Power-Sharing Plan Approved for Lebanon

Breaking a three-week deadlock in talks for ending Lebanon’s civil war, the Lebanese Parliament agreed Sunday on a historic political reform plan that will for the first time share power equally between Christians and Muslims.

The plan, given unofficial approval just before midnight after last-minute consultations with Damascus, also provides for withdrawal of Syrian forces to eastern Lebanon. And there is a guarantee that Lebanon’s national sovereignty, eclipsed by 14 years of civil war and a long procession of foreign occupation troops, will eventually be restored.

“Thanks be to God that we have reached this point. After 23 days of hard work, night and day, we are now in final agreement,” Youssef Hammoud, a Shiite Muslim deputy, told reporters as Lebanese journalists broke into applause.

The future of the plan was far from certain, however. Lebanon’s Christian leader, Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, said in Beirut that it does not meet his demands.

Even before the 61 deputies convened a full session to finalize the details of the compromise peace plan, Arab League envoy Lakhdar Ibrahimi flew to Beirut to deliver word of the accord to the heads of Lebanon’s two embattled governments--Aoun, who heads the army, and his Muslim rival, Salim Hoss.

Parliament is scheduled to convene a final session Tuesday in the Saudi port city of Jidda to endorse the new national reconciliation charter before returning to Beirut to officially adopt it and begin putting the reforms into effect.

But even with agreement on opening the doors to Lebanon’s Muslim majority and phasing out the religious sectarianism that has so divided the country, the fledgling plan still faces trouble in Beirut, where Aoun over the past several days has remained stubbornly opposed.

Aoun said at a news conference that the plan does not meet his demands for a specific timetable for Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon, the Associated Press reported from Beirut. He said that he accepts political changes giving more power to Muslims, “but I reject the part concerning Lebanese sovereignty. We don’t know what the Syrian role will be in Lebanon--what for and how long.”

Aoun proposed putting the peace plan to a referendum of the Lebanese people since, he asserted, the parliamentary deputies “exceeded their jurisdiction and legal powers by voting in . . . ambiguities that compromise Lebanon’s sovereignty.”

There was no immediate reaction from Hoss, the AP reported.

Unexpectedly, Muslim militia representatives who had repeatedly denounced the charter’s failure to immediately abolish the religious basis for political power in Lebanon said they would support the reform plan, with reservations.

“We shall struggle by logic, not by arms,” declared Zaher Khatib, whose National Front includes the Shiite movement Amal and the Druze sect, a Muslim offshoot. “We will not be an obstacle to the reconciliation.”

Maronite Christian deputies appealed Sunday to the Vatican and to Lebanon’s Christian patriarch to help coalesce support for the compromise, which would end the Maronites’ 46-year domination of Lebanon in exchange for the hope of peace.

The reform talks convened in this Saudi mountain resort on Sept. 30, shortly after an Arab League committee negotiated a cease-fire in Aoun’s six-month-long “war of liberation” and drafted a proposed charter for reforming the imbalance of political power in Lebanon that has fueled the civil war.

Christian deputies had resisted any move to relinquish their authority, however, as long as the plan contained no firm timetable for withdrawal of the 40,000 Syrian troops that now control two-thirds of the country and, through Damascus, dominate much of the decision-making in Lebanon.

The compromise plan provides at least that Syrian troops will withdraw into the Bekaa region of eastern Lebanon within two years of the adoption of a new government and political reforms, with the precise timing and location of the withdrawal to be worked out by a joint Lebanese-Syrian military committee.

But Christian East Beirut deputies remained opposed early Sunday to a proposal, backed by Syria, to increase the number of deputies in the Parliament to 128 from 99. The Christians have insisted that the National Assembly be limited to 108 members.

Under either scenario, the Parliament would be evenly divided between Muslims and Christians, but Lebanon’s old-line politicians, heavily represented among the Christians, have perceived a large infusion of new deputies, many of whom would come from the warring militia groups that now rule Lebanon, as a threat to the nation’s traditional power brokers.

Perhaps more importantly, the 128-deputy scenario contains a provision that would allow, for the first time, three of the 64 Muslim deputies to be Alawites, a Shiite sect of which Syria’s president, Hafez Assad, is a member. Muslim seats now are allocated among Sunnis, Shiites and Druze.

Presumably, three Alawite seats in the Parliament would give Assad a direct pipeline into the national government, and Christian deputies held off on any approval until Syria reportedly agreed Sunday not to insist on the 128-deputy plan, according to sources close to the Christian faction.

The sources said that Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, telephoned Syria’s foreign minister Sunday and relayed Syria’s assent on the 108-seat Parliament to the Christian deputies, who then unanimously agreed to the reform plan.

Once the plan went before the full Parliament Sunday night, there was additional opposition from two deputies representing the National Front.

Militia leaders and their parliamentary advocates have objected to the charter’s failure to provide for a rapid end to the religious sectarianism that has been both a basis for political power in Lebanon and one of its primary sources of conflict.

Traditionally, Lebanon’s president has been a Maronite Christian, its prime minister a Sunni Muslim and its Parliament Speaker a Shiite, but there is no similar position for the Druze sect.

The political reform plan calls for the president, prime minister and Speaker to form a committee to discuss abolishing sectarianism in the government.

BACKGROUND

Since 1975, Lebanon has been at war with itself, a conflict marked by political upheavals, coups, assassinations and an Israeli invasion. In 1976, a 30,000-member Arab peacekeeping force dominated by Syrian troops moved in to reinforce a cease-fire between Maronite Christian and Muslim forces. Syria has been there ever since. The latest conflict began in mid-March, and the fighting between the Christian forces of Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun and an alliance of Lebanese Druze and Syrian troops has been marked by fearsome artillery exchanges, with nearly 900 Lebanese killed and another 4,000 wounded. Much of Beirut, the capital that was once hailed as the Paris of the Mideast, has been reduced to rubble.