An Anxious Lebanon Is Coming to a Crossroads

Polished and meticulous, publisher Gebran Tueni of the newspaper An Nahar projects the very image of the modern and prosperous Lebanon that he would like to build. And in a recent open letter that startled nearly everyone here with its boldness, he laid out a vision of the future that his country’s Syrian “protectors” could not have welcomed.

In polite but uncompromising terms, Tueni wrote that the majority of Lebanese want the Syrians, with their ubiquitous intelligence service and estimated 30,000 troops, to leave Lebanon.

In a country where many are fearful of the Syrians, Tueni’s manifesto was unprecedented. But the publisher is far from alone in believing that his small, troubled nation has entered “a delicate and decisive time.” Its fate seems to hang in the balance, dependent on a complicated three-way dance that has begun between Syria, Israel and Lebanon.

The reason is the strategic gamble by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, strongly supported by the United States, to remove Israeli troops in the coming weeks from a self-declared “security zone” in southern and eastern Lebanon. With Israel’s exit after 22 years seemingly imminent, some Lebanese are raising anew questions about why the Syrians stay, while others are fearful that any change in the status quo could plunge the country back into war.

Few countries have suffered as Lebanon has over the past quarter of a century. An influx of Palestinian refugees in the 1970s upset the country’s fragile social balance and triggered a civil war that left an estimated 200,000 people dead. The state fractured, and Lebanon became a nightmare of warlords, terrorists and kidnappers. Neighboring powers found the war-torn country a convenient stage from which to pursue interests and rivalries. Israel and Syria intervened, and when the dust settled, Israel occupied a 9-mile-deep swath of southern Lebanon, while Syria had de facto authority over the rest of the nominally independent nation.

For years, Lebanese politicians have demanded that Israel leave, in accordance with United Nations resolutions dating from 1978. But now that Israel proposes to do just that no later than July 7, some Lebanese leaders can scarcely hide their lack of enthusiasm.

Mixed Signals From Leaders

First, the defense minister suggested that Lebanon might not want its troops in the area being vacated by the Israelis, and hinted that maybe the Syrians would fill the vacuum instead.

Next, Prime Minister Salim Hoss for weeks refused to say whether Lebanon would cooperate with the U.N. in the event of an Israeli pullback. Only Wednesday did Hoss belatedly confirm his government’s willingness to have U.N. troops redeploy along the border after the Israelis leave.

In the meantime, President Emile Lahoud has repeatedly warned that the Israeli withdrawal could complicate Lebanon’s security. He has asked that the U.N.’s peacekeeping force also be saddled with the job of going into nearby refugee camps and disarming Palestinian guerrillas. That’s a task almost guaranteed to discourage any foreign government from participating.

All in all, Lebanon’s leadership has been giving off mixed signals about the Israeli pullback. And this in turn has irked Lebanese who fear that their country’s interests are being slighted in favor of Syria, which has tied peace efforts here to its own goal of getting back the Golan Heights, seized by Israel in 1967.

“The view of many people is we should welcome the departure” of the Israelis, said Michael Young, a Lebanese political commentator. “They ask, ‘How long are we destined to remain at war in order for the Syrians to get back their territory?’ ”

By planning to depart Lebanon without making any territorial concession to Syria, Young believes, Israel is making its boldest gambit to drive a wedge between the Syrian and Lebanese “peace tracks,” which the government of Syrian President Hafez Assad and its Lebanese supporters had vowed to keep inseparable.

No one here knows yet whether Assad will take this move lying down or try to upset Israel’s plans.

Publicly, spokesmen for the Syrian president are saying an Israeli withdrawal is good for the Arab cause and are congratulating the Lebanese guerrillas, mainly Iranian-funded Shiite Muslims of the Hezbollah movement. They portray Lebanon as a victory: the first time that an Arab military force has compelled Israel to leave occupied territory.

Privately, however, the Syrian leadership is presumed to be seething because the nation stands to lose its most effective tool to pressure the Jewish state: guerrilla attacks against Israeli troops in Lebanon.

“It is a very shrewd chess game,” said Tewfik Mishlawi, a Lebanese journalist and political analyst. “One thing is clear in my mind: that Syria could ruin any agreement that is not to its liking.”

If Israel pulls out, he said, “I don’t think Syria will maintain the status quo. . . . It will not let Israel be comfortable.”

One widely discussed possibility is that the Syrians might stand aside and let radical Palestinian groups based in Lebanon, or perhaps Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas, begin unrestrained cross-border operations against northern Israel.

But Israel already has warned that if that happens, it will answer with massive retaliation against Lebanon and perhaps Syria as well, in what could open a new chapter in the long cycle of Arab-Israeli violence.

“This is a very dangerous situation we come to,” Mishlawi said. “It could start another war.”

To Western ears, such warnings sound a little overblown more than two decades after the Camp David peace accord and nearly 10 years since a groundbreaking peace conference in Madrid.

So far, the United States, France and other Western countries have been sending strong hints to Syria not to make trouble, warning that any violence after the Israelis withdraw will be laid immediately at its doorstep.

But many Lebanese feel anxious all the same about what Syria might do, because in the past they have been the ones who usually paid the highest price.

Vivid Memories of Israeli Retaliation

Memories are vivid here of Israel’s 1996 bombing campaign to punish Lebanon for Hezbollah rocket attacks. Operation Grapes of Wrath struck at Lebanon’s infrastructure, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and resulted in the deaths of about 200 civilians.

During this nation’s civil war, the Lebanese also got ample firsthand experience of Assad’s strong will and his ability to shape events in Lebanon. No one here can forget how quickly bombs and assassinations, attributed to Syria and its allies, upended a 1983 U.S.-engineered plan to install a pro-Israel government in Beirut.

The other danger is internal. With Israel leaving, some Lebanese such as Tueni see now as the moment to press for Syrian withdrawal as well and for Lebanon to regain its independence.

Syria has at least 30,000 troops in Lebanon, and the Lebanese joke that they are there mainly to protect the hundreds of thousands of low-wage Syrian guest workers who have invaded the country. But there is little doubt that resentment against Syria cuts across most segments of this society.

At the same time, many here fear that any attempt to tamper with the status quo could lead to renewed fighting among the Lebanese themselves.

So it was unsettling last month when small anti-Syrian protests broke out at several Lebanese universities, only to be quickly tamped down by security forces.

Among those reportedly arrested were student followers of Paris-based former military commander Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, who had opposed Syria during the civil war. Meanwhile, an explosion was reported at a shantytown inhabited by Syrian workers near the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.

Naseen Halaby, a 21-year-old worker, said he does not feel optimistic about Israel’s plans to leave the zone it occupies, almost abutting his town of Nabatiyeh.

“There will be peace [with Israel] when they leave,” he predicted, gesturing in the direction of the Israeli positions. “But then there may be a civil war between our own people.”