A Little Fighting, Then a Return to Normal Life : Battle for Sidon a Curious Kind of War

A young militiaman with an impish face stood amid a litter of empty cartridge cases in the rubble of an unfinished apartment building, playfully waving his arms like an orchestra conductor to the sound of mortar- and automatic-rifle fire.

His name, he said, is John, and he is 16 years old. For most of his life, people have been shooting at one another here in southern Lebanon.

Three weeks before, John was a high school student. But now, along with two classmates, he was manning an observation post on the front line in the latest fighting, which broke out on the outskirts of Sidon in mid-March.

All three youths were armed with assault rifles. John’s was a Soviet-made Kalashnikov with a picture of Jesus taped to the stock. He said he has had some kind of firearm since he was 13.

John and his friends are fighting with the so-called Lebanese Forces, an organization of Christian militias that joined under the late Bashir Gemayel as the military arm of the Christian Falangist Party.

“I’m fighting everyone who is trying to take my country,” John said. “As Bashir died for Lebanon, I’m ready to die, too.” He pointed to the picture on the stock of his rifle, and added: “And for this--I’m ready to suffer for Lebanon as he (Jesus) suffered.”

A few hundred yards away, in predominantly Muslim central Sidon and in the Palestinian refugee camps of Ein el Hilwa and Miye ou Miye, people say that Christians in the villages like Hililea, in the hills just east of Sidon, started the latest round of fighting. According to reports from Sidon, at least 60 people, most of them Palestinian refugees, were killed last weekend by Christian artillery, rocket-propelled grenades and rifle fire.

Proxies for Israelis?

Some Lebanese officials, among them Shia Muslim leader Nabih Berri, charge that the Christians are acting as proxies for the departing Israeli forces, trying to drive anti-Israeli Shia Muslims and others farther from the border.

The Christians say they came under harassment by Palestinian-backed Muslims in Sidon soon after the Israeli troops evacuated the city last Feb. 16 in the first stage of the Israelis’ planned withdrawal from Lebanon.

Nazar Nazarian, the regional commander of the Lebanese Forces, said in an interview that about 2,000 Palestine Liberation Organization fighters have returned to the Sidon camps and are “doing everything possible to return in a strong way, politically and militarily, to southern Lebanon.”

“We are defending our presence in the area,” Nazarian said, and he added that “to this point” the Israelis are not involved.

Whoever started it, the battle of Sidon has evolved into the kind of urban warfare that has become commonplace in Lebanon. Citizen-soldiers may fight for a day or two, then go off a few miles and resume relatively normal lives in another village. A front-line position may be a stylish apartment in a multistory building, with bearded young men in battle fatigues darting past posh furniture to firing positions at windows overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

Urban Areas, Not Villages

What the Lebanese call villages are actually urban neighborhoods. A string of such villages stretches up the hill east of Sidon. Hililea, at the fighting front, is virtually empty of people except for fighting men. But two miles away in Majdel Youn, children play in the streets and people go about their business seemingly unaware of the almost-constant firing down the hill in Sidon.

Even here, one Christian family has refused to leave, though their building has twice been hit by mortar fire.

“My daughter doesn’t want to leave, so I was obliged to come and be by her side,” one of the occupants, a wholesale food distributor, said.

And his daughter put in: “I’m not going to be like the Palestinians--leaving my home and becoming a refugee.”

They are the only residents still in the building, the man said, as a Filipina maid served coffee to a group of Lebanese Forces soldiers and foreign journalists. The apartment was richly furnished with antiques and Oriental carpets.

Asked how he manages, in light of the fighting, the man said, “I read all the time.” At the moment he was reading a French-language edition of “The Spy Who Came From Israel.”

In Majdel Youn, another apartment had been turned into Nazarian’s command post. Nazarian, 28, was using a bedroom for his office; the living room had been turned into a reception center and dormitory for his men.

Nazarian said the great majority of the Christian fighters here are local residents and that only “10 or 15 people” from the Lebanese Forces are on hand to provide “technical assistance.”

‘So Many of Them’

According to Nazarian, his casualties have included seven dead and 15 wounded since the fighting began. Asked why the casualties were so much higher on the other side, in Sidon, an aide responded, “There are so many more of them that when we shoot a bullet we must hit something.”

Nazarian said the fighting erupted March 18, when three Christians were kidnaped in Sidon. Armed Christians went looking for them and were fired on by units of the Lebanese army, which had moved into the area when the Israelis left in February.

He said the special, Muslim-Christian-Lebanese army battalion sent to Sidon was dominated by radical Muslims, who have joined the Palestinian-backed local Muslim militias against his Christians. He said that two Christian churches in Sidon were looted and burned a few days ago.

“Because we have been attacked by the Palestinians and by the proxies of the Palestinians, we Christians decided to defend ourselves,” Nazarian said. The 70,000 Christians living in the villages east of Sidon “don’t want to go back to the pre-1982 situation when they were ruled by the Palestinians in the area,” he said.

The Israelis invaded for the express purpose of destroying the PLO in southern Lebanon, though it later became clear that Ariel Sharon, who was Israel’s defense minister at the time, had more ambitious plans, including installation of a friendly Lebanese Christian government, under Bashir Gemayel, that would make peace with Israel.

Nazarian said he backs Samir Geagea, the rebel Christian militia chief, in his political struggle with the current Lebanese Christian leadership headed by President Amin Gemayel. As the successor to his younger brother, Bashir Gemayel, who was assassinated in September, 1982, Amin Gemayel has tended toward greater cooperation with Syria, and this is opposed by Geagea and his followers.

Nazarian said it was a mistake for Lebanon to abrogate, under Syrian pressure, the May 17, 1983, agreement with Israel to end the Lebanon war, and he said some new arrangement must be made with Jerusalem. “We think Israel is a country that exists, and we cannot ignore the existence of Israel, especially because we have common borders,” he said.

Just down the road, John, the 16-year-old rifleman, told much the same story, though in simpler language.

“I want to get rid of them,” he said of the Palestinians. As for the Israelis, he said, “I would like that they would come back as friends. I think nobody cares about me like Sharon does.”