Lebanon Bloody Battle for West Beirut

By Michael S. Serrill

During twelve years of civil war, foreign correspondents came to rely on the Commodore Hotel in West Beirut as a respite from the turmoil around them. Feuding militia leaders held press conferences there, and a string of hopeful peace envoys were among its guests. The Commodore's lively bar was renowned throughout the Middle East as a meeting place for those passing through Beirut. It was also the home of a parrot whose uncannily accurate imitation of an incoming artillery shell fooled more than a few newly arrived reporters. While cross fire occasionally damaged the aging seven-story edifice, it managed to remain open for business.

Last week the Commodore's luck ran out. The hotel became a killing ground in the bitter, fierce struggle between two Syrian-backed groups, the Shi'ite Amal militia and a leftist coalition of Druze militiamen and fighters of the pro-Soviet Lebanese Communist Party. At midweek, after an all-night battle, the Druze, lobbing grenades and delivering armor-piercing rockets, stormed the hotel and drove the Shi'ites out. The floors and walls of the lobby were stained with blood, and gaping holes made by rockets scarred its walls. By the time the last guests and employees had fled -- none, miraculously, were hurt -- looters were already at work stripping the building of everything from television sets to vacuum cleaners.

The sudden outbreak of fighting for control of Muslim West Beirut's commercial district was the worst to hit the area in three years. By week's end more than 200 people had been killed and some 400 wounded. Thousands more had been forced to go without food and water for days as gunmen fought pitched battles around them. Hostilities eased briefly late in the week as 4,000 Syrian troops, backed by hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers, massed in the nearby Chouf Mountains awaiting the order to move into West Beirut. Their mission: to enforce a cease-fire among Syria's feuding clients, one that might extend south all the way to the port city of Sidon. The sudden mobilization promised to become the largest Syrian presence in Beirut since before the 1982 Israeli invasion.

"Save Beirut from this inferno," pleaded Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami. Tank and artillery fire on downtown streets prevented fire trucks from reaching dozens of burning buildings in the Hamra district, which includes the Commodore and the American University of Beirut. West Beirut's once fashionable main thoroughfare, Rue Hamra, where the city's upper crust could buy anything from French perfume to Cuban cigars, was reduced to a smoke- filled war zone. Declared a retired Lebanese Army colonel: "It is a fight to the finish."

By the end of the week the Druze and the Communists, who had renewed an old alliance just last month, had the upper hand. They had pushed the Amal out of Hamra and the low-income Sunni Muslim district of Zarif and had begun shelling Shi'ite gunmen occupying the state television station in the Tallet Khayyat district, on the southern edge of West Beirut.

As the fighting continued, the big losers were clearly the Syrians. Damascushas 30,000 soldiers in northern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Initial pleas by the Damascus government for a cease-fire were ignored. At one point, Amal Leader Nabih Berri ordered his men to "stand fast. Fight until victory or martyrdom."

Prime Minister Karami led a Lebanese delegation that was summoned to Damascus, along with Druze Warlord Walid Jumblatt, to discuss a truce with Berri and Syrian President Hafez Assad. Despite Assad's resolve to send in troops, fast-moving events raised fresh doubts about his ability to control the warring militias, much less impose a wider peace in Lebanon. In the meantime, Lebanese police and 500 Syrian commandos in the city patrolled buffer zones between the combatants, as sporadic firefights made a mockery of the cease-fire.

The new fighting apparently forced Amal to withdraw many of its gunmen who had been laying siege to Palestinian refugee camps in the southern Beirut suburbs. Since October, Amal has blockaded the camps, preventing food and medicine from getting through, and in recent weeks the residents have been reduced to eating dogs, cats and rats to survive. During the past two weeks Amal allowed United Nations workers to drive in truckloads of food for the beleaguered refugees.

In the past, the Druze and Communist militias have had close ties to Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, whose fighters have aided in clashes with Christian militias. Thus Amal's siege of the Palestinians in the camps was opposed by the two groups. But tensions between the Druze and Shi'ites apparently were exacerbated by the presumed abduction last month of Anglican Envoy Terry Waite by pro-Iranian Shi'ite radicals. Waite, who was attempting to negotiate the release of some of the 24 foreign hostages held in Lebanon, vanished after he insisted that his Druze bodyguards leave him alone with his Shi'ite interlocutors.

As Beirut burned, there were few voices of sanity. Minister of Education Selim Hoss called for the resignation of Karami's ten-member national government, "because we are all failures." Said he: "It is time for the blood-shedding gunmen to listen to the unarmed honest citizen, on whose behalf - I say, 'No to all militias!' " Indeed, even the looming Syrian military intervention represented the addition of just one more volatile factor in the violent maelstrom that has brought Lebanon's tattered identity as a nation another step closer to extinction.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/Cairo