France Tries to Ease Quarrel With Lebanon on Aoun’s Fate

Army bulldozers removed more mines along the capital’s dividing Green Line on Tuesday, and France sought to ease an escalating quarrel with Lebanon over the fate of Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun.

President Elias Hrawi pledged to reunify the nation and end its 15-year civil war. He said he will work from the bombed-out presidential palace, where Aoun had his headquarters, even if he has to put up a tent.

Aoun spent a fourth day in the French Embassy in East Beirut, where he fled Saturday after being defeated in an eight-hour Syrian-led blitz that ended the Christian general’s 11-month mutiny.

France promptly granted Aoun asylum. But the Lebanese government refuses to allow him to leave the country and wants to try him on a variety of charges, including the theft of state funds.

On Tuesday, the government set up a military checkpoint near the embassy but said the measure was designed to prevent anti-Aoun demonstrators from storming the building.

“France and Lebanon do not intend to permit a crisis to develop between them,” French Ambassador Rene Ala told reporters after meeting Hrawi in Muslim West Beirut. It was his third meeting with the Lebanese president in 24 hours.

Reporters on the scene said soldiers at the checkpoint made no move to stop people from getting into or out of the embassy or block traffic in the vicinity.

Aoun began his mutiny in November, 1989, after rejecting an Arab League-brokered peace plan to end Lebanon’s civil war, which has killed an estimated 150,000 people. He had called Hrawi, like himself a Maronite Catholic, a “Syrian puppet” and refused to recognize his government.

The peace plan provides for the traditionally dominant Christians to share power with the Muslim majority. Aoun rejected the plan because there was no timetable for the withdrawal of Syrian troops.

Bulldozers, meanwhile, continued to remove mines along the Green Line on Tuesday, a day after authorities opened a key intersection to traffic.

Several Lebanese compared the dismantling of the Green Line--a series of earth mounds that have split Beirut into Muslim and Christian sections since 1975--to the removal of the Berlin Wall.

“There’s a ray of hope now,” Muslim housewife Jinan Sukkar said.

“Berlin has been united and has gotten rid of the wall that had divided it for many years,” Agriculture Minister Mohsen Dalloul was quoted as saying. “Now it’s Beirut being united with the Green Line ceasing to exist.”