese problem.”

The 1969 Cairo Agreement was voted on and approved by the Lebanese parliament because, Rabah said, at that time “everyone had a reason. The Muslims did not want to say no to Nasser and did not want to say no to the Palestinians. The Christian politicians had presidential elections in 1970 and did not want to lose the Muslim vote. And Lebanese allies of the Palestinians genuinely wanted the revolution to work out of Lebanon.”

Lebanon had remained out of the Six-Day War between Arab nations and Israel in 1967 but it could not avoid the consequences. PLO fighters were welcomed as heroes by many of the tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees already in the country, whose families had fled their homes during the occupation of Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948. Is it possible that without the presence of the PLO the civil war might not have happened?

“Well, for me, there was a powder keg and the Palestinians were a detonator,” said Rabah. “But I think something else would have happened, because the elements for the disaster were brewing over a number of years.”

By 1975, many other factors had conspired to push Lebanon to the brink of civil war, including a socioeconomic crisis in which wealth was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a privileged few sectarian political dynasties.

From the early 1950s to the early 1970s Beirut had enjoyed a renaissance. It had become a center of Arab culture and, as “the Paris of the Middle East,” a destination for the rich and famous, where Western film stars mingled with royalty at the seafront St. Georges Hotel.

Beneath the surface, however, tensions between the Christian and Muslim communities were mounting, exacerbated by what Lebanese historian and author Fawwaz Traboulsi described as “class, sectarian and regional inequalities,” and a rampant cost-of-living crisis.

Between 1967 and 1975, the cost of living doubled and, amid a flurry of real-estate speculation, rents soared as affordable properties were replaced by luxury apartments, about 50,000 of which in Beirut alone were empty on the eve of the civil war, according to Traboulsi. Meanwhile, “successive waves of migrants from the rural areas crammed into shantytowns and squats, taking over entire suburbs.”

Just as it had avoided direct involvement in the Six-Day War against Israel in 1967, so Lebanon also kept out of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War but, once again, could not escape the fallout.

That year, the Lebanese army had already clashed with the PLO, now firmly established in Lebanon as almost a state within the state, but the stark divisions in society really became apparent when demonstrations broke out among leftist groups and students in support of Egypt and Syria’s war on Israel.

From his vantage point as the State Department’s director for Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, Korn, the US diplomat, succinctly summarized the “profoundly disquieting changes” that had overtaken Lebanon by the eve of its civil war.

“The PLO progressively usurped Lebanese authority and took over the functions of government in most of southern Lebanon,” he wrote.

“Israeli raids in the south destroyed the authority of traditional Shiite leaders — the men who played the game of Lebanese politics and had a stake in the system — and sent hundreds of thousands of Shiite peasants in flight northward to the slums of Beirut, where they quickly became radicalized.”

Lebanese Christians, meanwhile, “lost hope that their army and government would be able to protect them from the armed might of the Palestinians and their Lebanese Moslem and leftist allies. In their desperation, the Christians began training and equipping militias of their own,” Korn added.

“Once this process was launched, it became only a matter of time before the various armed camps would clash.”

The clash came on April 13, 1975, and, once unleashed, the civil war escalated rapidly and brutally. In 1975, the St. Georges Hotel found itself catapulted from the gossip columns of Western newspapers to the news pages as one of the buildings ravaged during the so-called “Battle of the Hotels” in Beirut.

A seemingly unstoppable series of tit-for-tat massacres began. In 1976 alone, Phalangist Christians killed hundreds of Palestinians in Karantina in northeastern Beirut, and in retaliation the PLO attacked Damour, a Maronite town south of Beirut, massacring hundreds of Christians. In response, Christian militias assaulted the Tel Al-Zaatar refugee camp, killing at least 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians.

And so it continued, drawing in other forces, the presence of which only complicated an already complex situation: Syrian troops, the Israeli army, Hezbollah, Israeli-backed militias, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (which has remained in the country ever since), and joint US-French-Italian multinational forces.

Massacres, bombings, assassinations and kidnappings became commonplace, and not without consequences. Bomb attacks in 1983 on the American embassy, a US Marines barracks and the headquarters of the French military contingent in Beirut led to the evacuation of multinational forces.

In the end, it fell to the Saudis to bring the various warring parties to the negotiating table. On Oct. 22, 1989, three weeks of talks in the Saudi resort of Taif between Muslim and Christian members of the Lebanese parliament concluded with an agreement on a national “reconciliation charter,” which declared that “abolishing political sectarianism is a fundamental national objective.”

That objective is yet to be achieved. Bitar believes Lebanon’s sectarian dynamic “can be challenged and dismantled but this will require a very delicate and very smart approach. What was agreed upon at the Taif accord in 1989 was a first step that could have led towards a political system that would appease the existential angst of communities while progressively moving towards desectarianization.

“But Taif was not implemented. We were supposed to create a bicameral system with a senate, where communities would be represented, and we were supposed to move towards decentralization.

“These two steps would have alleviated the anguish of minorities and allowed us to implement what was also supposed to be part of Taif: desectarianization of the lower house, electing young men and women who would be focused on social and economic issues, while the Lebanese political dinosaurs who want to talk purely about community rights would be sent to the Senate. The Senate would have had a veto right on certain issues but the parliament itself would have moved beyond sectarianism.”

It would, said Bitar, be “wrong to regard Taif as a failed initiative. That would imply it was implemented but the truth is that there was a coup against Taif very rapidly, because the Syrians did not want to have it implemented and neither did Hezbollah.”

Another opponent of the deal was Maronite military leader Michel Aoun, whose appointment as prime minister the previous year had been widely contested. He denounced those who signed the agreement as traitors and, in the fighting that ensued between his troops and the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia, much of Christian East Beirut was destroyed.

Aoun’s revolt — and, finally, the civil war itself — ended on Oct. 13, 1990, when Syrian troops attacked the presidential palace in Baabda, driving Aoun into exile in France.

After 15 years and six months, the war was over at last. More than 150,000 people had been killed, hundreds of thousands had been displaced from their homes and an estimated 250,000 had emigrated, many never to return.