Middle East - Anthony Ham [339]
By the 1950s, the National Assembly was once again struggling against economic crisis, along with growing support for pan-Arabism, which advocated the creation of a united Arab entity in the Middle East. In 1952, staunchly pro-Western president Camille Chamoun quickly garnered Muslim enemies by refusing all notions of pan-Arabism, and in 1958, when his term was about to end, the unpopular president tried to extend his presidency to a second term. Lebanon’s first civil war soon erupted, with pro-Western Maronites pitted against largely Muslim, pro–pan-Arabism opponents. Chamoun panicked, turning to the US for help, and on 15 July 1958, 15,000 US troops landed in Beirut.
The presence of US troops quelled trouble and Chamoun was finally persuaded to resign, to be replaced by a more even-handed president, Fouad Chehab. With Chehab’s talent for smoothing ruffled feathers, Lebanon soon prospered, Beirut rapidly developing as the banking capital of the Arab world. Civil war, believed the optimistic Lebanese, was a thing of the past.
The Swinging ’60s?
By the mid-’60s, Beirut, the newly crowned ‘Paris of the East’, was booming, but Palestinian refugees and the Shiites of the south remained in poverty. As Beirut basked in newfound riches, the less fortunate grew bitter and restive, and the good times were already numbered.
The collapse of the country’s largest bank in 1966 and soon the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War brought yet more Palestinian refugees fleeing into Lebanon. Refugee camps soon became centres of guerrilla resistance, and the government watched impotently as Palestinian attacks on Israel rapidly increased from Lebanese soil.
In May 1968, Israeli forces retaliated across the border. Meanwhile, with sectarian tensions growing, the Lebanese army clashed violently with Palestinian guerrillas. Palestinian forces proved too strong an opponent for the army, and in November 1969, Lebanon signed the Cairo Agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), agreeing to large-scale autonomy of its refugee camps and refugees’ freedom ‘to participate in the Palestinian revolution’.
Maronite opposition to the agreement was immediate. Many Muslims, on the other hand, felt an innate sympathy for their fellow Palestinians. In response, a group of Christians known as Phalangists began to arm and train young men, and by March 1970, fighting between Phalangists and Palestinians had erupted on Beirut’s streets, as southern Lebanon suffered under Israeli reprisals against relentless guerrilla attacks. Rapidly, the country factionalised and took up arms.
Civil War
It’s widely agreed that Lebanon’s civil war began on 13 April 1975 when Phalangist gunmen attacked a Beirut bus, killing 27 Palestinian passengers. Soon, it was outright chaos. In December, Phalangists stopped Beirut traffic and killed Muslim travellers. Muslims did the same, prompting ‘Black Saturday’ during which around 300 people died.
The slaughter rapidly reached horrific proportions. In January 1976, Phalangists led a massacre of some 1000 Palestinians in Karantina, a Beirut slum. Two days later, Palestinians attacked the southern coastal town of Damour, and killed over 500 Christians. In August, Phalangists set their sights on the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp, killing between 2000 and 3000 Palestinian civilians.
Soon Beirut was divided along the infamous Green Line, which split the city in two, with Christian enclaves to the east and Muslims to the west. Though allegiances and alliances along its border would shift many times in the coming strife, the Green Line would remain in place for another 15 years.
Syria & Israel Intervene
In 1976, the civil war gave Syria a reason to send tens of thousands of troops into Lebanon, initially sympathetic to the Palestinians and the pan-Arab cause. It wasn’t long, though, before Syria switched allegiance to the Maronite side,