Lebanon's road to crisis

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THE religious or contessional divisions in Lebanon were enshrined in a political system, called the National Pact, in 1943.

The basic idea was that representation in the Assembly, and other state institutions to an extent, was specifically organised on a religios basis.

Seats in the Assembly were allocated to religious groups, supposedly in proportion to their numbers.

Particular positions were reserved for representatives of a particular religious community. For example, the President was to be a Maronite Christian.

Much praised as a paragon of democratic virtues by Western liberal commentators, this system was in reality a farce.

First of all it guaranteed for the Christians a majority of six to five and discriminated against the various Muslim communities who by the 1960s were a majority of the population.

Second, by deciding politics on a religious-sectarian basis, it reinforced the long-standing sectarian divide in Lebanese politics. Political party organising on political or ideological lines was more or less impossible, and the task of parties trying to span sectarian divisions was made extremely difficult.

Within each community political divisions developed of course, but the general pattern of politics was that traditional leaders vied with and allied with eachother to maintain control over their respective communities.

Such control was organised in an elaborate system of patronage generally based on traditional family or clan lines, and reinforced by mafia-like gang leaders.

In this situation the Lebanese state was extremely weak and regularly broke down.

In 1958 US Marines intervened to protect the Maronite Christian government of Camille Chamoun who was eventually replaced by President Shihab who attempted to strengthen the state apparatus, largely by strengthensecret police, the Deuxieme Bureau.

But with a weak state, real power tended to fall into the hands of various sectarian leaders.

The capitalist class itselt spanned the religious divide but its political power depended on the preservation of the old traditional loyalties and an alliance of the traditional leaders. There thus arose an extremely complex system of political control.

Two main factors caused its collapse. First were the internal contradictions. The extremes of social and political inequalitiy upon which the system was based. There is no doubt that the civil war which got underway in earnest in 1975 was an expression in a confused way, of the deep class divisions that exist in Lebanese society.

Second was the presence of nearly a million Palestinian refugees, and in particular the Palestinian guerrilla movement based on those refugees.

The Cairo Accords in 1969 gave the guerrillas the right to possess arms and control their INFORMATIONI BULLETIN own camps and after 1970, when the Palestinian resistance was driven out of Jordan, Lebanon became the major base.

The resistance developed close links with some of the more radical mainly-Muslim Lebanese political groups that had been influenced by the rise of radical Arab nationalism after World War Two. These groups were trained by Palestinian guerrillas.

Politically, Lebanese society polarised on the issue of the Palestinian presence. The Christian Maronites tended to be opposed to it; the Muslims tended to be in favour of it.

In addition many of the social tensions were increased by an influx of Lebanese Shi'a Muslims fleeing the Israeli raids in the By 1975, the economic crisis and social unrest were deepening.

The causes of the outbreak of violence included the suppression of the fishermen's strike in Sidon by the army, and shortly after a revenge attack by Phalangists on a Palestinian bus. By August the situation had worsened to ali-out civil war in which some 50,000 people were killed. Its roots were to be found in the oppressed within Lebanese society increasingly acting in alliance with the left Palestinian movement.

To maintain their political base, sections of the Muslim leadership identified with the revolt and attempted to gain control of it, to a degree successfully.

Phalange

Amongst the Christians it was the Phalange who were most effectively seen to be defending Maronite independence, as they saw it, against pan-Arabism.

The Lebanese National Movement, founded at the peak of the Civil War, grouped together Arab nationalists, Communists, and right wing organisations, such as the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. So from the outset it had a sectarian overtone. By 1976 the LNM had dropped its secular anti-sectarian programme in the face of the communal degeneration of the conflict, for which it saw no way out.

The conflict had degenerated into a sectarian bloodbath. People were often shot only because their names betrayed their religion (the Maronites tended to have French first names as a Gas masks during World War One THE use of a form of mustard THR "c0 nf o fram .f........, use by Germany lime... /Dim, through the aq