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Lebanon the battlefield for the Middle East

BEIRUT: When Lebanese Druze militiamen rained shells on their Christian foes in 1983, their artillery came from Syria; when Christians left car bombs on West Beirut streets they were packed with explosives bearing Hebrew writing.

The "civil war" ended a decade ago but as Lebanon marks the 25th anniversary of the opening shots in the brutal conflict on Thursday, the country remains captive to outside struggles. Once again Syria and Israel are waging a test of wills on Lebanese soil.

"The history of Lebanon is that it is a place for the intersection of factors from the whole Middle East," said Suheil al-Natour, a Palestinian intellectual who has spent his entire adult life amid the political intrigues of the region.

The debate over responsibility for the 15-year war will never be resolved.

Certainly Lebanese share blame. The struggle over Christian Maronite domination of a country where they were a minority, deepening economic disparities and the weakness of the state were leading to a crisis even before the April 13, 1975 ambush by the Lebanese Phalangist militia of the Maronites that marks the start of the war.

That attack on a bus carrying Palestinians and Muslim Lebanese from a football match killed 30 people. But, instead of Lebanese resolving the conflict quickly as historians believe was possible, it widened until countries from Iran to the United States were involved.

VICTIM OF ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

Every dispute found fertile ground in free-wheeling Lebanon. Rival Baath party regimes in Syria and Iraq destroyed each others offices in Beirut, the Iraqi embassy in Lebanon was blown up in 1981 after its forces invaded Iran.

Armenians assassinating Turkish diplomats and Japanese Red Army anarchists found refuge. By the mid-1980s Lebanese groups backed by Iran, which was battling the United States, were kidnapping Westerners.

"All the time internal factors could find external factors to continue," said Natour, who throughout was in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine - one of the Palestinian factions involved in the fighting.

Outside Natour's office in a Beirut refugee camp, a Kalashnikov-toting DFLP guard still stands anachronistically. Above all, Lebanon was a victim of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Forces of the Palestine Liberation Organisation that were central to the conflict, operating a state-within-a-state even before the civil war, began using Lebanon as their base against Israel after they were driven from Jordan in 1970.

"By 1976 the two main actors in the war were not Lebanese, but Syria and the PLO," said Farid el Khazen, a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. "No Lebanese group could have continued without foreign support."

ISRAEL INVADES

As the PLO and its Lebanese leftist allies gained, Syria intervened to save the Maronites, probably fearing that a Palestinian victory would draw Israel into Lebanon. But Maronite leaders soon were plotting to be rid of the Syrians and opened channels to Israel.

Any hope for early peace disappeared when Israel's 1978 invasion sent refugees flooding north, creating Beirut's impoverished southern suburbs that became a hotbed of Muslim Shi'ite fundamentalism in the next decade.

By the time Israel invaded again in 1982, the Syrians were aligned with Palestinians and leftist Lebanese groups while the Maronite militias collaborated openly with the invaders.

Israel's siege of Beirut forced out the PLO. But Israel then let its Christian allies methodically slaughter hundreds of civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

The massacre drew French, British, Italian and U.S. forces into Beirut. Although termed peacekeepers, the United States was also pursuing Israel's agenda of securing a peace treaty with the largely occupied country.

DRAWING IN THE WEST

Syria could not win on the battlefield but had other methods. The bombing of the U.S. embassy and the deaths of hundreds of U.S. and French soldiers in suicide attacks drove those two countries out by early 1984.

Israel's efforts to impose a treaty that would have isolated Syria collapsed and it dug in north of its border, continuing an occupation begun in 1978. Lebanese guerrillas, backed by Syria and Iran, began attacks that continue to this day.

Although the peace terms that shape Lebanon now were agreed in 1989, the civil war had one final burst of bloodletting. In a play for power, the Maronite general Michel Aoun bombarded his own capital in a fratricidal struggle with Maronite militiamen.

Syrian intervention drove him from the presidential palace in October 1990 and later into exile in Paris, the former colonial power behind the sectarian power-sharing tradition.

It was peace - for most. While Beirut was rebuilt, fighting in the south continued. Now, as Israel moves to withdraw by July, Lebanese fear that also might not end the conflict.

Syria has warned of attacks from Lebanon unless Israel returns the occupied Golan Heights; Israel has made just as clear that Lebanon will face severe retribution if that happens.

A Beirut newspaper called last month for Syria to take its 35,000 troops from Lebanon and Lebanese ask privately why they should confront Israel if its forces leave. But the Beirut government, dominated by Damascus, has said the fate of the two countries is linked inextricably.

Full peace after 25 years of conflict remains in the hands of Lebanon's neighbours.

"The external factor remains," said Nizar Hamzeh, a U.S.-trained political scientist at the American University of Beirut. "The fate of Lebanon is no different than that of other small countries squeezed by more powerful neighbours."-Reuters