One Bomb Rocks All Lebanon

The assassin’s bomb that killed Lebanon’s President Rene Mouawad on a West Beirut street yesterday may also have wrecked the painstaking political compromise that had become the best hope for bringing peace to that ravaged land. It’s true that the Taif agreement, hammered out by Lebanese legislators in an extraordinary convocation in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago, was a compromise that displeased both Muslim and Christian extremists. But because it had won broad acceptance within most Lebanese communities, it had become widely recognized as the best political road map anyone had seen in memory for a way out of this dead-end political nightmare. Taif’s tremendous achievement was to bring about the first formal change in more than 45 years in the procedures for sharing governmental power in Lebanon. Under the new agreement, Muslims and Christians were to have equal parliamentary representation for the first time in Lebanon’s history. The previous understanding had assured Christians a parliamentary majority, even though they long ago ceased to be the most numerous of Lebanon’s communities. Additionally, under Taif, the powers of the president, who was to remain a Maronite Christian, were reduced. Finally, it was agreed, although ambiguously, that within a few years Syria would begin withdrawing some of its 35,000 “peacekeeping” troops from Lebanon.

Gen. Michel Aoun, a Maronite warlord, bitterly opposed the Taif agreement and swore to sabotage it. He makes everybody’s list of suspects in the Mouawad murder, although there are other likely candidates as well, among them several Muslim fundamentalist groups that also scorn the accord. Wherever guilt lies, terrible damage has been done. What may well have been lost in Wednesday’s explosion was not just the life of a leader who not only embraced the spirit of Taif but perhaps epitomized it, but the chance to find some reasonable answers to the problems that have kept Lebanese at war with each other for 14 years. It usually takes an act of imagination to envision how things could get any worse in Lebanon. It now takes little imagination to see that, after yesterday, they will.