Shultz Meets Gemayel, Sees Progress in Lebanon

Lebanon’s bitterly divided factions, negotiating through U.S. and Syrian intermediaries, have made some progress toward constitutional reforms intended to end 13 years of civil war, Secretary of State George P. Shultz said Friday after conferring with Lebanese President Amin Gemayel.

“Quite a few issues have been resolved, but there are issues remaining,” Shultz said following his hourlong meeting with Gemayel, who flew in from Beirut on a U.S. Army helicopter.

Shultz made an unannounced stop in Cyprus on his way home from a weeklong Middle East shuttle because war-torn Beirut is considered far too dangerous a place for a secretary of state to visit.

Will Return to Mideast

Earlier in the day, Shultz told a news conference in Amman, Jordan, that he would return to the Middle East in the next few weeks to continue his effort to bring Israel and its Arab antagonists to the negotiating table. He said he is determined to continue with the initiative, although he conceded that so far progress “is measured in inches.”

In many ways, the Lebanese civil war is a more intractable dispute than the Arab-Israel conflict that usually overshadows it. Shultz said the U.S.-Syrian mediation is aimed at increasing the political power of Lebanon’s under-represented Muslim population to create conditions in which disputes could be settled with ballots instead of bullets.

The purpose of Shultz’s meeting with Gemayel, who is coming to the end of a largely impotent six-year term, was more to inform than to negotiate. Shultz admitted that he was unable to report as much progress as he had hoped.

Serving as Surrogates

In effect, Washington and Damascus are serving as surrogates for Lebanon’s warring factions, which long ago stopped talking to each other. The United States is representing Christians, while Syria is representing Muslims.

Last month Gemayel, on behalf of Christian factions, gave U.S. diplomats a written negotiating position that was forwarded to Syrian President Hafez Assad. Shultz said he had hoped to obtain Assad’s written reply when he visited Damascus last Tuesday, but did not do so.

“A considerable amount of headway was made . . . but not to the point where we had another piece of paper (from Assad) to present to President Gemayel today,” Shultz said. “We had hoped we might get there, but we didn’t.”

April Glaspie, the State Department’s director of Lebanese, Jordanian and Syrian affairs, accompanied Gemayel back to Beirut. She plans to confer with Lebanese officials and then travel to Damascus for more talks with Syrian leaders.

The negotiations are aimed at updating Lebanon’s “national pact,” adopted in 1943, which allocates government posts by religious grouping. The allocations are based on a half-century-old census that showed Christians in a narrow majority. Today, Muslims are certainly the majority, with Shia Muslims by far the largest single group.

Under the pact, the president is a Maronite Christian, the premier is a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of Parliament is a Shia Muslim.

A senior U.S. official said the reforms would retain the religious division of the three top jobs but would eliminate the religious affiliation of most other posts. At present, almost all jobs--ranging from the Cabinet and Parliament to the army and civil service--are awarded in this fashion.

The official said there is a tentative agreement to split seats in Parliament evenly. Christians currently hold 55 of the 99 seats.

Time Running Out

U.S. officials said the reforms must be put into place before the election of Gemayel’s successor late this summer. Under Lebanese law, constitutional changes must be adopted during a regular session of Parliament. The last such session before the election winds up at the end of May.

“We want to see an election go off successfully,” Shultz said. “Successfully means that it is conducted, it has an outcome, and the outcome is recognized and is the basis for greater stability and authority for the government.”

Asked why Syria, which has long dominated Lebanese politics, should cooperate in strengthening the Lebanese government, Shultz said: “If there is a greater sense of national government in Lebanon, perhaps there will be greater stability. . . . The turmoil you see in Lebanon does not look good to any of its neighbors, including Syria.”

The U.S.-Syrian mediation effort represents an astonishing warming of Washington-Damascus relations, which were encrusted in ice less than a year ago. Last summer, the United States withdrew its ambassador to protest Syrian involvement in an unsuccessful terrorist attempt to plant a bomb on an Israeli airliner.

For Shultz, the change is even more remarkable. Shultz for years blamed Syria for torpedoing the May 17, 1983, agreement that he mediated between Israel and Lebanon that called for removal of both Israeli and Syrian troops from Lebanon. Because of his experience with the May 17 pact, Shultz appeared to be reluctant to plunge back into Middle East diplomacy until he launched his current initiative in February.

But Shultz now seems unwilling to say anything unflattering about Assad’s regime. Talking to reporters on his plane, he even seemed to absolve Syria for the breakdown of the May 17 agreement.

“The agreement didn’t hold, in part, because the Israelis withdrew without the basic terms of the agreement coming into play, and that pulled the rug out from under, you might say, the diplomatic strategy we had,” Shultz said. He did not mention that it was Syria that was primarily responsible for blocking the basic terms of the pact.