Syria Makes Clear Who’s Dominant Power in Beirut : News ANALYSIS

In the rubbled forecourt of Lebanon’s presidential palace at Baabda, Syrian troops Sunday heated coffee over a fire fueled with shredded posters of fallen Christian strongman Michel Aoun.

The flag of Damascus flew over the Lebanese Defense Ministry in nearby Yarze, and for the first time in 12 years, Syrian soldiers patrolled the streets of East Beirut, capital of the Christian heartland.

If Syrian President Hafez Assad still harbors the ambition to restore Greater Syria, including Lebanon--and many Damascus-based diplomats are convinced that he does--Saturday’s lightning assault that toppled Aoun was a decisive step. At the least it erased any doubt that Assad would remain the ringmaster in Lebanon, the sorrowful sideshow of power politics in the Middle East.

Assad’s government waited for months before delivering the final blow to Aoun, who had repeatedly threatened to “break the head” of the Syrian president with a crusade of liberation. Syrian propaganda labeled the Christian general a lunatic and pointed to the imbalance of forces--Aoun’s 15,000 men to Syria’s Lebanon army of up to 40,000--as evidence of an unwarranted superiority complex.

According to Western diplomats in Damascus, the Syrian hand was apparently stayed by American advice for caution and the standing Israeli warning against any sudden change in the Lebanese political balance. “Assad’s been ready to move more than once,” one diplomat said recently.

Why now? The Damascus government was not saying precisely, but Sunday’s edition of the government daily Tishrin described the Syrian military role as an example of proper intra-Arab action, a bit of brotherly help for a favored leader, in this case Lebanon’s pro-Syrian President Elias Hrawi.

“It is a relation which is not based on annexation and wiping out countries from the map,” Tishrin added in a reference to Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion and subsequent annexation of Kuwait.

Several Middle East political analysts said that Assad was emboldened by his rising stock in Western capitals, the result of committing an estimated 15,000 or more troops to the international force in the Saudi Arabian desert. The Saudi daily Al Sharq al Aswat pointed out that Syria wanted big power acquiescence for any move against Aoun, fearful of a situation where “one of the members of the (U.N.) Security Council would urge the council to lay its hands on the Lebanese file.”

Reuters news agency quoted Uri Lubrani, the coordinator of Israeli operations in the southern Lebanon security strip, as saying: “I have no doubt that the Syrians felt much freer to use force inside Lebanon when they are in an alliance with the United States (in Saudi Arabia).”

So far it appears that Damascus has what it wants. No demands for Security Council resolutions condemning Syrian force against Aoun have been raised. Syrian troops are encamped in the Baabda palace, on a rise overlooking Beirut’s southern suburbs. They are kings of the hill.

President Hrawi was elected by a Lebanese Parliament under the protection of Syrian guns. Hrawi himself spent the first months of his term in a Syrian military camp in the Bekaa Valley. Aoun is powerless, his loyal brigades having surrendered to the president’s authority.

But Lebanon remains Lebanon, and even the Syrians, at this moment of their strongest power there, cannot call all the shots among the country’s fractious politicians and militia leaders.

On Sunday, the issue was what to do with Aoun. The French government, the primary supporter of Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, has granted him asylum. A helicopter is on hand in the French Embassy compound prepared to fly him here to Cyprus, where the Paris government reportedly has a plane standing by to take the general and his family to France.

The Hrawi government, however, wants the judicial authorities to review the request. Typically, the factional leaders were talking tough.

Nabih Berri, head of the Syrian-supported Shiite Amal militia and a Cabinet minister, said: “France must pardon us for not swallowing its hasty decision to grant asylum to Aoun. He should stand trial as a plain criminal.”

Samir Geagea, warlord of the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces militia, whose men fought a vicious campaign for control of Christian territory against Aoun’s forces this year, agreed, saying the general “should be brought to justice and tried as a criminal.” Walid Jumblatt, the Druze chieftain whose militia is Syria’s strongest ally in Lebanon, suggested that both Christian leaders, Aoun and Geagea, be put on trial.

That sort of division and fence-jumping has plagued Lebanon’s politics for decades. Hrawi says the fall of Aoun will bring unity to Lebanon, but few analysts support him. Look at the president’s problems:

* The Lebanese economy and currency, performing near miracles of resilience through 15 years of civil war, were finally brought down by Aoun’s two-year crusade to chase the Syrians out of Lebanon and break Geagea’s militia. The guns of Beirut were silent for only a few months over that time. The refugee tide of Christians, Lebanon’s entrepreneurial class, ebbed and flowed and finally broke into full flood with Christians fighting Christians in the first six months of this year.

As yet another school term began with classes jeopardized by the fighting, families made the decision to cut their roots and seek permanent emigration to France, Canada, Australia, the United States and Brazil. The economic uncertainty of the Persian Gulf crisis, meanwhile, spread throughout the Middle East, hitting particularly hard in a trading nation like Lebanon, and the value of the Lebanese pound plummeted.

* The Christian community, estimated at 1 million of the country’s 3 million citizens and still privileged even under the new political reforms, faces a leadership vacuum. By most accounts, nearly one-half were strong supporters of Aoun--and vehemently anti-Syrian. While the general has ordered his soldiers to submit to Hrawi’s authority to “avoid further cost of blood,” the transfer of his political following to the pro-Syrian president seems less likely.

And Geagea’s Lebanese Forces, who doggedly defended their turf during the intra-Christian war, are not likely to surrender the profitable perks of their state-within-a-state to Hrawi either.

A top Lebanese Forces official once remarked of Aoun’s loud defiance of Syria, “We oppose the Syrians too, and we know the time will come when we have to fight them. But we are not ready yet. We have to build the Christian heartland from within. Aoun has moved too soon.”

That sort of talk, which reveals a Christian goal for a cantonal state of separate Muslim and Christian communities, is standard fare north of Beirut along the Mediterranean coast, the strongholds of Geagea’s militia.

* The Lebanese sideshow has not been diminished by the fall of Aoun. The Israelis still hold their security strip north of the border, patrolled by a Christian militia on the Israeli payroll. It is not in Jerusalem’s interests to see Syrian power increase in Lebanon, and Aoun’s surrender presents Israel with new problems.

Iraq, self-proclaimed champion of the Islamic cause, was a player in the sideshow as an arms supporter to the Christians, both Aoun and Geagea. Analysts say that President Saddam Hussein’s hand in Lebanon was mainly that of a spoiler--anything to cause pain to his longtime rival Assad.

Aoun is now out of the picture, but there has been no indication that Geagea’s militia would reject Iraqi support if it could be delivered.

The Muslim militias--primarily Berri’s Amal, the Iranian-supported Hezbollah (Party of God), various Palestinian commands and the odd Communist and Nasserite groups--continue to do their military and commercial business in general defiance of the central government.

Like every other political group in Lebanon, including the Christians and the Druze, Muslim political strength is measured largely by the number of guns in the party militia.

Hrawi, strengthened by the fall of Aoun, has already heard the familiar charge to Lebanese political leadership. Besides righting the economy and rebuilding the damage of 15 years of war, said the Syrian ruling party daily Al Baath on Sunday, Hrawi must deal with the “most important” of these tasks, “the dismantling of the armed militias and ending their existence.” Several of the militias, it failed to add, are bankrolled by the Syrian government.

One of Hrawi’s immediate ambitions, according to press reports from Beirut on Sunday, is to move his office from West Beirut into the palace at Baabda, which was last occupied by a Lebanese president, Amin Gemayel, in the fall of 1988.

But Syrian soldiers encamped on the palace grounds told reporters that the compound will become a military barracks for a while--a Syrian barracks.