Lebanon Elects New President; Peace Plan OKd

Rene Mouawad, a longtime lawmaker and standard-bearer of three powerful Christian clans, was elected president of Lebanon on Sunday by a parliamentary session held in defiance of Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, the army commander and head of an interim Christian Cabinet in East Beirut.

The Parliament, which Aoun had declared dissolved Saturday, formed a quorum Sunday with the mid-afternoon arrival of 25 deputies from Paris at an air base outside the Syrian-controlled town of Qlaiaat. The lawmakers moved quickly to formally endorse a peace plan for their embattled country, reelect Parliament Speaker Hussein Husseini and choose the 64-year-old Mouawad, a Maronite Catholic and a moderate, as Lebanon’s ninth president.

Aoun, 54, who declared a “war of liberation” against Syrian troops last spring and rejected the Arab League-sponsored peace accord, immediately labeled Mouawad’s election invalid.

The general has said that the accord--hammered out last month in the Saudi Arabian resort of Taif--fails to meet his major demand of a total and speedy withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon. The Taif agreement, which also would increase the political power of Lebanon’s Muslims, provides for a phased withdrawal of the Syrians. Aoun’s dispute is apparently with the Syrian issue and not the proposed political reforms.

“We consider everything happening now in Qlaiaat as unconstitutional and void,” he told reporters at the presidential palace in a Beirut suburb. “It is as if it did not happen.”

The leader of Lebanon’s Christian community warned Sunday that Aoun’s open defiance may lead to violence.

“The situation is dangerous, very dangerous, because it would lead to partitioning the country,” Maronite Catholic Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir said in a sermon at a church at the patriarchate seat of Bkirki, northeast of Beirut.

Aoun told reporters that his dissolution of Parliament was not a call for partition. “But if it leads to a temporary partition, that means we have to liberate the other part of our country,” he said.

Fifty-eight of Lebanon’s surviving 73 parliamentary deputies--nine more than the necessary quorum--convened near the Mediterranean coastal town five miles south of the Syrian border and gave Mouawad the presidency on a unanimous, second-ballot vote.

By law, all Lebanese presidents must be Christian. Falangist Party leader George Saadeh and businessman Elias Hrawi picked up a handful of votes on the first ballot.

The presidency had been vacant for more than a year. President Amin Gemayel’s term expired Sept. 23, 1988, without election of a successor. He named Aoun to head a military caretaker Cabinet, but the Muslims quickly fielded a rival Cabinet.

The choice of Qlaiaat for Sunday’s session arose from fears that Aoun might disrupt the session if it were held in Beirut.

The parliamentary session, held in a building resembling an armory, lasted less than two hours and had little of the pomp that normally accompanies the election of a president. The military atmosphere was offset only slightly by a pair of Lebanese flags hung outside the one-story building.

Mouawad, who is backed by Syria, received a six-year mandate to form a government of national reconciliation to replace rival interim governments headed by Aoun in Christian-dominated East Beirut and by Salim Hoss in the Muslim-populated western sector of the capital.

Aoun’s rejection of the rapid-fire parliamentary moves clouds the prospects for an end to Lebanon’s bitter 14-year civil war, the main goal of the peace accord. The accord itself was achieved by the deputies only after 23 days of contentious Christian-Muslim bargaining under the watchful eye of the Arab League.

In Washington, President Bush warmly welcomed Mouawad’s election and urged all Lebanese to back the new leader’s efforts to end the fighting.

The State Department also issued a congratulatory statement that singled out Aoun for criticism for his attempt to block the Parliament session.

“We call upon Gen. Aoun and the armed forces to respect the results of Parliament’s action,” said State Department spokeswoman Nancy Beck, reading a written statement. “We extend to President Mouawad our sincere congratulations and best wishes. . . . We ask all parties to refrain from violence and intimidation and aid President Mouawad in reunifying Lebanon.”

What happens to Aoun if Mouawad consolidates power is uncertain. Syria has called repeatedly for the general’s ouster since a bloody artillery war, the latest outbreak of factional fighting, began in March. The fighting ended in September, with more than 900 civilians killed, under an Arab League-engineered truce. But the humbly born, plain-speaking Aoun retains a hard core of support among die-hard Christians as well as many Muslims for taking on the Syrian occupation army and the oligarchical families that traditionally have controlled Lebanese politics.

And Aoun’s is not the only camp unhappy with the compromises endorsed at Taif. Only Syrian pressure forced acceptance of the accord by some powerful militias, including Nabih Berri’s Shiite Muslim group Amal and Druze forces led by Walid Jumblatt.

Syrian President Hafez Assad, whose army has 40,000 troops deployed in Lebanon, wired immediate congratulations to Mouawad and his fellow deputies.

“What was achieved today is a great accomplishment on the way to ending Lebanon’s long ordeal,” the telegram said. “ . . . Syria, which provided all sacrifices for the sake of Lebanon, will continue its unlimited support to the cause of Lebanese national entente.”

The Parliament, prodded by Speaker Husseini, a Shiite, had planned to elect a new national president Saturday. About 30 deputies, almost all Muslims, defied Aoun’s decree of dissolution and drove to Qlaiaat in a caravan of cars from West Beirut. But others, most of them Christians, did not arrive as scheduled at Qlaiaat’s disused airfield from Paris, where the Christian deputies had assembled after the Taif talks, preferring not to return to Beirut for fear of reprisals by politicians opposed to the accord.

A campaign of intimidation by Aoun’s followers in East Beirut--who branded the absent Christian lawmakers traitors, with an implied threat of violence against them--led to the 24-hour hesitation. Husseini himself flew to the French capital Saturday and led them back to Lebanon on Sunday aboard two planes of Middle East Airlines, the national carrier. Significantly, according to a British reporter at Qlaiaat, the Christian deputies intended to return to Paris once the new president was elected.

The deputies were joined at Qlaiaat on Sunday by a large diplomatic contingent from Beirut. The Taif agreement has won widespread support from the international community, including the United States, which evacuated its embassy in Beirut two months ago, complaining of deteriorating security in the Aoun-controlled eastern sector of the capital.

“From the eerie smell of cordite, we are watching a new Lebanon rising from the ashes of civil war,” proclaimed a Muslim-operated television station in West Beirut as the quorum was formed 50 miles to the north under the protection of Syrian guns. It was the first parliamentary session on Lebanese soil since June, 1988.

The deputies first reelected Husseini to his fifth consecutive one-year term and formally approved the Taif accord, which will diminish the privileges that Christians have held since independence from France in 1943. The membership of Parliament will be increased from 99 to 108 and will be evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, a formula that still does not recognize the presumed Muslim majority in Lebanon. No census has been taken since 1932, and in the years since independence, an unwritten national accord has reserved for Christians not only the presidency but also preferential hiring in government jobs.

Under the agreement, the presidency remains reserved for the Christians, and the new prime minister will be a Sunni Muslim, but he will have greater powers than his predecessors in the post, at the expense of the presidency. The army command will remain in Christian hands.

Lebanon’s presidents are often chosen from among the deputies.

“An MP (member of Parliament) deserves this (position) after all the work at Taif,” said Shiite lawmaker Ali Khalil, a professor at the American University of Beirut.

Mouawad’s candidacy was buoyed by support from his own influential family, his wife’s Issa Khoury clan and the politically powerful former President Suleiman Franjieh, a pro-Syrian Christian who was an early candidate to replace outgoing President Gemayel last year, an election aborted for lack of a quorum of deputies.

Support for Mouawad was centered around the northern town of Zagharta, Franjieh’s family home.

Raschka reported from Qlaiaat and Times staff writer Williams from Nicosia, Cyprus.