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Beyond Salvation?
Joseph Matar / Beirut
(September 11, 2000) The political and military decline of Lebanon's Christian community leaves many of its members wondering if it has any future at all
On the first Sunday following Israel's hasty May withdrawal from South Lebanon, for the first time in 200 years, mass was not celebrated in the historic Maronite church of Qlayaa.
A Christian village 14 kilometers from the Israeli border in what used to be the security zone, with an original population of 3000, Qlayaa has become a synonym for heroism and bravery among Lebanon's Christian community over the decades. In the 1970s and early 80s it faced off the PLO and later, the Shi'ite fundamentalist Hizballah. More recently, it was a bastion of the South Lebanon Army, Israel's proxy force in the security zone.
But that Sunday in late May, thousands of partisans of the Shi'ite movements of Hizballah and Amal flocked to the village, hoisting their flags over public and private buildings alike. The jubilant mobs pillaged private property, further scaring the locals who, hearing the commotion, rushed out of church before mass had begun to protect their empty homes.
With the now victorious Hizballah dominating South Lebanon and the Biqa valley and a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist movement growing ominously in the North, the Christians of Lebanon are feeling squeezed. The seemingly everlasting Syrian hegemony over the whole country doesn't help. The community, pervaded by a sense of having been betrayed by its "natural" ally, Israel, faces an uncertain future. Many feel they have no future here at all.
Though once the dominant denomination by a narrow majority (the last official census, from the 1930s, showed a Christian-Muslim ratio of 6-5), recent voter lists published by the Interior Ministry for the late August parliamentary elections show three Muslims for every two Christians among Lebanon's population of roughly 4.5 million.
Among the factors that have contributed to dwindling Christian numbers are lower birthrates � Christian families have up to three children while Muslims have at least seven � and emigration, which drains the relatively cosmopolitan Christian community more than the others.
At the same time, the outbreak of the 15-year civil war in 1975, initially between the Christians and the PLO, sparked a process of displacement and internal migration that has permanently changed the demographic map of the country. Sectarian bloodletting, together with the search for better economic opportunities, sent the Christians living in Muslim-dominated areas on the peripheries fleeing into the Christian hinterlands of East Beirut and the Christian parts of the central Mount Lebanon district. The Christians also engaged in their own bloodletting to rid Mount Lebanon of their Muslim rivals. Large tracts of the country including West Beirut, the Druse-controlled part of Mount Lebanon, the North, the South and the Biqa valley, were almost emptied of Christian inhabitants.
Now, with Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon, the small Christian presence in the Shi'ite-dominated South has been decimated even further. The Christians had constituted the core of the 2,500-man South Lebanon Army, taking command and operating the force's heavy weaponry. Following the SLA's rapid collapse, some 2,000 families headed for Israel, others for Beirut. Yet more emigrated abroad. As a result, the Christian community of the South, formerly some 20 percent of the area's population of 250,000, has been slashed in half.
For two months after Israel's withdrawal, appeals by Christian spiritual and political leaders for the deployment of the Lebanese Army to keep the peace in the area fell on deaf ears in Beirut and Damascus. The 1,000 lightly armed gendarmes who were dispatched instead to the former security zone proved no match for the thousands of militiamen and armed mobs. Only in Au-gust, under mounting international pressure, did the government agree to send a joint unit of 500 soldiers and 500 gendarmes south under the command of the Interior Ministry, not the army.
QLAYAA, UNTIL recently a bustl-ing village, is now half-deserted. Hundreds of its former inhabitants � some members of the SLA, and others who'd been employed by the Israeli "civil administration" � have taken refuge in Israel. Others have fled the village because they simply felt unsafe. A long line of Lebanese leaders, including the president and the prime minister, made the pilgrimage to Qlayaa in the weeks following the withdrawal, appealing to all those who left for Israel to come back and face a "fair trial."
Unsurprisingly, there's been little positive response. "In the absence of a credible Lebanese authority," stated Qlayaa's priest, Father Mansour Hokayem, "and in the presence of thousands of irregular armed elements, I find it rather difficult to convince those who remained here to stay, let alone asking those in Israel to come back and face harsh sentences." The few dozen who have come back face imprisonment of a few months or years, like those who had earlier turned themselves in. Only the unlikely offer of a general amnesty would persuade most of those who took refuge in Israel to return without fear.
While mass is once again being celebrated in Qlayaa, locals still voice concern about the presence of Hizballah and other armed militias. According to Hokayem, people suspected of connections with the SLA are being snatched from their homes by Hizballah cadres, taken to undisclosed locations for questioning and sometimes beaten before being handed over to the authorities or released.
