Lebanese Deputies Defy Aoun : Mideast: The Parliament gathers despite Christian leader’s decree dissolving the body. But it fails to muster a quorum.

Defiant Lebanese parliamentary deputies gathered at a Syrian-controlled seaside town Saturday in a bid to counter Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun’s decree dissolving Parliament. Aoun, the leader of Lebanon’s Christian military Cabinet, is seeking to block election of a new president.

By Saturday night, the test of authority remained unresolved. Twenty-seven deputies, almost all Muslims, had arrived in a column of cars from West Beirut at Qlaiaat, just south of Syrian territory on the Mediterranean coast. They were prepared to vote formal approval of a peace plan for their war-torn country.

But about 28 others, most of them Christians, remained in Paris, forestalling a parliamentary quorum at Qlaiaat. A plane that was to have flown them to Qlaiaat never left the French capital, according to press reports from Beirut.

(Late Saturday, Reuters reported from Paris that Speaker Hussein Husseini said he and the other deputies would return to Lebanon today and vote for a president at a time and location still to be announced.)

Abdallah Rassi, one of the deputies at Qlaiaat, said the planned session had been delayed “for technical reasons.”

Salim Hoss, who heads a rival Muslim Cabinet in West Beirut, rejected Aoun’s decree as illegitimate. “It is unconstitutional and void,” he told reporters in Beirut. “This farce should be stopped by electing a new president.”

Another attempt to form a quorum of 49 of Lebanon’s surviving 73 deputies--all elected in 1972, three years before the civil war between Christians and Muslims broke out--will be made today, supporters of the peace plan said. Parliamentary Speaker Husseini went to Paris to round up the missing deputies, who have been labeled traitors--and are believed to be intimidated--by Aoun’s followers.

Aoun summoned reporters before dawn to his shell-shattered presidential palace in the Beirut suburb of Baabda to hear his order dissolving Parliament. It was a move he had threatened for a week.

He repeated his charge that the peace plan, hammered out by the deputies last month after three weeks of dogged bargaining at the Saudi Arabian mountain resort of Taif, does not guarantee Lebanese independence and sovereignty.

The general, wearing combat fatigues, appeared tired and disheartened, according to reporters at Baabda. He challenged the action of this Parliament by proposing election of a new one in a three-stage election in January. Of the current deputies, he said, “We sent them to Taif and gave them a chance to bring peace, but they brought back a charter of surrender.”

Aoun’s Christian-led Lebanese army fought a brutal six-month artillery war against Syrian troops and their Muslim militia allies in the first half of the year to break what he calls Syrian control of his country.

Approval of the Taif accord, strongly supported by the Arab League and outside powers such as the United States, France and the Soviet Union, is a “breach of the constitution that warrants dissolution of the Parliament,” Aoun’s three-member Cabinet declared in its decree.

Other Christian leaders, including the influential patriarch of the Maronite Church, have called the Taif plan acceptable. The well-armed Lebanese Forces militia has not rejected it.

So Aoun, who has earned support from both Christian and Muslim for his “war of liberation” against the Syrians, stands largely alone in opposition to the accords.

Aoun’s followers promptly called a general strike Saturday in Christian East Beirut. Stores and factories shut down, and Christian demonstrators drove through the otherwise quiet streets shouting deprecations against the parliamentarians.

Lebanon has not had a president for more than a year, since Amin Gemayel’s term ended without election of a successor by the Parliament. Accusations were laid against both Christians and Muslims for threatening deputies to prevent a quorum.

Just before stepping down, Gemayel named Aoun, his army commander, to head an interim Cabinet. Aoun has interpreted the appointment to give him presidential powers.

The Arab League-engineered cease-fire in September that ended the artillery war led to the long deliberations at Taif. There, under strong pressure, the now aged Christian and Muslim legislators approved a series of compromises designed to reform the outdated political system in Lebanon, which guaranteed Christian privileges in the face of a Muslim population majority.

Under the reform plan, the president will remain a Maronite Christian, but his power will be diminished in favor of a strong prime minister to be chosen from the Sunni Muslim community. The Shiite Muslims, who by most estimates are the largest community in Lebanon, will retain the speakership of the Parliament, but the term will be extended from one year to four, increasing Shiite clout.

Many Lebanese factions were unhappy with their share of the power to be assessed under the plan, but none opposed the overall package as strongly as Aoun. He demanded a firm timetable for the withdrawal of Syria’s 40,000 troops in Lebanon in return for political reforms.

But even the thin prospect for peace after 14 years of civil war was enough to win approval of the Christian parliamentarians at Taif. Most of them are now in Paris. A series of intimidation bombings at some of their homes and offices in East Beirut underscored their security concerns. An initial plan to meet at the Parliament building on the so-called Green Line dividing Christian and Muslim Beirut was abandoned in the tense atmosphere of the past few days.

One Christian politician who did arrive in Qlaiaat was former President Suleiman Franjieh, 79, who headed the government when the civil war began and who was unsuccessfully promoted by the Syrians in the contest to succeed Gemayel last year. Franjieh kept his militia forces out of this year’s conflict.