Lebanese Civil War

Lebanese Civil War, conflict from April 1975 to October 1990 pitting the many ethnic and religious groups of Lebanon against one another. In the course of the 15-year war, an estimated 130,000 to 200,000 Lebanese were killed and the Lebanese economy was crippled. The country was occupied by Syrian, Israeli, and Palestinian forces, as well as Iranian military advisers. United Nations forces, as well as soldiers from the United States, Great Britain, Italy, and France also intervened in Lebanon. Eventually, most of the Middle East’s religious, political, and nationalist factions played some part in the war. As a result of the war, the country’s political system was changed to give more power to Lebanon’s Muslim majority.

The roots of Lebanon’s civil war lie in the country’s ethnic and religious mix at the time of independence from France in 1943. Maronite Christians were the largest single group, followed by Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Druzes. Upon independence, Lebanon’s most powerful groups, the Maronites and Shia Muslims, created a power-sharing formula called the National Pact. The National Pact required that the president be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, the speaker of the parliament a Shia, and his deputy a Greek Orthodox. The pact also stipulated that the 55-member assembly have a ratio of 6 Christian members to 5 Muslim members, but each group have enough power to veto the policies of any other group. In time, a similar balance of power was replicated in the government bureaucracy and the Lebanese army. Because the National Pact established a distribution of power based on religious beliefs, or confessions, the form of government it created has often been called “confessional democracy.”

The pact’s creators hoped that because no group was powerful enough to threaten the interests of another, all groups would need to cooperate to set national policy. Similarly, since each group was guaranteed representation in parliament and the cabinet in advance of elections, no group would fear exclusion from government. Many political scientists praised this innovative confessional democracy for combining democratic features with power-sharing elements that tamed the potentially disruptive effects of having multiple religious and ethnic groups.

From the start, however, there was evidence of confessional democracy’s problems. Rather than defusing religious identities, the National Pact focused attention on them. It also left political power in the hands of the same elite families who held power under the French, especially Maronite families, who were well-represented in the upper echelons of colonial Lebanon. Moreover, the pact included no provisions to change the balance of power if the country experienced demographic shifts, or if the popularity of groups or leaders changed. This flaw would eventually prove fatal. By the early 1960s Muslims had become a majority, but most formal political power remained in Christian hands. Furthermore, the system worked only so long as the leaders of each faction did not seek support from regional powers like Israel, Syria, or Iran. Any effort by one group to forge foreign alliances was bound to threaten the interests of another group and undermine the National Pact’s delicate balance.

In the late 1950s pan-Arabism became increasingly widespread. Egypt and Syria joined to form the short-lived United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958. In addition, most Arab states were united in their opposition to the Jewish state of Israel, which had formed on Lebanon’s southern border in 1948. Lebanon’s Maronite Christian president Camille Chamoun maintained a largely pro-Western stance on these and other regional issues, which led to his isolation in the mostly Arab Middle East. Chamoun grew increasingly intolerant of his Christian rivals and the Muslim opposition. As he neared the end of his term in 1957, Chamoun provoked other political leaders into an unconstitutional ploy to gain a second term. The resulting tensions were exacerbated by regional stresses, and in May 1958 civil war erupted. Partly at Chamoun’s urging but also because of other regional crises such as a coup in Iraq, the United States landed more than 14,000 troops in Lebanon in July. The war ended three weeks later with an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 Lebanese dead.

In June 1967 Israel defeated Arab forces in the Six-Day War and occupied many areas beyond its borders. Large numbers of Palestinian Arabs fled to Lebanon, and with them came armed militias of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Many other Palestinians fled to Jordan, where the PLO had established a quasi-state on the border with Israel. As the power of the PLO grew, Jordan’s King Hussein became increasingly alarmed. In 1970 he waged a small-scale war to evict the PLO from Jordan, and another wave of Palestinian refugees and PLO militias fled to Lebanon.
The situation in Lebanon was volatile. Although Muslims had become the majority in the early 1960s, Christians retained military and other power. With the arrival of the heavily armed PLO, the balance of military power threatened to tip toward the Muslims and Arab nationalists. The Christian government, guaranteed power by the National Pact, was not inclined to change the pact, nor was it inclined to allow the Muslim militias to have de facto power. Largely as a result, a militia of the Christian Phalange faction attacked Palestinians in East Beirut on April 13, 1975, touching off Lebanon’s civil war.

During the first few years of the war, the conflict revolved around the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), a Druze force led by Kamal Jumblat; and the Lebanese Front, a Maronite force led by Chamoun. Each side joined forces with other militias. The LNM joined with the PLO and other Muslims, and the Lebanese Front allied with Christian militias. The militias received many of their weapons by seizing them from the rapidly disintegrating Lebanese army.

The LNM sought the abolition of the National Pact, while the Lebanese Front said it would consider the proposal, but only after the PLO was expelled from Lebanon. As the PLO was the chief military ally of the LNM, the LNM refused the Christian offer and instead made several attacks on Christian forces. Syrian president Hafez al-Assad feared if the Muslim LMN won the war, Israel might invade Lebanon, touching off a wider Arab-Israeli war. In 1976 Assad sent Syrian troops to Lebanon to intervene on the side of the Christian Lebanese Front.

The Syrian troops succeeded in imposing order, giving Lebanon a brief respite from war. While the war was on hold, the PLO made several attacks on Israel from its bases in Lebanon, provoking Israel to invade Lebanon in March 1978. The Israelis threw their support behind Bashir Gemayel, a leader of one of the Christian factions. Gemayel consolidated his control over rival Christians and established a Christian ministate. This shift in power prompted Syria to switch its allegiance from the Christians to the National Liberal Party, a mostly Muslim, pro-Palestinian, and well-armed group. The conflict intensified in April 1981, when Israel shot down two Syrian helicopters. Many observers feared a full-scale Syrian-Israeli war might erupt, prompting the United States to negotiate a cease-fire among Israel, Syria, and the PLO. Israel withdrew in June but left a pro-Israel Christian militia in control of the area.

