Israel-Syria Talks Proceed With Key Player Caught in Middle

As Israel and Syria launched groundbreaking peace talks last week, the silent partner in the negotiations--Lebanon--was suffering from an intense and unwelcome spasm of violence.

In the country’s north, the Lebanese army battled Sunni Muslim militants in the fiercest fighting it has seen since civil war ended nearly 10 years ago.

Here in the capital, another militant fired rockets on the Russian Embassy and briefly turned the elegant seafront corniche into a mini-battle zone.

And a day earlier, a Roman Catholic nun was killed and her body dumped on the side of a much-traveled road--pointedly, in a country where Christians and Muslims fought a devastating war.

Suddenly, newspapers were filled with pictures of weeping widows while funerals were held for slain army officers. A bomb hoax emptied downtown office buildings and tied up traffic for hours. Lebanese were reminded with a sense of nagging dread of the sectarian conflict that ripped their country apart for more than 15 years.

The violence, and the uncertainty it triggered, underscored Lebanon’s vulnerability as the talks between Israel and Syria--the power that calls the shots in Lebanon--forged ahead. Lebanese are worried that their neighbors will cut a deal at their expense, a deal that ignores the problems plaguing Lebanon--including the presence of terrorists and well-armed Palestinian refugees--while tacitly sanctifying the country’s continued domination by Syria.

Israel is preparing to withdraw from southern Lebanon, a region it has occupied for 22 years. However, Syria does not want Israeli troops to pull out of the zone--where they are vulnerable to attack and thus remain a chip to be bargained over--until Israel returns territory it captured from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War.

Syria, which uses Hezbollah guerrillas to harass the Israelis in southern Lebanon, has essentially controlled Lebanon since Syrian forces moved in to help end the 1975-90 civil war. Israel may soon pull out, but Syria continues to keep 35,000 troops in the country.

Officially, the Syrian and Lebanese governments--the last of Israel’s neighbors still at war with the Jewish state--have said they will sign a peace deal only “in tandem.” But many Lebanese feel that they are but an afterthought to be included as Syria sees fit.

“I hope that when the essential questions relating to Lebanon are discussed, we will be present,” said Fouad Butros, a former foreign minister. “This peace process will draw a new picture of the Middle East, and each country should know its role.”

Some Lebanese were convinced that the Russian Embassy attack and the fighting in northern Lebanon were timed to disrupt the peace talks. In fact, the consensus among diplomatic and intelligence sources about what happened is more complicated.

A Lebanese army patrol was ambushed New Year’s Eve by Sunni extremists who have been operating and training in northern Lebanon near the border with Syria. In the ensuing violence, a Lebanese colonel was kidnapped and his throat slit; two civilian women--Christians--were killed and their bodies mutilated. The army deployed elite troops around the northern village of Kfar Habou, and, after five days, the government’s death count stood at 11 soldiers and at least 30 militants.

The Sunnis involved in the fighting appear to be part of a loosely knit network of Sunni extremists that reaches as far as Algeria and the U.S., Western diplomats in the region and analysts here say. It is a network reputedly financed in part by Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, although his ties to the group remains a matter of speculation.

Among those killed in northern Lebanon was the purported ringleader, Bassam Kanj, also known as Abu Aisheh. He is believed to have been a veteran of the Islamic forces who battled the Soviets in Afghanistan. Local newspapers reported that he held U.S. citizenship and had moved to Lebanon to begin setting up a fundamentalist enclave.

Although the fighting raged as the peace talks got underway in the U.S., some officials here said the confrontation was inevitable as pressure built. Just last month, Syrian President Hafez Assad, whose minority Alawite regime faces a challenge from the Sunni majority in his country, launched a crackdown on Sunni militants there. The Lebanese military operation in the north might have been an extension of that campaign.

Three days after the Sunni ambush, a Palestinian radical named Raja abu Kharroub fired rocket-propelled grenades at the Russian Embassy here, seized hostages and killed a police officer before being killed by Lebanese troops. Authorities said he was despondent over Russian attacks on Muslims in the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya.

Perhaps more to the point, Abu Kharroub was from the Ein el Hilwa camp for refugees in the southern city of Sidon. That camp, like most that house an estimated 350,000 Palestinians in Lebanon, is rife with well-armed factions that keep the Lebanese army at bay, worry Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and post a serious regional security threat.

The attack on the Russian Embassy was not necessarily coordinated with the northern skirmishes but was part of the same growing phenomenon of Sunni extremist violence, diplomats and analysts say.

Senior officials in the Lebanese government say they have sought to prevent Sunni fundamentalist factions from linking up militarily with armed Palestinians. Some of the factions, an official acknowledged, have been allowed to thrive on the pretext that moving against them would play into Israel’s hands. Unstated is the widely held belief that Syria will not let Lebanon act against the armed groups because Syria wants to maintain them as a reserve tool.

“We closed our eyes to these [armed] groups, even though they had nothing to do with the resistance against Israel,” said Naser Kandil, a senior official in the Information Ministry. He said some of these factions are afraid they will lose their ability to maneuver if a peace deal is signed.

If asked, the majority of Lebanese will say that what they want to see most out of peace between Syria and Israel is a solution to the problem of Palestinians who took refuge in Lebanon after the founding of Israel in 1948 and who now make up about 10% of the population.

Nervous about its own delicate demographic balance between once-dominant Christians and now-majority Muslims, Lebanon refuses to settle the mostly Muslim Palestinians here permanently.

The armed factions in the refugee camps--some loyal to Arafat and others opposed to both him and making peace with Israel--pose a different problem because of their potential for spreading bloodshed outside the camps’ confines. It is widely believed that the Lebanese could not disarm the camps without substantial loss of life.

For now, many Lebanese are convinced that they will continue to be relegated to the sidelines as their future is debated.

“The fact that we don’t exist politically, that we have no real say, that we always have to receive our instructions from Damascus [the Syrian capital] . . . God knows what they’ll do with us in these talks,” said Dory Chamoun, a Christian politician and frequent critic of the Syrians. “We cannot know.”