From: eliedw@ulrik.uio.no (Elie Dib Wardini)
Subject: Re: New York Times article
Organization: Univerity of Oslo, Semitics dep.
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 16:22:46 GMT

In article <1992Sep04.002040.2458843@locus.com> jle@locus.com (John
Elghani/10000000) writes:


>			^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>HOW untrue.  The only opposition is the Phalangists and Company ( The Kataeb
Party).  Besides, the majority of Lebanon are muslims, not even one oposition
voice sounded out of the muslim community.  In fact great amounts of the
Christinas in Lebanon voted.  Take all of the North's Zghartawiyeen, Al
Qbayyat, ...etc all had candidates, and no oposition.
>
>I don't know why people like to lie.   Take it from the Article, NY times, the
known to be pro-israel.

>jle
>


In the July 24th. 1992 edition of Middle East international Jim Muir, BBs
correspondant in Middle East wrote from Beirut:

(printed without permission)

Lebanon: Leap into the unknown

With the near certainty, at MEI press time, that the Syrian-backed Lebanese
gevernment was about to call the country's first general elections for 20
years, Lebanon was again poised to plunge into uncharted waters. Only a
last-minute change of heart in Damascus, of which there is no sign, could avert
a decision which should have caused rejoicing throughout the land but which
instead risked opening new breaches and possibly even civil unrest, some
pessimists warned.

With parliament on 16 July obediently endorsing an amended election law which
was itself the object of virulent objections from many quarters, nothing stood
in the way of a cabinet announcement calling for polling to take place in
several stages between late August and mid-September, starting with Beirut and
ending with the South.

As the moment of decision approached and tension mounted, one thing was clear.
Virtually no Lebanese leader really wanted the election to take place under
such conditions. The momentum for the move came almost entirely from Syria,
whose hold over the Beirut government is indisputable and irresistible.
Seperate pilgremages to Damascus by the Lebanese president, prime minister and
House speaker, concerned at the bitter and widespread rejection of the election
proposal by Maronites, cut no ice. The poll, Syrian Vice-President Abd al-Halim
Khaddam declared on 16 July, would go ahead, though of corse Syria would not
interfere. "The Lebanese state takes its decisions completely independantly
from us," he added for good measure.

Some local observers were puzzled as to why the Syrians should be so insistent
on pushing ahead with the elections in such contentious circumstances,
especially as they would find it hard to elect a chambre more melleable than
the present one. The most obvious explanation was that Damascus, aware that
preasures to redeploy its troops from Beirut and the coast to the Eastern Beqaa
Valley may mount after September, was eager to ensure the elction of a
thoroughly controllable Beirut parliament whose mandate, unlike that of the
current chamber, will run beyond the election of the next President of the
Republic in 1995. This, bearing in mind that the chamber which currently enacts
Syria's will so faithfully is the same which elected Beshir Gemayel president
in the shadow of Israeli tanks in 1982.

Syria's ability to manipulate the new parliament will be enhanced by the
amendments intorduced into the electoral law by the bill passed through the
chamber on 16 July, which raised the number of deputies to 128 from the 108
agreed on in the Taif accords and rearrenged constituencies so that some areas
will vote on the basis of the Muhafazat (governorate), as stipulated in the
Taif agreements, while others will do so on the basis of the smaller Cazas
(districts). A number of new deputies were tagged on to areas in the north and
east where Syrian troops will remain even if the supposed redeployment takes
place, ensuring that Syria's will cannot be ignored.

Chorus of opposition
The election law amendments were one of the main objections raised by the
chorus of opposition to the poll plans. Its passage through parliament was
resisted by a rump of mainly Christian deputies, most of whom had supported
Taif and saw the election as a deviation. The opponents included the Phalangist
leader George Saadeh, who had played the key role in delivering the Christian
side in Taif.

