Lebanon’s Parliament Urged to Elect a New President : Mideast: Weary lawmakers head for home after Arab League talks, carrying a plan to end 14 years of factional strife. But Christians are giving it a cold reception.

Arab League mediators on Tuesday called for the Lebanese Parliament to convene Nov. 7 to elect a new president, even as massive demonstrations broke out in East Beirut against a political reform plan devised by the Parliament to end the civil war.

As more than 20,000 supporters turned out to back Christian army chief Michel Aoun’s vow to fight the new peace plan, the Lebanese Parliament concluded three weeks of talks in Jidda and prepared to return home with the plan for sharing power between Christians and Muslims.

Parliament Speaker Hussein Husseini, a Sunni Muslim, was defiant Tuesday when he vowed to ride out Aoun’s opposition and implement the reform plan, which would end the political dominion that Maronite Christians have held in Lebanon since independence in 1943.

“Not any claim by anybody that he represents the people should be taken at face value,” Husseini told reporters. “We (the members of Parliament) are the legal representatives of the Lebanese people, and we are acknowledged as such by the entire world.”

Husseini said there is no choice except for the Parliament to agree to the reforms and the plan for phasing out religious factionalism and restoring the Lebanese government’s sovereignty.

“When we have several options, we take the easiest,” he said. “But we have one option only--mainly the salvation of Lebanon--no matter how difficult that path is, and no matter how many pitfalls there are, we are determined to ride out the storm, come what may.”

In closing ceremonies at Saudi King Fahd’s opulent seaside palace, the three-member Arab League committee that drafted the peace plan and negotiated the current cease-fire pledged international support for Parliament’s efforts. These efforts are aimed at establishing a new conciliation government and phasing out the Syrian troops that control two-thirds of Lebanon.

“The Arab countries will not shrink from performing their duties toward what the peace formula in Lebanon may need in order to help Lebanon recover its unity and full sovereignty,” Prince Saud al Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said in a statement on behalf of the Arab League committee, which also includes Algeria and Morocco. He added:

“We will not hesitate to back up the government of national reconciliation to overcome any obstacles that may lie in its way.”

Aoun, a major general who heads Lebanon’s army, made it apparent that the first obstacles will be found in his Christian government and its supporters, who marched through East Beirut on Tuesday lashing out at the Parliament, shouting “Traitors! They sold Lebanon,” according to news agency reports.

“Don’t return to Lebanon!” demonstrators shouted. “If you return, we will kill you with our bare hands!”

Banks, shops and schools were closed throughout the day in mostly Christian East Beirut, and black smoke from tires burned by the demonstrators rose over the deserted streets, according to news agency reports.

None of the parliamentary deputies planned to return to Beirut from Saudi Arabia for at least another day or two, in part because of Christian deputies’ concern over the the unrest in East Beirut and the Muslim deputies’ wish to express solidarity with the Christian deputies, according to a Muslim source.

Georges Sadde, head of the Falangist Party and the leading hard-line Christian in the Parliament, is scheduled to meet with reporters today and then travel to Rome to seek backing for the peace plan from the Vatican and from the Maronite Christian patriarch.

In Beirut, a leading Christian political figure, Dany Chamoun, issued a statement backing the new national reconciliation charter. Christian deputies were seeking similar support from Christian militia chieftain Samir Geagea in an apparent attempt to isolate Aoun and build a new Christian leadership around Geagea.

Aoun, meanwhile, put his 20,000 Christian army troops on alert, calling it a defensive move to “cope with all eventualities.”

The charismatic general, whose six-month “war of liberation” to drive Syrian forces out of Lebanon led to some of the most vicious fighting of the 14-year-old civil war, opposes the peace plan because it sets up no firm timetable for withdrawal of the 40,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon. Instead, it gives Syria two years to pull back into eastern Lebanon and provides for a joint Syrian-Lebanese military committee to decide on any final withdrawal.

Aoun has denounced the reform plan as “a path to hell” and vowed to defeat it. In Jidda, Aoun’s words were largely viewed as last-stand posturing by a man who has been virtually abandoned by the West and faces increasing isolation at home.

The new peace plan also drew opposition from the Muslim side. Amal and Hezbollah, the two main militias of Lebanon’s 1.2 million Shiite Muslims, rejected the accord, as did Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.

Deputies of the Lebanese Nationalist Front, which groups a number of Muslim militias, announced earlier that the front would accept the peace plan “with reservations,” but Jumblatt, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, dismissed the plan as “silly and sectarian.”

The Muslim militia groups oppose a compromise that raises the number of deputies in the Parliament to only 108 from the present 99. The original draft of the plan would have created a 128-seat Parliament evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. Theoretically, this would have allowed significantly increased representation from the militia groups.

The Muslim militias also oppose the plan’s failure to abolish immediately the religious basis on which nearly all government posts, including those of president, prime minister and Speaker of the Parliament, are allocated. Instead, the plan opens the way for talks on how to do away with sectarianism.