Lebanon’s New Crisis

Such national law as is still observed in Lebanon requires that a new president be chosen by the legislature before Aug. 23, and to that end most of the survivors from the parliament that was last elected in 1972 are preparing to convene in Beirut. As with everything else in Lebanese politics, this process is not going easily. Some bitterly unhappy legislators are threatening to boycott the session and so prevent the quorum needed for the election to occur. If Lebanon were not already in a state of civil war, this latest contest for the presidency could bring one on.

Is this yet another example of the seemingly endless Lebanese struggle for power that pits Christians against Muslims, or Sunnis against Shias? No. Not for the first time, this latest political crisis reflects the vicious antagonisms that have long divided the Maronite Catholic community, the largest of Lebanon’s Christian denominations and by unwritten 45-year-old agreement the group from which the president is chosen. At the age of 78, Suleiman Franjieh, a former president closely allied with Syria, has announced his candidacy. That has prompted anti-Syria right-wing Christians, among them the head of the powerful Lebanese Forces militia, to warn that they will do everything they can to keep him from again becoming president.

Franjieh headed Lebanon when civil war erupted in 1975, and it was he who a year later invited Syrian “peacekeeping” forces to intervene. In 1978 an attack by the Lebanese Forces on the Franjieh household killed the former president’s son, daughter-in-law and grandchild. The Lebanese Forces were led at the time by Bashir Gemayel, who was to be elected president in 1982 only to be killed almost immediately by an assassin’s bomb. Syria is widely believed to have been behind the Gemayel killing. Bashir’s brother Amin, now the outgoing president, also strongly opposes the Franjieh candidacy.

Syria’s army continues to control about 60% of Lebanon, and political realism leaves no doubt that the next president of the country must be acceptable to Damascus. There may be others within Maronite ranks of whom Syria would approve, but anti-Syria Christians would probably see those men also as stooges of a foreign power and oppose their selection as strongly as they oppose Franjieh’s. If the Lebanese Forces and other hard-liners mean what they say about trying to prevent any ally of Syria from becoming president, then the Maronite community could soon find itself even further divided, with its various militias again trying to further the political aims of their masters. Internecine warfare wasn’t invented in Lebanon, but nowhere else has it been more bewilderingly self-destructive.