Road to Peace in Lebanon Runs Through Syria

In Lebanon, a nasty neighborhood of militias, suspicions and seething feuds, the Syrian army is the big boy on the block, a bully to some and a protector to others.

Over the past 13 years, the Syrians have salvaged the Lebanese Christians from a Palestinian onslaught, given arms to Muslim militias and pulled back in the face of an Israeli invasion. They also helped engineer a radical uprising within Yasser Arafat’s mainstream guerrilla faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a revolt that resulted in Arafat’s loyalists being ousted from northern Lebanon.

They have meddled in Lebanese politics to the point where no political settlement is deemed possible without a blessing in Damascus, the Syrian capital, 50 miles southeast of Beirut.

Yet never has Syria declared its long-term aims in Lebanon--even now, with 40,000 armed men deployed in the country.

‘They Do Not Negotiate’

Others have not been so reluctant. Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, commander of the mainly Christian Lebanese army and head of a military cabinet in Christian East Beirut, declared at the height of the artillery war between his forces and the Syrian army with its Muslim militia allies last month: “The decision to confront the Syrian presence was imposed on us by the Syrians because they do not negotiate and (want to force us to) put our seal of approval to a total subordination of Lebanon to Syria.”

Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh, in his recent talks with French President Francois Mitterrand in Paris, put his country’s goals in a more beneficent light. He said the Damascus government is intent on helping the Lebanese with their problems, proposing political reforms to increase the power of the Muslim majority, and also wants to “unite all Lebanese and make them feel they belong to one homeland where they are equal in status and rights.”

Whatever the specific Syrian objectives in Lebanon, they go beyond helping their small neighboring state, according to authorities on Middle Eastern politics. They are also driven by the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Syria’s own security concerns and the ambitions of Hafez Assad, the Syrian president.

Assad, in power in Damascus since 1970, is a formidable leader in the Middle East. As president of a country with minimal resources beyond a Soviet-trained and Soviet-supplied army, he has had some hard times over two decades but played his few cards wisely. He is, diplomats in Damascus say, a man who gets his way by saying no.

“He understands the geopolitical process better than any of the (other Arab leaders),” a Western envoy commented recently. “He is politically astute, and his strong card is patience.”

A leader of the so-called Rejectionist Front opposing any negotiations with Israel, Assad now finds himself almost alone as his former rejectionist allies have given Arafat the green light to try to make a deal. Arafat and Assad are the best of enemies, the diplomat said--”They just don’t like each other.” And now, he went on, “Assad is content to let (Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak) Shamir do his job on Arafat.”

The Syrians “dig in and see what happens,” the diplomat said, adding: “They’re not really the people to take the initiative. They’re reactive.”

Indispensable Man

Following that line in Lebanon since his forces first entered the country in 1976, under the Arab League’s imprimatur as a peacemaker at the onset of the Lebanese civil war, Assad has become an indispensable man in Lebanese crises, a man with influence in Lebanon that extends beyond the power of his army.

When sectarian fighting escalated in Lebanon in 1985, militia leaders trooped to Damascus and, under Syrian tutelage, forged a pact to give the Muslims a greater share of power. The pact also gave wide powers to Syria within Lebanon. Christian traditionalists rose in defiance.

Muslim leaders responded by turning their backs on Amin Gemayel, the Christian president, and, in 1987, demanded a return to Beirut of Syrian troops, five years after the Israelis had punched northward to the outskirts of Beirut and driven the Syrians eastward into the Bekaa Valley. Today, with the Israelis gone from Lebanon except for a six-mile-deep strip along their border, the Syrian army remains, about 6,000 troops in West Beirut and 34,000 more in the Bekaa and elsewhere in Lebanon.

This week, as Arab League diplomats have tried to work out a cease-fire in the latest round of Lebanese fighting, their first stop was Damascus. Even if Assad wanted to wash his hands of Lebanon, he dare not for several reasons, say the experts. Among them:

-- Any weakening of his pro-Muslim stance in Lebanese politics would undercut the position he has taken as an Arab leader, the hard man in the struggle with the Israelis. In two decades, he has never wavered on this point.

-- From a security point of view, with Israeli troops still occupying their strip of southern Lebanon, the cautious and untrusting Syrian president could potentially put his country’s western flank at risk in any future war with Israel. So Syria insists that its troops will not leave Lebanon until the Israelis do, underlining the prime cause for its continued presence there.

-- Without direct influence in Lebanon, Syria would have diminished political control there. Damascus would be served by increased Muslim power in Beirut, but many analysts argue that it is served even better by keeping the Lebanese factions at each other’s throats, weakening the central government and making it more pliable to Syrian demands.

-- In the current round of fighting, others have accused Syria of more nefarious reasons for hanging on in Lebanon. The conflict began in early March when Aoun, seeking to extend his government’s control and recover lost revenues, imposed a blockade on “illegal” ports operated by Syria’s Muslim allies.

Jean-Francois Deniau, a member of the French National Assembly, who was instrumental in arranging a shipment of fuel and food into besieged Beirut on French vessels, declared in an interview with a French weekly that the Syrian-controlled Bekaa is a center of opium production “which secures wealth to Syria and the militias.” He suggested that drugs left Lebanon through the blockaded ports.

-- Underpinning current politics are the historical ties between Syria and Lebanon. Under centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule, Syria encompassed its little neighbor, which was then known as a part of Syria called the Lebanon. Under a post-World War I mandate following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the French ruled in Syria and carved out Lebanon as a separate state, one with special privileges for Christians. The independent Lebanon turned to the West, becoming in some ways as European as it was Arab. Syria remained close to its heritage as a center of Islam.

Even today, some Syrian maps show no border between the two countries.

Many Lebanese, particularly the Christians, insist that Damascus intends to impose the past on Lebanon’s future.