The Christians were by no means the only critics. Another outspoken opponent -
although his deputies were obliged to vote along with the amended law - was the
Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. "I think it is not the right moment for having
elections," he told MEI. "The way the new law was promulgated was just a sort
of decree which will lead us one day to a kind of dictatorship. I don't like
it. Let's be frank. The Syrians want this election to try to give themselves a
kind of credibility. We are not against the Syrians, but this is not the proper
way to give them, or give ourselves, credibility. We have more important issues
to solve - the economic situation, the government, the Lebanese administration,
which is in a total shambles and is totally corrupt."

While many on the Muslim side of the fence have quietly shared Jumblatt's
views, few would dare say so. Muslim leaders began preparing for the elction -
including even the radical Hizbullah, which announced that it would take part
despite the fact that so far it has been excluded from the governments set up
after Taif.

The onus of overt opposition thus fell in the Christians, and more specifically
the Maronites, whose leadership has been divided and weakened to a point where
a big question-mark over its ability to unite and resist. The main political
factions in the hard-line Maronit camp - the Phalangists, the Lebanese forces
(now playing politics after supposedly ending its militia carrer), the National
Liberal party (whose leader, Dany Chamoun, was mudered in 1990) and the
followers of the exiled Michel Aoun at least managed to from a joint committee
to direct their anti-election strategy. Doubts were raised by trends within the
Phalangist party favourable to taking part in the election, though the other
factions all insisted that would boycott the poll and the Lebanese Forces
leader Samir Geagea called for a general strike to protest the scheme.

More worrying for the government of Rashi al-Sulh was the critical position
adopted by the Maronite Patriarch Nasrullah Sfeir, who strongly objected to the
holding of elections while foreign armies remain entrenched in Lebanon and
while hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, displaced by the war, are unable to
return to their homes and vote. Like many other crtics, the Patriarch did not
rule out mass demonstrations and strikes to protest the poll - something the
government was apparently determined to suppress. This led some observers to
fear that a combination of political dissent and economic unrest could produce
some really ugly violence, bearing in mind the scenes which brought down the
Karami government in May.

Returning the dispalced
In an effort to defuse some of the opposition, the government put its weight
behind an ambitious plan for the return of the dispalced. On 21 July (the day
before the expected announcement of the election dates), the first phase of a
plan to return the displaced to their homes went into motion, embracing 116
areas, twons and villages streching from Beirut, through the mountains, tothe
South. It was an ambitious and complex project - many of the displaced are
living in houses earlier vacated by other displaced people, and their original
houses are either occupied by other refugees or completely destroyed - and
would clearly need a great deal of both time and money.

While the energetic pursuit of the issue was clearly linked to the impending
election and was dismissed as a manoevre by many of the displaced themselves,
its patron, government minister Elie Hobeiqa of Sabra and Shatila fame, was
bent on making his name among the Christians by making a success of the
project; given his close ties with the Syrians, the scheme - of paramount
importance if Lebanon is to be reintegrated - might stand a chance of success
despite the numerous problems facing it.

The commencement of the refugee return plan coincided with another measure
taken by the government to quell the critics, some of whom had insisted that
the general level of public armament precluded a free and fair election. A
cabinet decree ordering the surrender of small arms and ammunition exipred on
20 July, with the army under orders to begin raiding suspected caches the
following day. Ironically, there were fears that the measures might be
exploited by the authorities to crack down further on the already largely
neutred Christian camp.

The decsion to push for elections was in many ways a leap into the unknown. How
would Israel react? Would its friends and agents try to subvert the poll? Would
its ally in the southern border strip, Antoine Lahd, disrupt polling by opening
artillery fire on other parts of the South if the strip were excluded, as the
government planned to do? Given that Lebanon is Lebanon, there were a hundred
things that could happen. The uncertainty led to another plunge in the value of
the battered Lebanese pound, bringing it perilously close to the 2,000 mark
against the dollar which triggered the May riots and brought the government
down despite Syria's efforts to prop it up.
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