Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon

A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict

Samir Khalaf

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9780231505369
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In this long-awaited work, Samir Khalaf analyzes the history of civil strife and political violence in Lebanon and reveals the inherent contradictions that have plagued that country and made it so vulnerable to both inter-Arab and superpower rivalries. How did a

fairly peaceful and resourceful society, with an impressive history of viable

pluralism, coexistence, and republicanism, become the site of so much

barbarism and incivility? Khalaf argues that historically internal grievances have been magnified or deflected to become the source of international conflict. From the beginning, he shows, foreign interventions have consistently exacerbated internal problems.

Lebanon's fragmented political culture is a byproduct of two general features. First, it reflects the traditional forces and political conflicts caused by striking differences in religious beliefs and communal and sectarian loyalties that continue to split the society and reinforce its factional character. Second, and superimposed on these, are new forms of socioeconomic and cultural stress caused by Lebanon's role in the continuing international conflicts in the region.

Khalaf concludes that Lebanon is now at a crossroads in its process of political and social transformation, and proposes some strategies to re-create a vibrant civil and political culture that can accommodate profound transformations in the internal, domestic sphere as well as mediate developments taking place internationally. Throughout, Khalaf demonstrates how the internal and external currents must be considered simultaneously in order to understand the complex and tragic history of the country. This deeply considered and subtle analysis of the interplay of complex historical forces helps us to imagine a viable future not only for Lebanon but also for the Middle East as a whole.

1 On Proxy Wars and Surrogate Victims

“When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.”

—René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1977)

“The practice of violence changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.”

—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958)

“When in doubt, just bomb Lebanon.”

—Charles Glass, The Daily Star (2000)

The social and political history of Lebanon—despite occasional manifestations of consensus, balance and harmony—has always been characterized by successive outbursts of civil strife and political violence. The brutality and duration of almost two decades of senseless bloodletting might have obscured some of the earlier episodes. Consequently, observers are often unaware that much of Lebanon’s history is essentially a history of intermittent violence. Dramatic episodes such as the peasant uprisings of 1820, 1840, and 1857 and the repeated outbreaks of sectarian hostilities in 1841, 1845, 1860, 1958, and the protracted civil war of 1975–92, reveal, if anything, the fragility of Lebanon’s confessional democracy, its deficient civility and perpetual grievances of dominant groups within society. Because of such inherent deficiencies and contradictions, Lebanon has always been vulnerable to inter-Arab and superpower rivalries. Quite often a purely internal or local grievance is magnified or deflected to become the source of international conflict. Conversely, such foreign intervention has always exacerbated internal cleavages.

Typical of small, communal and highly factionalized societies, much of the violence in the early nineteenth century took the form of internal strife between factions and feuding families. Little of it assumed an open confessional conflict. At least until 1840, the bulk of violence was more in the nature of feuds, personal and factional rivalry between bickering feudal chieftains, and rival families vying for a greater share of power and privilege in society. Nineteenth-century travelers and local chroniclers all uniformly commented on the spirit of amity that had characterized confessional relations at the time (for further details, see Hitti 1957; Salibi 1965; Khalaf 1979; Abraham 1981; Akarli 1993; Fawaz 1994).

Throughout the nineteenth century, Lebanon witnessed various forms of social change which began to dislocate feudal relations and disturb the balance of forces between the various sects and religious communities. The interplay of both external and internal transformations opened up the society to new ideological and cultural encounters, various forms of secular reforms, and generated further socioeconomic mobilization. Such swift transformations, however, also produced pronounced shifts in the relative socioeconomic and political positions of the various religious communities. These dislocations almost always touched off renewed outbreaks of civil unrest and political violence.

In some obvious respects, Lebanon has all the features of a fragmented political culture. In fact, it has been fashionable in the relentless outpouring of literature to depict the country as an “improbable,” “precarious,” “fragmented,” “dismembered,” “torn” society; a house so “divided” and riven by ethnic, religious, and communal schisms that it has become extremely difficult to “piece it together again.” Indeed, given this inherent “deficiency in its civility,” some go as far as to doubt whether Lebanon has ever existed as a viable political entity.¹