After the cease-fire, the PLO again made strikes against Israel, and in June 1982 Israel retaliated by bombing Lebanon. The bombing inflicted heavy damage on the PLO’s militias, many of whom fled the country as Israel invaded and advanced on Beirut. With Israel’s support, Bashir Gemayel, a Christian, was elected president in August, but three weeks later he was killed by a bomb. Many Western governments believed Syria was responsible for the assassination. Partly in response, the Israeli-supported Phalange militia, with Israeli knowledge, massacred an estimated 800 to 1,500 Palestinian refugees in September. After a large international outcry, an Israeli commission reprimanded its leaders for failing to prevent the massacre. Bashir was replaced by his brother, Amin Gemayel, who in May 1983 concluded a peace treaty with Israel. The treaty provoked a violent backlash from Druze and PLO forces. With Syrian support they attacked the Phalange militia and Lebanese army, which had jointly occupied parts of the country.

The Druze-PLO attack and the assassination of Bashir Gemayel raised concerns in Israel, France, and the United States that the Christians might be totally isolated. In mid-1983 the United States and France shelled the Druze-PLO forces, and by September, U.S. and French troops were stationed in Beirut. A month later, a truck bomb killed 241 U.S. troops and 58 French troops in their barracks, prompting the United States to shell Muslim forces in February 1984. Rather than weaken the Muslims, however, this second U.S. intervention encouraged greater cooperation between the Druze and the increasingly powerful Shia militia known as AMAL (Afwaj al-Muqawimah al-Lubnaniyya, or Lebanese Resistance Movement). Together, they drove the Christian forces from West Beirut, prompting the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Beirut in February. The remaining Western forces withdrew shortly thereafter.

With the departure of U.S. troops and the defeat of the Israeli-backed Christian government, Syria compelled President Amin Gemayel to nullify the Lebanese-Israeli peace treaty. In March 1984 Syria pressured Lebanon’s Christian and Muslim leaders to form a government of national reconciliation. Syria’s attempts to impose order in Lebanon, while somewhat successful, were undermined by some of its other policies, especially its policy regarding Iran. Syria received financial and military support from Iran to reinforce the Shia militias in southern Beirut. These militias, inspired by the Islamic Revolution of Iran (1979), had grown in power and prestige as thousands of Shia refugees fled southern Lebanon for southern Beirut. Iran dispatched members of its Revolutionary Guard to train the Shias, who quickly became more loyal to Iran than Syria. As a result, Syria had difficulty establishing a pro-Syrian government in Lebanon; and the Shia community itself became sharply divided on whom to support: the more secular Syrians or the more religious Iranians.

In the spring of 1988 fighting broke out between Hezbollah, a staunchly pro-Iranian Shia group, and the more moderate AMAL. To prevent the fighting from spreading, Syrian president Assad and U.S. secretary of state George Shultz met and drew up a plan for political reform in Lebanon, but the plan foundered when the Lebanese parliament could not agree on a compromise leader. In October General Michel Aoun, the interim prime minister, responded to the chaos by forming his own, pro-Christian cabinet and launching what he called a “war of liberation” against the Syrian occupiers. However, his troops first warred against his Christian rivals, many of whom feared Aoun’s war would unify all the Muslim militias in Lebanon against the Christians. This fear proved to be well founded when, in August 1989, several Muslim groups, supported by Syria, formed an anti-Aoun coalition.

From September 30 to October 22, 1989, most of the remaining members of the Lebanese parliament met in Ţā’if, Saudi Arabia, to debate a proposal for political reform drafted by the Arab League. The result was the National Reconciliation Charter, commonly known as the Ţā’if Agreement. The Ţā’if Agreement recognized that Christians no longer formed a majority of the population and stipulated that Christians and Muslims would have an equal number of seats in parliament, which were increased from 99 to 108 (and later to 128). The agreement left the presidency as a Christian position. Because Muslims were critical of a Christian presidency, the Lebanese government that formed after the Ţā’if Agreement amended the constitution to lessen presidential authority. As a result, the president was required to consult the speaker of the National Assembly (a Shia Muslim) before naming a prime minister (a Sunni Muslim), and the president’s power to dismiss ministers was transferred to the cabinet.

Aoun rejected these changes and launched another rebellion in 1990. Syria, however, quickly suppressed his attacks, thus ending the civil war in October 1990, and set about rebuilding the Lebanese army and imposing political reform. To ensure their political domination of Lebanon, Syria had earlier secured the election of Elias Hrawi as president and, in 1992, the selection of Rafik al-Hariri as prime minister. Both men proved to be dependable allies of Syria. With Syrian support, parliamentary elections were held in September 1992 despite a Christian boycott. Although Syria’s presence largely prejudiced the elections, the elections were relatively peaceful and thus viewed positively by many outside observers.

An estimated 130,000 to 200,000 Lebanese died in the war and tens of thousands fled the country. The financial costs were staggering, draining Lebanon of an estimated $25 billion to $30 billion in lost property and revenues. After the war, Lebanon faced the challenge of reconstructing its economy and remedying the stark social and economic inequalities that existed before the war and were exacerbated by it. Lebanon was also left to contend with its new political system, which, although reformed, still allocated power through religious and ethnic quotas similar to the quotas that prompted the civil war.

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