Said one Qlayaa resident: "All the government officials came here parading with dozens of bodyguards. I only wish they'd left half their guards behind to help calm our fears, instead of coming and giving us lessons in patriotism." Other Christian towns and villages in the South � Ain Ebl, Debl and Rmeich, to name a few � share the same fears about their future.
Wanting to preserve an image of a "clean victory," Hizballah has made efforts to soothe Christian anxiety by constant reassurances. Still, its armed presence in the villages is a constant reminder of the Christians' military and political defeat.
Hizballah's show of force following Israel's withdrawal from the South has rattled the nerves of Christians all over the country. The Shi'ite fundamentalists, under the nose of the Lebanese Army, staged a series of victory parades from the North to the South, and from Beirut to the Biqa in the east, displaying pieces of tanks, armed personnel carriers and command cars left behind by the disbanded SLA militia.
"They are growing in numbers and we are shrinking. How can we face such a threat?" said Fuad, a 22-year-old Christian as Hizballah's convoy passed through the Christian port town of Jounieh, north of Beirut.
The proportional decline has, over the years, bred a new realism in certain Christian quarters. Veteran journalist Joseph Abu Khalil, a member of the Maronite Phalange party and a former adviser to the late president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, used to argue that independent Lebanon had been created by the French in the 1940s for the Christians. "If the Christians lose power," he wrote in his book "Lebanon and Syria: The Hardship of Brotherhood" published in 1989, "then there would be no need for Lebanon to still exist. It could become an integral part of Syria."
But in the wake of Gemayel's assassination in 1982, and the steady military and political decline in Christian power, Abu Khalil has changed course. He now advocates building a good Christian relationship with the Syrians. Considered something of a maverick by anti-Syrian Christian hard-liners, Abu Khalil believes that Lebanon's Christians are a danger to themselves. "They tend to lose themselves in impossible dreams without any attention to the geopolitical facts surrounding them," he wrote recently in the independent Nidaa al-Watan daily. "We live in a mostly Muslim area; we have to take this into consideration and try to build up a good relationship with our surroundings."
Most of the Christian adventures in Lebanon, he argues, have in the end boomeranged against the whole community. The most recent case in point, he says, was Gen. Michel Aoun's anti-Syrian war of liberation in the late 1980s. That resulted in an intra-Christian war that, rather than ridding Lebanon of the Syrians, gave Damascus total hegemony over it.
Ironically, the Syrians have done more to preserve the power of Lebanon's Christians than anyone else. The 1989 inter-Lebanese Taif Accord that ended the civil war, backed by the Syrians and the United States, consecrated the office of the presidency for the Christian Maronites, along with a Sunni Muslim prime minister and a Shi'ite speaker. It also split the legislature equally between Christians and Muslims, giving the Christians more proportional power than their numbers warrant.
However, Syria has spared no effort to put that power only in the hands of weak Christian leaders who owe their allegiance to Damascus alone. Gen. Aoun was forced into exile in France. Samir Geagea, the commander of the once mighty Christian Lebanese Forces militia, is serving a life sentence for alleged war crimes. Today, the Christians are the only sector left without a militia or powerful organization of any kind, while the aftermath of the Israeli withdrawal has made it patently clear that all the other militias � Druse, Sunni, and most obviously Shi'ite � are still armed to the teeth.
THE MARGINALIZATION OF THE Christians has led in recent years to a level of emigration that is hemorrhaging the community nationwide. In the last decade, 270,000 Lebanese, mostly Christians, left the country.
At the same time, internal displacement and the Christian flight to the cities have permanently changed Lebanon's sectarian map. Dozens of Christian villages in the Biqa valley and in the north are now deserted. Baalbek, the capital of the Biqa that once had a thriving Christian minority, has become a totally Muslim city. While the official day off for the rest of the country is Sunday, Baalbek closes down on Fridays.
The village of Douris, just outside Baalbek, also once had a mixed Muslim-Christian population. "When we were kids we could tour the whole village by jumping from roof to roof," reminisced a Christian former inhabitant who now lives in Beirut. He left Douris with his family when the civil war broke out in 1975, and later joined the Lebanese Forces. "I went back in 1990 and didn't recognize the place," he recalled. "Most of the Christians had left, and the village had grown from about 30 houses to more than 200 buildings, occupied by Shi'ites. I knew there was no future for me there. I went back to Beirut where I've settled for good."
Douris, in the meantime, has become a bastion of Hizballah.
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