Post-Conflict Transition in Lebanon

The Disappeared of the Civil War

Lyna Comaty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315386003
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Addressing one of the most pressing issues of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that is still unresolved almost 30 years later, this book adopts a political, sociological, and anthropological approach to look at periods of transition from conflict to peace in Lebanon.

Inducing a set of questions about the social and political system, the post-conflict state has been pushing for a politics of amnesty and amnesia. The case study delves into the notion of transition from conflict to peace in Lebanon by looking in the case of the estimated 17,000 people who disappeared during the Civil War. Using the concept of liminality to understand the evolution of the issue over the years, the book follows the trajectory of the relatives of the missing, who have formed a communitas – a group sharing strong feelings of comradeship and brother/sisterhood by virtue of finding themselves in the same situation.

Offering a novel way of looking at transitions, the book is a significant contribution to peace studies, and it will be an interest of students and academics working in human rights, political science, and the Middle East disciplines.

1 Taif

Between a peace agreement and a political project

This chapter outlines the main events, actors, and outcomes of Lebanon’s Civil War, including some background on the issue of the disappeared, and discusses how the conflict ended with the Taif Peace Agreement, an agreement that, on the one hand, was a continuation of the sectarian power-sharing model of government and, on the other hand, an outline for far-reaching reforms to abolish political sectarianism, in line with the National Pact of 1943. In this sense, the Taif accord constituted a continuity of the Lebanese system, since the country has since its birth intended to abolish sectarianism, but has always postponed it. This strongly resonates with the state of transition that the country finds itself in the postwar period. The order born from the signing of the Taif Agreement, which I term the “Taif regime,” did not deal with the unresolved sociopolitical issues of the civil war or with the question of accountability for crimes committed but rather privileged security over reconciliation and peace over justice. In this context, the issue of the disappeared remained unresolved, mainly because the perpetrators of the crimes were given amnesty and remained the main actors in power as the sectarian power-sharing system continued. This regime did everything it could to prevent the state from taking up its role as a master of ceremony for the communitas, as will be explored in Chapter 3. Here, the political stakes involved in the continued non-resolution of the issue of the disappeared will be clarified.

In its conceptualization of peacebuilding and conflict resolution, Lebanon drifted away from the trajectories of most post-conflict countries that institutionalized peace after their violent military dictatorships or civilian violence by setting up commissions of reconciliation, such as Morocco’s Equity and Reconciliation Commission set up in 2004 or Fiji’s Unity and Reconciliation Commission set up in 2005, or commissions of investigation such as Argentina and Chile formed in the 1980s. Instead, the setup of a post-conflict Government of National Reconciliation from 1990 to 1992 and the signing of the Treaty of Coordination, Fraternity and Cooperation with Syria brought former foes to power in a consensus-building logic rather than moral-based peacebuilding policies that could have included the vetting of former warlords and could have restricted the rise to power of new elites, as was done in many countries with different outcomes: Eastern European countries after the fall of communism or more recently in Iraq within the politics of de-Ba’thification. In addition, the transition from conflict to peace in Lebanon was outlined by the Taif Agreement, the Document of National Understanding, which mostly focused on power sharing and did away with much of the possible work on formal reconciliation, democratization, and the building of peace. The choices that Lebanon had to make were carefully designed in a logic of balancing the participation of political elite with the regional stakes at play, as well as minimizing the probability of actors hindering the peace process. In this way, the various interests and circumstances that have made the country remain stuck in transition become clear and are further discussed later in this chapter.

The Lebanese Civil War: violence and its outcomes

15 years of civil war

From April 13, 1975, until an uncelebrated October 13, 1990, Lebanon lived through a series of conflicts commonly referred to in local jargon as “The Events” (al-hawâdith), or the civil war. Over the years, different factions fought each other in violent and bloody combats, leading to massive bloodshed and the destruction of an entire country. An estimated 45,000–50,000 combatants from all armed parties were involved (Makdisi and Sadaka, 2003). Over those 15 years, and in intermittent momentums, 29 Lebanese armed groups mushroomed in the territory. Only nine of them were linked to well-organized and trained political parties, while the rest were spread out according to geographical locations and needs of the moment. Eventually, these dissolved or were integrated into the main militias (Labaki and Abou-Rjeily, 1994). In addition to Lebanese participants, and the Israeli and Syrian armed forces, 13 Palestinian armed groups also took part in the 15 years of violence that opposed two main camps over political, economic, sectarian, and regional differences.

