A Pledge for Unity

By Russ Hoyle

President Gemayel vows to link Christian and Muslim

"This is not the time for tears. It is the time for work." So declared Amin Gemayel, 40, last week as he addressed the members of the Lebanese Parliament, who had just elected him by a vote of 77 to 0 to a six-year term as President of their fragmented country. Gemayel spoke while standing beneath a black-draped portrait of his brother Bashir Gemayel, 34, who was killed by a bomb blast on Sept. 14, nine days before he was to have assumed the presidency. In that somber setting the new President-elect said: "I pledge to shoulder the monumental responsibility of reuniting and reconstructing Lebanon in the fashion my martyred brother had hoped to accomplish."

The selection of Amin Gemayel--a Maronite Christian, as was his assassinated brother--was the result of a rare display of unity between the country's Christians and Muslims. A lawyer who worked diligently as a member of Parliament for the past ten years to maintain ties with the country's various Muslim and Christian factions, Amin Gemayel has little of the charisma that made his tough-minded brother a popular hero among Lebanon's Christians. Still, Amin is no less dedicated than Bashir was to the main goals of the Phalangist Party: preserving the country's existing political balance, which in effect means the supremacy of Lebanese Christians.

Lebanon's 500,000 Maronites trace their history back to the 5th century. Followers of St. Maron settled in the rugged mountains of what is now northern Lebanon. In those years, Lebanon was a haven of tolerance for persecuted Muslim and Christian sects. The Maronites, who formed a union with Rome in the 12th century, are one of the so-called Eastern rites of the Roman Catholic Church, with their own jealously guarded traditions (including a married clergy and a liturgy celebrated in ancient Syriac).

A hardy and fiercely independent people, the Maronites struggled to preserve their culture through hundreds of years of foreign rule, first by the Arab caliphs (632-1258) and then by the Ottoman Turks. In the late 19th century, following a devastating massacre at the hands of the Druze sect, the Maronites were granted formal autonomy by the Turks. After the Ottoman empire was finally dissolved in 1920 and Lebanon came under French mandate, the Maronites continued to rule themselves. When Lebanon became independent in 1943, political power was divided among the various religious groups according to a 6-to-5 ratio of Christians to Muslims in the population. Under the National Covenant, an unwritten agreement reached at the time, the country's President is always a Maronite, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament a Shi'ite Muslim. But the Maronites overwhelmingly dominated the setup through their power in the military and their economic influence. Moreover, the Muslims are now believed to be the majority in the population.

Traditionally clannish, the Maronites had no real political organization until Pierre Gemayel, the father of Bashir and Amin, founded the paramilitary Phalangist Party in 1936. His purpose: to establish a political vehicle for the Maronites, something they had not really had before. Visiting the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Gemayel was reportedly impressed by the discipline of Hitler's Nazi Germany. He named his party after, and took many of his ideas from, the fascist Falange of Spain's Francisco Franco. Nowadays Phalangist leaders disavow any fascist doctrine and prefer to call their organization the Kataeb Party.

"We haven't left Lebanon," says the still defiant elder Gemayel, who is 76. "The Jews left Israel and were gone for nearly 2,000 years. The Palestinians left Palestine. We did not leave." It was not until 1948, when Palestinians fleeing the newly created state of Israel threatened to alter the Christian-Muslim balance in Lebanon, that Gemayel transformed the Phalangists into a fighting force. Maronites insist that the presence of armed Palestinians in Lebanon provoked the incident that sparked the bloody 1975 civil war: an attack on Pierre Gemayel by Muslim gunmen that left one of the Phalangist leader's bodyguards dead. Phalangist forces retaliated by shooting up a busload of Palestinians passing through a Christian area, starting the strife that set both Christian and Muslim factions against one another, destroyed much of downtown Beirut and left an estimated 40,000 dead.

By then, Bashir Gemayel had taken control of the Phalangist militia and ruthlessly set about consolidating his party's power over other Maronite Christian groups. Bashir's major challenger was Tony Franjieh, whose father Suleiman had been elected Lebanon's President in 1970, and whose forces fought alongside the Phalangists during the civil war. Franjieh controlled parts of northern Lebanon with his own militia. In June 1978, 200 Phalangists opened fire with rockets and guns on Franjieh's house in the resort village of Ehden, killing him, his wife, daughter and 35 others. Two years later, Bashir crushed the rival Christian forces of former President Camille Chamoun. The Gemayel forces created their own state within a state in East Beirut, making their own laws and efficiently handling such chores as running the telephones and collecting the garbage. Bashir Gemayel also was able to take control of the joint Lebanese Forces, a supermilitia numbering 25,000 that included most of the Christian factions.

Since the civil war, the Phalangists have been supported and encouraged by the Israelis. Although they share a common hatred of the Palestinian guerrillas, the Israelis viewed the Phalangists both as a counterweight to Syrian forces in Lebanon and as the group best able to stabilize the country. But for all the help the Israelis have given them over the years, the Phalangists did little to help when Israel invaded Lebanon in June. In a turbulent period, Bashir Gemayel did not want to risk offending the Muslims he had fought so often in the past, and was afraid he might have to fight again.

The main question facing President Amin Gemayel, and his country, is whether the ruling Christian Phalangists can create and maintain a working alliance with their old Muslim foes that will survive the honeymoon period of the new presidency. As he accepted a red-and-white sash imprinted with the Cedar of Lebanon as the emblem of his office, Gemayel last week indicated that he perceived the dangers. "A single concern grips us now," he said. "This is to stop the vicious cycle of bloody violence on Lebanon's soil.'' --By Russ Hoyle. Reported by William Stewart/Beirut

With reporting by William Stewart

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