Arab League Scurrying to Restore Truce as Shells Fall in Beirut

A long weekend of punishing artillery fire crushed the last vestiges of a cease-fire in Beirut and sent Arab League diplomats scurrying Tuesday to try again to restore order.

Three days of heavy shelling eased at daybreak, but the big guns resumed firing at midday. According to reports from the battered Lebanese capital, scores of rounds fell in residential districts on the Christian and Muslim sides of the divided city.

Civilians in both sectors were caught in the open as the six-hour lull ended. Panic and rage at the unseen gunners filled the streets as people hurried for shelter. Radio stations again put out a call for blood donors.

In Kuwait, Foreign Minister Sabah al Ahmed al Sabah said his Arab League committee, which had hammered out the April 28 truce, will be reconvened. “We are now preparing to call a meeting . . . to evaluate the situation in Lebanon,” he announced.

Meanwhile, a three-member Arab League team left its headquarters in Tunis for a direct assessment. Headed by Lakhdar Ibrahimi, a deputy of the league’s secretary general, the team flew to Damascus for talks with Syrian officials as well as with Salim Hoss, head of a Syrian-backed government in Muslim West Beirut, and with Muslim militia representatives. The team is expected to meet later in East Beirut with Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, leader of the Lebanese Christians, whose Defense Ministry compound was hit in Tuesday’s shelling.

The cease-fire plan put forward by the 22-member Arab League called for a cessation of fighting and the lifting of a port blockade by Aoun’s Christian forces and the Syrians and their Druze allies. But the firing stopped for less than 48 hours, resuming, according to Arab League representatives, with Muslim shelling of the Christian ports north of Beirut.

The so-called war of the ports, which has brought some of the heaviest shelling of Lebanon’s 14-year civil war down on Beirut, began in mid-March when Aoun’s Lebanese army shut down Muslim militia ports, which were draining revenues from his government and curtailing its authority.

Lebanese Muslims refuse to recognize Aoun’s regime, instead backing Hoss, whose rival government is supported by the 40,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon.

A key part of the Arab League truce formula entails deployment of a pan-Arab observer force to watch for cease-fire violations.

The new shelling Tuesday took 11 lives and brought the death toll in nearly two months of conflict to 331, with more than 1,250 wounded.

According to a report in the Mideast Mirror, a London-based daily with reporters in Beirut, Muslim guns were also targeting vital installations. On Monday, East Beirut’s main communications center was knocked out, cutting telephones to foreign countries and to the Muslim side of the capital.