Beirut’s Water, Power, Phones Targeted : Syrians Smashing Key Facilities, Christian Spokesman Says

Syrian artillery is systematically smashing the public facilities of East Beirut, a leader of the Christian militia forces said here Wednesday.

“It’s very accurate shelling,” said Richard Jreissati, a top spokesman for the 10,000-member Lebanese Forces. “They’re going after the infrastructure, the gas tanks, water supplies, telephone centers.

“It’s hell,” he said. “We’ve never had this sort of shelling before.”

Jreissati said he came to Nicosia to try to re-establish overseas phone communications. International calls from Lebanon were knocked out earlier in the week when a shell hit Beirut’s telecommunications satellite station. Calls from the beleaguered capital can reach no farther than Cyprus.

“The power station ran out of fuel Sunday,” Jreissati went on. “There is no electricity anywhere in Beirut.” Nor is there any tap water, he said, because the shelling has crushed the water tanks in the Christian eastern sector.

About 250 civilians and soldiers have been killed in the five weeks of relentless artillery exchanges between the Christian forces and the Syrians and their Muslim militia allies.

According to reports from Beirut on Wednesday, only scattered shelling occurred Tuesday through Wednesday evening. Beirutis were dazed from long hours in impromptu shelters over a weekend of fearsome shelling.

“We don’t know if we will sleep in our beds or stay in shelters,” one Lebanese told a wire service reporter in the ravaged capital. “It’s nerve-racking.”

Hospital Ship

As the city got a tense breather, a French hospital ship arrived at the Cypriot harbor of Larnaca--90 miles from Beirut--with 78 Lebanese wounded, a majority of them Muslims. A military transport waited at Larnaca Airport to fly most of them to France. The rest were taken by ambulance to Cypriot hospitals.

A physician aboard the ship, the Rance, said most of the wounded had suffered injuries from artillery shrapnel and that a number of amputations were performed at sea. The Rance picked up 14 wounded Christians from the port of Juniyah over the weekend and took aboard the remainder, all Muslims, on Tuesday off the port of Sidon, 25 miles south of Beirut.

As the Rance arrived, a ferry from Juniyah was unloading more than 800 Christian refugees from the fighting. Thousands have fled the embattled Christian sector of East Beirut by ferry to Larnaca over the last two weeks.

The French take a special interest in Lebanon because they ruled it from the end of World War I until Lebanon’s independence in 1943.

Despite a chorus of international calls for a cease-fire and a political settlement of the heaviest sectarian fighting in Lebanon’s 14 years of civil war, peacemakers were making little visible progress. Kuwait’s foreign minister, Sheik Sabah al Ahmed al Sabah, who heads an Arab League committee attempting to establish a truce, said in Kuwait that an emergency meeting of the league’s foreign ministers set for Friday has been delayed until next week. Some of the ministers declared that they had prior commitments, he said.

“The postponement causes us regret,” Sabah said. “We had wanted it to be held at the earliest possible moment.”

The problems of Lebanon are reflected in a web of tenuous alliances among the Arab nations. “It’s not a Lebanese problem,” said Jreissati, the militia spokesman. “It’s a Syrian-Lebanese problem.”

Fighting began in mid-March when the Lebanese army commander, Gen. Michel Aoun, a Christian who heads a military government in East Beirut, moved to shut down the ports operated by Syrian-supported Muslim militias. Druze gunners responded with artillery fire on army strongholds, and within two weeks the Syrian forces joined in. Syria has about 40,000 troops in Lebanon, some in the capital but most in the Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border.

Facing the Syrian artillery, Aoun declared the fighting a battle to drive the Syrians out of Lebanon, an implicit call for foreign help for the Christians against the combined Muslim forces.

The Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia that had clashed with Aoun’s predominantly Christian army as recently as late February, threw in with Aoun to create an all-Christian front.

“I think the battle (with the Syrians) was inevitable,” Jreissati said. “They want to push our people out of the country so there will be no one to fight them. That’s what they think. It will not happen.

“We’ve held out for a month. We’re still holding out.”

Aoun, meanwhile, ridiculed the United States for not becoming more involved in Lebanon, accusing the Bush Administration of being afraid of Syria, Reuters news service reported from Beirut.

“When the United States says it cannot do anything against Syria, it means Syria is a superpower that frightens the United States,” the general told 1,000 Christians who marched to protest a cease-fire call by dovish members of Parliament.

Arab League Mandate

The Syrians have been deployed in Lebanon since 1976, when they entered the country under an Arab League mandate to make peace between the Christians and the Palestinians after the outbreak of the civil war. Jreissati estimated the total Syrian forces at 40,000, including 6,000 in West Beirut, which he said was an increase of more than 5,000 over the past month.

Since President Amin Gemayel’s term ended last year, Lebanon has been run by rival Christian and Muslim governments. Leading the Muslim Cabinet is Salim Hoss, who was premier under Gemayel. When Gemayel named Aoun premier, however, Hoss refused to step down.

Arrayed against the Syrians and their allies in the Lebanese Muslim militias are the Lebanese Forces’ 10,000 troops and Aoun’s estimated 15,000 soldiers, whose ranks, Jreissati claimed, are about 25% Muslim.

He said the Christian side remains well supplied with weapons and ammunition despite the heavy bombardment of Juniyah, its main port. “We’re OK,” the militia official said. “We have enough.”

Jreissati admitted that some of the arms had come from Iraq, a latecomer to the Lebanese conflict, motivated by its long-running rivalry with Syria.