Saudi Talks May Not End Lebanon Strife : NEWS ANALYSIS

They meet over sweet tea in an Arabian palace, their deliberations bathed in the prism glow of chandeliers, their disputes hushed in the soft Oriental carpets underfoot.

But as Lebanon’s Parliament prepares to conclude more than a week of talks on a new government charter, it is to the streets of Beirut that they must return, hoping that a peace plan brokered over tea and cigarettes will win favor with the generals, international adventurists and street thugs 1,100 miles away who now constitute the true government of Lebanon.

Too many concessions to the now-dominant Muslim population and the Christian troops will dig in for more battles. Too much power retained by the ruling Maronites and the Muslims will take up arms again.

In the 14-year-old political stew that is Lebanon’s civil war, a teaspoonful of error in the recipe for peace could cost more than another outbreak of hostilities. It could, in the threatening climate that surrounds the talks, cost these aging gentlemen their homeland, even their lives.

Only 73 of the 99 deputies elected in the last elections, in 1972, have survived the war, many of them victims of the bombs, gunfire and artillery duels that have killed nearly 900 Lebanese just in the last six months.

“I am a human being,” a Shiite deputy, Hamid Dakroub, admitted Friday. “I have my fear until I am thinking of my people. At this point, I don’t have calculation for my life. My life, all of our lives, are at risk. But we have to act.”

As the Parliament prepares to take up this week the most difficult issue of the Arab League-sponsored peace plan--the 40,000 Syrian troops that occupy two-thirds of Lebanon--there are serious doubts that any fragile “reconciliation charter” the deputies can agree on will win acceptance at home and provide a permanent foothold for the two-week-old cease-fire that has momentarily silenced the artillery around Beirut.

Although the Arab League has hailed the talks as the last chance for peace in Lebanon, political analysts--and, privately, some of those close to the negotiations--say that the Lebanese Parliament no longer has the political cachet to sell peace to the warlords who run Lebanon.

“The first question,” one analyst said, asking not to be named, “is what legitimacy do these so-called elected representatives have? The answer to that is, practically zero. The next question is, can they make an agreement, and how will it be enforced? The answer to that is, they can make an agreement in Taif, and that’s about it. . . . The younger generation doesn’t look at these guys as their spokesmen anymore.”

Signs of Opposition

Already, as the deputies over the past several days have reached tentative accord on sharing power at the top levels of the government and ending the religious sectarianism upon which Lebanon’s civil service structure has been based, there have been signs that the emerging peace plan will encounter opposition at home.

In Tehran, a coalition of Muslim and Druze militia leaders were openly critical of the proposed charter, complaining that the plan to retain a Christian president and divide the seats in Parliament evenly between Christians and Muslims does not go far enough to break the Maronite Christians’ historic dominance.

Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani joined in the chorus, declaring that it would be “a great treason” if the Muslim deputies accede to the plan.

The Iranian stand adds a new level of complexity to the Lebanese quagmire of militia groups that until now were responsive primarily to Syria.

While Arab League mediators have privately guaranteed Syria’s cooperation in the reconciliation charter as it is presently worded, no such guarantees have been offered by Iran, and the militia leaders’ opposition could amount to a veto of any peace pact negotiated in Taif, some analysts said.

The Parliament itself admits that it is powerless to enforce any pact approved here.

“I think we are able to make an agreement among ourselves,” one deputy said, “but the conflict is not between deputies.”

As a legislative body, he said, the Parliament has no executive authority to enforce its decisions, even as the last vestige of an official government institution in Lebanon.

“We need Arab support and international agreement,” he went on. “If the international community does not . . . find an international solution, we cannot. We are realists.”

Arab League’s Importance

Hence, much has been made of the Arab League’s vigorous backing for the peace process now under way. A tripartite committee made up of the heads of state of Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Morocco actually drafted the proposed charter now under review, supposedly after winning private endorsement from Syria and other major players on the Lebanese stage.

The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, has been “literally living with us” during the recent talks, a deputy said, and tripartite committee representatives last week sat down with Iraqi, French, British and U.S. diplomats to broker additional international support.

Saudi Arabia has thrown its extensive diplomatic and economic influence behind an agreement, but some analysts said privately that the Saudis’ ability to broker a settlement may have been overestimated.

Saudi Arabia’s influence over Syria, for example, has been waning in the past year, even as its historic $150-million-a-year military and financial support to Syria has shrunk, one analyst said.

‘Saudis Out of the Game’

“The Saudis really do mean well but, fundamentally, the Saudis are out of the game. They can’t enforce it. They can blackmail Syria, they can refuse to put money into Lebanese banks. But I don’t think they understand the extent of the Lebanese calamity.”

Although political power-sharing remains a sticking point in the negotiations, the real showdown is expected to come as the deputies debate Syria’s role in Lebanon and the timing for withdrawing the troops sent in as a peacekeeping force in 1976.

The deputies were scheduled to take up that issue several days ago but passed it over.

Last week, several Christian deputies expressed optimism that they would be able to win a settlement in which Syria would withdraw its troops from Beirut proper within six months of the establishment of a new reform government.

But Prince Faisal, in a meeting with the Christian faction, reportedly told them he could provide “Arab and international guarantees” only for the plan outlined in the proposed Arab League charter, which gives Syria two years to pull its troops back to the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon and sets no timetable at all for its leaving.

For most of the Muslim deputies, and even some Christians, such a plan is advisable because they believe that Syrian troops are needed to help keep order once the militias are disbanded and a new government takes power.

But Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, commander of the Christian forces and head of one of Lebanon’s two rival governments, keeps urging right-wing Christian deputies to hold out for an immediate Syrian pullout, or at least a firm and stepped-up timetable for withdrawal.

In informal talks late last week, some Christian deputies proposed at least starting the clock running earlier on the reconciliation charter’s proposal for the two-year withdrawal into the Bekaa Valley.

As it stands, according to a report from several leading Muslim deputies, the two-year clock would not start running until after a new president and Speaker of Parliament are elected and a new constitution and set of laws are adopted to translate the reconciliation charter’s provisions into action.

Shiite Deputy Ali Khalil, in a meeting with reporters Friday, said the tentative timetable calls for the Parliament to convene in Lebanon by the end of October and take on the reforms in the following order: elect a Speaker and officially ratify the reconciliation charter, a process which he said could take only a matter of days; elect a new president and form a new government; put the political reforms into effect, and start the timetable for Syrian withdrawal.

During the first six months, he said, the new government would concentrate on forming new security forces, using Syrian troops and what would be the newly united Lebanese army to disarm the militias that now rule Beirut’s streets.

The proposed plan also calls for ejecting, with international help, Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, where they are encamped in a self-declared security zone. Israel insists that this zone is necessary to prevent incursions out of Lebanon across its borders.

Khalil admitted that there are no guarantees that whatever political compromise is negotiated in Taif will be accepted in Beirut. But there is no hope except to try, he said.

“We have to turn the page and start trusting ourselves again,” he said. “We can’t do otherwise, really.”