National Agenda : A Divided Community : Lebanon’s Maronite Christians are struggling to recover after a top leader was arrested for allegedly ordering the murder of a rival.

The crime was hideous yet not unprecedented in a country that has specialized in dispatching its leaders in hails of machine-gun fire, car bombs, explosive letters and other examples of the annihilative arts.

In the dead of night, three men in military fatigues climbed up to the fifth-floor apartment of Dany Chamoun, a prominent Christian political leader. As Chamoun wrestled with one of them on the floor, his 7-year-old son ran to Chamoun’s briefcase and pulled out a gun. His father’s attacker cut the boy down with a bullet in the head. His 5-year-old brother, screaming, “No, no, no!,” was shot in the eye.

Chamoun’s German wife was hit 10 times in the chest and stomach. And Chamoun, one of the most important Maronite Christian political figures left in Lebanon after Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun’s flight to exile in France a week earlier, collapsed and died with 15 bullets in him.

Coming on the heels of Syria’s ouster of Aoun, the maverick former army commander who holed up for months in Christian East Beirut against both Syrian and rival Christian forces, the Chamoun murder on Oct. 21, 1990, seemed another notch in Syria’s belt of domination around Lebanon.

But Lebanese authorities, after investigating the case for nearly four years and interrogating one member of the assassination team, have concluded it was not a Muslim hit squad but rival Christian leader Samir Geagea who was responsible. Moreover, the government has accused Geagea of masterminding the bombing of a Maronite Christian church in Zouk, north of Beirut, Feb. 27, a bloody attack that killed 11, injured 50 others and brought to peacetime Lebanon a disturbing echo of 16 years of a civil war that most thought had ended.

Geagea’s arrest this spring has removed from the scene the most influential Christian political figure remaining in Lebanon.

And it has left the Maronite Christian community that for decades dominated Lebanese political life in a state of frustration and disarray.

Hundreds of Christians have fled the country since Geagea’s arrest, adding to an exodus over the past five years that has further diminished the minority’s representation in Lebanon. Although Christians are well outnumbered by Muslims (as much as 2 to 1, by some estimates), they still hold the presidency and half the Cabinet seats.

“At the moment, most Christians are completely disillusioned,” said Christian political analyst Paul Salem. “Most feel they have lost the war. Lebanon is dominated by the Muslims and by the Syrians. They believe the Christians of the East are finished.”

Unsure of where to turn, some of the Christian leaders have staked their political fortunes on calling for Lebanese resistance against Syrian domination. But not all.

While the most prominent leaders--Aoun, former president Amin Gemayel, National Bloc party leader Raymond Edde and Chamoun’s son Dori--continue to harangue from exile in France against the presence of 35,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon, a number of key Christian leaders still in Beirut have, in the wake of Geagea’s arrest, quietly begun making contacts with Syrian officials in Damascus.

An unprecedented visit by Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir to Damascus may not be far away, pro-Syrian newspapers have reported.

“It is true that we must reorient ourselves. We have been passing through more severe periods than ever before, and yet instead of being united all as Christians, every one of us is criticizing the other,” said George Saadeh, head of the Falangist Party, the largest Christian political organization, and a bitter rival of Geagea.

“First, we must start to make relations within the Christian community. Then a good Lebanese-Lebanese relation, and after that we will discuss about the outside, with Syria,” Saadeh said. “The Lebanese are in three parts now: One part is with the Syrians, and whatever Syria says, they will accept it. The other part is against the Syrians, no matter what. And the third part, which is the part where we are, say if things are good with Syria, we say OK, and if it isn’t good, we will oppose it.”

This kind of pragmatic talk is a far cry from only four years ago when Aoun, barricaded in the presidential palace at Baabda, railed against Syria until the day Syrian tanks literally blew him out of his hiding place and into refuge at the French Embassy. (Aoun was later granted exile in France in exchange for five years of political silence--which is nearing its end.)

Yet Geagea, 42, a bitter enemy of Aoun who brought war to relatively unscathed Christian East Beirut when the two Christian leaders’ militias began slugging it out, carried on long after Aoun retreated to his elegant chateau outside Paris.

As head of the Lebanese Forces, a disarmed militia that had acted as a political party in the aftermath of the war, Geagea endorsed but never fully reconciled himself to the 1989 agreement reached in Taif, Saudi Arabia, which set the stage for ending political sectarianism in Lebanon and ended decades of Christian political domination.

His call for a federalist system that would allow Christians to have their own enclave--safe from what some Christians viewed as growing “Islamization”--was seen by the government as a front for a more radical plan to consolidate his power and establish a breakaway Christian ministate.

The bombing at the church in Zouk was said by the government to be an attempt on Geagea’s part to create panic in the Christian community and enough instability to rekindle the war and demand international protection for a breakaway Christian ministate.

His indictment in the Chamoun killings, based in part on interrogations of members of Geagea’s security apparatus, alleges that his Lebanese Forces continued to maintain secret weapons stashes and were aided in carrying out their activities by the Israeli secret service.

Geagea and others charged, many of whom are in exile, have denied any involvement in the bombing or the Chamoun family murder.

The Christian strongman, who had dined at the home of Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Rafik Hariri only days before his arrest, accused the government as he was being led off to prison of “wanting to muzzle every opposition voice.”

A Lebanese Forces official and Geagea confidant, who asked not to be identified, said Geagea’s arrest represents the political failure to guarantee Lebanese Christians even those rights granted to them under the Taif agreement, including guarantees for an end to Syria’s presence.

“The problem of Dr. Geagea is not a problem of crime, it’s not a problem of security, it’s not a problem of arms, it’s not a problem of militia,” the official said. “The problem of Dr. Geagea is a political problem consisting of the fact that Dr. Geagea and other Christian leaders oppose the way of implementing (Taif), especially the problems of individual liberty and common liberty.”

He said Geagea is being punished for speaking out about lack of Christian political representation in Lebanon. Though half of the 30-member Cabinet is Christian, about 10 to 12 of them are allied with the Muslims. A Christian boycott of the 1992 parliamentary elections left Lebanon’s most important Christian political factions unrepresented. Maronite Christian Elias Hrawi is president, but his powers under the Taif agreement are very few.

“The problem is we want a real political life, we want democracy, we want liberty, and we have none of this,” the Geagea confidant said. “And Dr. Geagea was the man who talked about this. He was the only Christian leader in the opposition who had a party, who had a media, who could act. Politically, he is dangerous for the government.”

Yet political analysts here say it is the Christians themselves who have been their own undoing, first with the war in East Beirut launched by Aoun and Geagea, later by the elections boycott and the assassinations and feuding that have destroyed some of their most important political groups.

And now, many say, the demise of Geagea may actually pave the way for new Christian leadership to develop that may be more healthy for the community and the country.