Arab League Presses for Cease-Fire in Beirut

Moving to halt an artillery war that has killed more than 250 people in Beirut in the past six weeks, the foreign ministers of the Arab League countries called Thursday for an immediate cease-fire and the reopening of blockaded Lebanese ports.

The ministers, meeting in Tunis, declared that the 22-nation Arab League will send observers to oversee the cease-fire, which would bring a halt to the most punishing fighting in Lebanon since the civil war began more than 14 years ago. The cease-fire was to take effect at noon today.

The Cabinet of Christian leader Michel Aoun issued a statement Thursday pledging to cooperate with the observer force. “It is a modest step in the right direction to lift the Syrian hegemony off Lebanon,” the statement said.

Syria ‘Satisfied’

Salim Hoss, who heads a rival Muslim Cabinet, issued a statement in West Beirut also pledging full cooperation. And in Damascus, the capital of Syria, the official Syrian Arab News Agency said that President Hafez Assad’s government is “satisfied with resolutions announced by the Arab League on Lebanon.”

The foreign ministers of the Arab countries met for nearly seven hours Thursday, in two sessions, before producing a statement on the divisive conflict that reaches beyond Lebanon’s borders in a web of Arab alliances. The statement did not disclose how many observers will be sent to the war-torn country, but it said they will be sent “without delay.” Press reports indicated that the observers will number 312.

The foreign ministers’ statement said the observers will be deployed in the ports and along the so-called Green Line that separates Muslim and Syrian forces from Christian forces in the capital. They will be commanded by a Kuwaiti officer, it said. Kuwait headed the six-nation Arab League committee that was appointed in January to seek a political settlement in Lebanon.

The observer mission will be funded at more than $3 million, the statement said, and is authorized for three months. The statement called for the blockade to be lifted for three months at all ports.

The fighting broke out in mid-March when Christian leader Aoun ordered the Lebanese army, which he commands as a major general, to shut down ports operated by Lebanon’s Muslim militias. Aoun said he was extending state authority over “illegal ports” that had diverted government revenues into militia hands. Earlier, he had moved to take over ports operated by the main Christian militia, the Lebanese Forces.

The question of who controls the ports and receives their revenues was underlined in Tunis by a remark by Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh, whose government supports the Muslim militias and has about 40,000 troops deployed in Lebanon, more than twice as many men as in Aoun’s Lebanese army.

“To declare a cease-fire is not to just take the finger off the trigger but to lift the blockade,” Shareh said.

The foreign ministers called on the league’s secretary general, Chadli Klibi, and Kuwait’s foreign minister, Sheik Sabah al Ahmed al Sabah, to name representatives to seek a “firm and definitive solution” to Lebanon’s problems.

Fighters Ready to Stop

While a political solution in Lebanon appears unlikely considering the bitterness and the divisions, the combatants in Beirut had appeared to be ready for a formal cease-fire.

“We will cooperate positively with the Arab force on the military side,” Aoun said in a statement broadcast by radio before the Tunis statement was issued. Hoss, his political counterpart on the Muslim side, announced that he, too, was prepared to accept the truce.

But any Arab League effort to build a cease-fire into a lasting political settlement in beleaguered Lebanon seemed likely to be ignored. Nabih Berri, head of the Syrian-aligned Shiite Muslim Amal militia, said this week that he was opposed to a return to the so-called confessional system that for more than 40 years has allotted top Lebanese government posts according to sectarian prerogatives. The president, for instance, has always been a Maronite Christian.

Berri not only opposed the cease-fire but declared that his Shiites, believed to be the largest sectarian group in the country, would never approve a continuation of the sectarian system, “even if the Syrians imposed it.”

Aoun has said that he agrees to the truce and observer force “as a necessary first step,” but only toward his goal of ejecting the Syrian army from the country. However, he has said he would support political reforms to give more power to Lebanon’s Muslims.

Most Lebanese analysts argue that a political solution can be achieved only after the leadership question is settled. Lebanon has been without a president since last September, when Amin Gemayel, a Maronite, completed his term. Under heavy sectarian pressure, the Parliament, which elects Lebanese presidents, was unable to assemble a quorum. Gemayel, out of office and without legal power, appointed Aoun to succeed him, naming him head of a military Cabinet based in Christian East Beirut.

The Muslims promptly rallied on sectarian lines and formed a rival Cabinet in West Beirut under Gemayel’s premier, Hoss. The division marked the firmest move yet toward the partition of Lebanon into Christian and Muslim states.

As the Arab ministers met in Tunis, diminished shelling continued in Beirut for a second straight day. Syrian and Muslim militia rockets pounded the road from the main Christian port of Juniyah north to the smaller harbor at Jubayl, midway on the Mediterranean coastal rim of the Christian enclave, hemmed on the north by Syrian-backed Muslim forces in Tripoli and in the south by Muslim West Beirut.

Lebanese army gunners under Aoun’s command returned the fire, targeting Muslim artillery emplacements in West Beirut and the hills south of the capital. No casualties were reported in the shelling.

Except for a sharp four-hour exchange Tuesday, the level of shelling has subsided over the past 10 days as the civilian populations suffered from a lack of water and electric power.