Next Step : Lebanese Skirmish Over Plan to Rebuild Beirut : Advocates hope to attract millions in Saudi and Gulf funding for the shattered capital. Foes call it ‘the theft of the century.’

This is a city dying to be reborn. But who will give it the breath of life?

Controversy over that question is raging across Beirut with, it sometimes seems, little less vengeance than more than 15 years of civil war.

Today’s combatants bear no resemblance to the scruffy, gun-toting militiamen of the past. The men and women doing battle are engineers, Ph.D.s in city planning and sociology, profit-minded investors and genteel citizens whose family histories are as deeply rooted in Lebanon as the country’s famous cedar trees.

They debate on TV and publicize their points of view through books, calendars and posters. Sociologist Dr. Nabil Beyhum sees the process as healthy, especially when compared to the war and its 150,000 victims. “No one has been killed in these public debates,” Beyhum said.

At first glance--even second--the sad state of downtown Beirut begs the question: Who would want it?

The 360-acre city center suffers from a bad case of infrastructure collapse. Leaking sewage has turned the rutted streets into cesspools. Refugees and squatters have turned former boutiques and bookstores into greasy, trashy car-repair shops.

So who wants it?

“We do,” comes the cry from an association of owners and tenants who once plied the full range of trades here.

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Physician Samir Saleeby says he would go back tomorrow. Although just a tenant, he’s willing to pay for redoing his office. “Before the war my patients came from all sects,” he recalled almost wistfully.

Nearly all the former downtowners recently questioned at random said they want to return. But realistically, how many owners or tenants could bear the financial burden of playing the phoenix rising from the ashes?

A Lebanese government body called the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) has come up with a scheme to attract foreign capital--read Saudi and Gulf money--that could supplement funds raised from Lebanese investors, property owners and returning tenants to rebuild the downtown area. The CDR would form a real estate company and give the former owners and tenants 50% of the shares. The other 50% would be sold to the investors.

Through a recently passed law, the area included in the master plan has already been made the property of the yet-to-be-formed real estate company. About $200 million in Saudi capital reportedly stands ready for the project, with an additional $450 million said to be waiting in the wings. The buzzword in Saudi Arabia is Downtown Beirut. “Put a million in, get a billion back,” reported a Saudi resident of the Lebanese capital.

Not surprisingly, some of the former owners and tenants are less than ecstatic. “The theft of the century,” say Raya and Omar Daouk, who describe the scheme as expropriation.

Abdo Semaan is a carpenter whose neighborhood is slotted for the bulldozers under the master plan. The 70-year-old man has trouble understanding what he will do with a piece of paper that won’t yield any payoff for at least a decade, by CDR estimates. A resident of the area for 40 years, he worries about his future.

His neighbor, lawyer Khalil Sarkis, has organized the neighborhood in a case against the government--one of several hundred pending in court. Theirs is a neighborhood where the civil war took little physical toll, the lawyer noted. “Nothing happened here, not even broken glass,” he said as he pointed to a tidy neighborhood of two- and three-story apartment buildings.

Still, the master plan calls for demolishing 75% of the built-up area within its newly acquired jurisdiction. The other 25% includes buildings on Allenby and Foch streets whose architecture is considered historically significant.

Churches, mosques, a synagogue and government buildings will be left standing, but their renovation will be the responsibility of their respective organizations.

The CDR, showing a flexible side, has also added an escape clause to its plan--buildings that are structurally sound and could be brought back to their original function within two years can request immunity from the bulldozer.

But that doesn’t help people like Semaan, the carpenter, who doesn’t qualify. His property and those around him are designated for parking in the master plan. Opponents argue that far less needs to be demolished and that the plan will create even more refugees than already populate what used to be known as no-man’s-land--where one now sees laundry on the roofs, braided onions hanging on the balconies and children in school uniforms.

The battle over new Beirut is being fought on opposite sides of the old city.

On Tuesday evenings, Omar and Raya Daouk open their home--one of the most splendid traditional villas left in Beirut--to landowners and tenants from the city center. There they plan their next moves against what they see as the forces of money and power and political privilege trying to take over their town.

Across the city, in a modern office block, sit the architects of Dar Al-Handasah, the largest engineering firm in the Middle East and among the top 10 worldwide. Their chief architect, Henry Edde, headed a team that drew up the plans for the center.

Their promotional 1992 calendar, with glossy renditions of the future city, became a rallying point for the owners and the nostalgia-minded. High-rises, marinas and an international trade center replaced the busy souks (marketplaces), a standard feature of Beirut.

In fact, say the architects, some of the old souks will be rebuilt. But they argue that the high-rises belong there too, as they do in any city center. (The high-rises proved to be the downfall of Edde, who resigned in November when their number and height were increased against his advice.)

The bulldozers have already claimed about 300 buildings condemned as unsafe. Property owner Omar Daouk videotaped the destruction of his four-story building and then turned his camera on the next building on the CDR’s list. At first, the videotape shows the structure shaking but nothing more; it takes another two servings of dynamite to bring it down. “And this was a building that posed a danger to the public?” Daouk asked incredulously.

Proponents of the real estate project argue that the owners have had two postwar years to get down there and do something. But in fact, a law passed in 1983 froze all activity downtown in anticipation of a master plan.

The law didn’t stop everyone. For example, Michel Roumi, owner of La Grande Boucherie just off the main downtown square, redid his burned-out shop and laid a new sidewalk outside.

Although this spirit of private enterprise is exactly what the Lebanese are famous for, the problem of sewage gurgles, unsolved, underfoot. The CDR estimates it will take $400 million to redo the sewage system. The opposition claims the cost is closer to $100 million. The problem is, the Lebanese government doesn’t have the funds whatever the cost.

Waiting in the wings while the would-be urban rebuilders fight it out are the “men of traces,” as archeologists are known Arabic.

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No serious excavations have been done in Beirut since major reconstruction took place in 1920s. But existing outcrops of Roman temples suggest that there is a lot more to be found--including a Roman law school from the time of Justinian.

The archeologists are as excited about digging into Beirut’s past as the developers are enthusiastic about excavating for its future. But just how much of Beirut’s ancient past will survive the dynamiting and bulldozing?

As the no-man’s-land becomes an everyman’s dream, the figure of Lebanon’s self-made billionaire prime minister, Rafik Hariri, looms over it all.

Hariri’s fortune came from construction projects in Saudi Arabia. A longtime employee of Hariri now heads the CDR. Other so-called Hariri men fill Cabinet posts crucial to the project. “Every line of the (plan) made a (Cabinet) minister,” Raya Daouk charged.

His pledge to put money into the downtown renewal project up to the legal maximum of a 10% share for any one investor has brought protests of impropriety.

Hariri, who has built his reputation by getting things done on time, has fixed next spring as the deadline for launching Lebanon’s reconstruction.