One camp was composed of the Christian right-wing parties of the Kataeb, founded by Pierre Gemayel, which merged with other groups to become the Lebanese Forces (LF) in August 1976. Together with other armed groups, notably the National Liberal Party (NLP) founded by Camille Chamoun and headquartered in the Chouf, and the Marada, founded by Suleiman Frangieh and mostly located in the North of the country, they formed the “Lebanese Front.” The entirety of the front consisted of about 14,000 fighters (Makdisi and Sadaka, 2003). The camp was by no means homogenous, as it cracked in the early 1980s, and eventually armed groups fought each other in the decade preceding the Taif Agreement. The main objective of the Lebanese Front was to counter the opposing front, composed of approximately 27,000 fighters from major and minor militias and armed groups belonging to the leftist, pan-Arab, pro-Palestinian movement, referred to as the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) (Makdisi and Sadaka, 2003). These included but were not limited to Amal, the armed wing of the Shiite-based Movement of the Dispossessed founded by Imam Musa al-Sadr¹; the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO); and the Druze-based Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) founded by leftists Druze intellectual Kamal Jumblatt and headed by his son, Walid, after the former’s assassination in March 1977. Alongside these were some minor groups such as the Murâbitûn, the Communists, the Nationalist Socialist Syrian Party (NSSP), the Nasserists, and the Arab Socialist Union that were close to the Murâbitûn, and finally the ‘Asifa and the forces of the Sâ’iqa, two small Palestinian armed groups.

The 1980s saw the emergence of Hezbollah, the Islamic resistance to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, with approximately 5,000 Shi’a fighters. By then, many movements within this camp had turned against each other for internal, political, or regional reasons and the homogeneity of the movement cracked and effectively disappeared with the successive wars that intermittently opposed Amal to the Lebanese Army, Hezbollah, and the Palestinians in the mid-1980s. Added to this large diversity of armed groups, the Lebanese army divided and disintegrated in 1976, and the Syrian and Israeli armies became involved in the successive conflicts. There were also quick stabilizing efforts involving an Arab deterrent force of 30,000 men, mainly Syrian-led, sent in by the Arab League in January 1977, a UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) after the Israeli invasion of 1978,² as well as a Western multinational force in 1983.

The external interventions went hand in hand with political maneuvers that gave the conflict certain characteristics³ and privileged the thesis of the “War of Others” (Tueini, 1985). In this vein, as pointed out by a majority of academics, “no country played as influential and sustained a role as Syria” (Zahar, 2003a: 113). The Syrian army entered the country in May 1976 at the demand of the then President of the Republic, Sleiman Frangieh, with the official objective of helping the Christians fight the PLO and their Lebanese allies, but the intervention quickly took another turn. In fact, its motives turned out to be shaped neither by domestic nor Lebanese politics but rather geopolitics (Hinnebush, 1998). Hafez al-Assad had no intention of letting the Christians fall into the arms of Israel. But what was planned as a temporary military assistance by a regional power instead lasted for 29 years. It was not until 2005 that the Syrian army withdrew its forces from the country after popular protests coupled with international calls for withdrawal put pressure on Hafez al-Assad’s son, Bachar, to exit the territory. Over the years, Lebanese proxies to the Syrian armed forces played an extension of their role.

For its part, the Israeli army invaded the country twice, in 1978 and 1982, with the objective of annihilating the PLO. Their presence in South Lebanon was extended to the South Lebanon army (SLA), headed by Antoine Lahd. The latter would carry out all “dirty” operations for the Israelis, such as the detention of Lebanese resistance members in the Khiam detention center south of Lebanon. The Israeli army withdrew in 2000 after the resistance operations were carried out by Hezbollah and international groups, and domestic pressures within Israel pushed them to withdraw from the self-declared Southern Security Zone confined to the SLA (Humphrey and Kisirwani, 2001) to full withdrawal in May 2000.⁴ Though all these local and regional actors shaped the Lebanese conflict(s) from 1975 until 1990, the polarization between the camps was by no means a fixed one; in fact, several groups within the two movements turned against each other over the 15 years.

A grim outcome of 15 years of violence

The official statistics published in 1992 put the number of victims of the civil war at approximately 144,240 dead, 184,051 injured, and 13,455 handicapped in an estimated population of four million.⁵ Other sources indicate the number of wounded was 350,000.⁶ Various figures give different numbers, privileging the categorization of victims into civilians, military, and militias. Based on newspapers and police reports, Labaki and Abou-Rjeily estimated the number to be 71,328 dead and 97,144 wounded Lebanese civilians and military between 1975 and 1990 (Labaki and Abou-Rjeily, 1994: 37). This discrepancy in counting will be explored further in this chapter, but it is mainly due to the absence of a central authority, state, or other official institution. Over the years, the number of 150,000 dead has become the main citation when referring to the civil war’s deathtoll.

In addition to the bloody combats that took mostly civilian lives, there were also 3,641 car bombings in the territory. Added to this, Labaki and Abou-Rjeily insist on the fact that the conflict’s most dramatic consequence has been the emigration of 894,717 persons out of the country, constituting about one-third of the population (Labaki and Abou-Rjeily, 1994: 212). Moreover, an estimated 875,000 people emigrated from the country over the 15 years of war (Labaki and Abou-Rjeily, 1994: 205), and between 600,000 and 800,000 people were displaced from their place of residence, whether internally or outside the country (Labaki and Abou-Rjeily, 1994). This number amounted to 125,000 households, or 22.2% of the total population (Kanafani-Zahar, 2011). Linked to the practice of displacement that sought to create a feeling of terrorization within populations, the census of 1992 also reported 17,415 disappeared and 13,968 kidnapped, most of whom were never freed or had never returned home – to this day. These numbers exclude the Palestinians who died as a result of fights with Israeli forces, and fights between Palestinian groups and Amal in the War of the Camps⁷ of 1984 (Makdisi and Sadaka, 2003).

For a population of four million, these numbers take on an added dimension when they are measured proportionally to, for example, the US population of roughly 316 million.⁸ In this vein, when considering the percent of the population, if we employ the generally used number of 17,415 disappeared in Lebanon, this number is comparable to around 1,375,785 missing American citizens, and 144,240 dead would be the equivalent of 11,394,960 American victims. Today, with the emergence of the discourse on transitional justice and the extensive work on collective memory, there is enough probability to affirm that the US government would have commemorated this humungous number of victims in one form or another.

Moreover, the war’s economical costs were enormous: in addition to the destruction of downtown Beirut as well as factories, ports, airports, roads, and entire villages, the costs of the war amount to somewhere between USD80 to 160 billion (in 1995 prices) (Makdisi and Sadaka, 2003), and unemployment mounted to 40% of the population. Worse than that, by 1989 the Lebanese pound had dramatically fallen from 0.5 to 1,800 Lebanese pounds/USD (Zahar, 2002).

Disappearances as a political act

As was developed previously, between 1975 and 1990, militias used many tactics to gain and maintain power, and the main ones involved spreading terror so as to establish strength and victory and dehumanizing the enemy to justify both the practices of violence and the violence of practices. Besides displacement, another technique to spread terror involved kidnappings and disappearances of both civilians and militiamen from the enemy side. It was so widespread that it became a dominant characteristic of the war, “a regular feature of daily life of the war” (Humaydan, 2006: 19). In addition to a practice of terror and a show of power by militias, disappearances were also used to induce displacement “for the very purpose of creating internal displacement that separated people along sectarian lines” (Maalouf, 2010: 266). In parallel to internal “communal terror” (Humphrey and Kisirwani, 2001: 10), kidnapping of internationals became a political tactic for cutting diplomatic ties or persuading foreign powers to withdraw from the country and cease involvement in the conflict (Labaki and Abou-Rjeily, 1994).

Kidnappings and disappearances became a common practice of violence since the beginning of the war. Over the 15 years, the years 1975 and 1976 hold the record for the most abductions and kidnappings (ICRC, 2013). During these years, abductions mostly took place along sectarian and political lines. People would be taken away at military or militia checkpoints, whether the fixed ones along the Green Line⁹ or the flying checkpoints. “Moreover, as the militias had not yet developed full-scale organizational structures, their approach to abductions was somewhat more haphazard and chaotic than was the case subsequently” (Young, 2000: 4).

The aftermath of Kamal Jumblatt’s assassination in March 1977 and the entry of new actors to the political and military checkers in 1976 and 1977, namely, the Syrian-dominated Arab deterrent force, gave a new turn to abductions. Suddenly, these became much more political- and military oriented, with a rise in abductions of opponents to the Syrian presence on Lebanese territory, in what was seen as interference in internal Lebanese affairs. This continued in line with Syrian polit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 Taif: between a peace agreement and a political project
• 2 Relatives of the disappeared, a communitas in liminality
• 3 The relationship between the state/regime and the communitas
• 4 The local external environment and the communitas
• 5 The communitas and the global discourse of human rights and transitional justice
• 6 The slide from global to local: mechanisms of liminality and unintended outcomes
• Conclusion – Looking beyond the transitory state: Lebanon three decades into the post-conflict
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index