Such conceptions, particularly those propounded by Lebanon’s detractors, and they are legion, are often exaggerated. They bear nonetheless some measure of truth. Even those who continue to entertain a more flattering and felicitous image of Lebanon and speak—often in highly evocative, idyllic and romanticized tones—of this “valiant little democracy,” as a “privileged creation” and a “bold cultural experiment,” a “miraculous” pluralistic society sustained by resourcefulness, resilience, and unfuwan cannot entirely dismiss or mystify the inherently problematic nature of Lebanon’s pluralism.²

Lebanon’s predicament, given the resurgence of what is termed “Low Intensity Conflict” (LIC) by experts on global warfare and Third World insurgency, is far from unique. Its sanguinary history with protracted strife epitomizes the predicaments other small, plural, fragmented political cultures caught up in turbulent regional and global rivalries are also facing. More, perhaps, than other comparable entities, this interplay between internal dislocations and external destabilizing pressures has been much more acute and problematic in Lebanon. It is also a long-standing and persisting feature. Neither the internal divisions, nor the external unsettling forces are of recent vintage. Nor should they be attributed, as claimed recently, to the divisive presence of “borrowed ideologies” and other disheartening derivatives or fallouts of the new world order, post-modernity or the “clash of civilization.”

Long before the state of Lebanon came into being in 1920, it had been a puzzling and enigmatic entity: extremely difficult to manage politically, or to cement together into a viable and integrative social fabric. To a large extent, its fragmented political culture is a byproduct of two general features. First, it reflects some of the traditional forces and sharp cleavages, sustained by striking differences in religious beliefs, communal and sectarian loyalties, kinship and fealty sentiments, and other primordial attachments which continue to split the society vertically and reinforce its factional and parochial character. Second, and superimposed on these, are some of the new forms of socioeconomic and cultural differentiation generated by the asymmetrical growth Lebanon has been undergoing with the advent of modernity. These differences manifest themselves in virtually all the common indicators of socioeconomic mobilization, demographic variables, literacy, quality of life, exposure to westernization, professionalization and the like.

Hence, there have always been both vertical and horizontal divisions which on occasion pulled the society apart and threatened the delicate balance of forces. With the exception of the massacres of 1860, all earlier episodes of conflict were however comparatively limited in scope, clearly not as belligerent or devastating in their destructive consequences. For better or worse, prompt foreign intervention always managed to bring about a cessation of hostilities, if not a firm or just resolution of the issues underlying the conflict.

Disruptive as they might have been by standards of the day, all earlier episodes of collective strife pale when compared to the ruthless atrocities the country has been afflicted with recently. For almost two decades, Lebanon was besieged and beleaguered by every possible form of brutality and collective terror known to human history: from the cruelties of factional and religious bigotry to the massive devastations wrought by private militias and state-sponsored armies. They have all generated an endless carnage of innocent victims and immeasurable toll of human suffering.

Even by the most moderate of estimates, the magnitude of such damage to human life and property is staggering. About 170,000 have perished, twice as many have been wounded or disabled, close to two-thirds of the population experienced some form of dislocation or uprootedness from their homes and communities. By the fall of 1982, UN experts estimated that the country had sustained $12–15 billion in damages, i.e. $2 billion per year. Today more than one-third of the population is estimated to live below the poverty line on a subsistence budget of $600 a month as a result of war and displacement (Corm 1998: 9).

For a small, dense and closely knit society with a population of about 3.5 million and an area of 10,452 km², such devastations are, understandably, very menacing. More damaging, perhaps, are some of the sociopsychological and moral concomitants of protracted hostility. The scars and scares of war have left a heavy psychic toll which displays itself in pervasive post-stress symptoms and nagging feelings of despair and hopelessness. In a culture generally averse to psychoanalytic counseling and therapy, these and other psychic disorders are more debilitating. They are bound to remain masked and unrecognized and, hence, unattended to.

The demoralizing consequences of the war are also visible in symptoms of vulgarization and impoverishment of public life and erosion of civility. The routinization of violence, chaos, and fear only compounded the frayed fabrics of the social order. It drew groups into the vortex of bellicose conflict and sowed a legacy of hate and bitterness. It is in this fundamental sense that Lebanon’s pluralism, radicalization of its communities, and consequent collective violence have become pathological and uncivil.

Rather than being a source of enrichment, variety, and cultural diversity, the modicum of pluralism the country once enjoyed is now generating large residues of paranoia, hostility, and differential bonding. This pervasive “geography of fear,” and the predisposition of threatened and displaced groups to relocate in cloistered and homogeneous communities, only serves to accentuate distance from and indifference to the “other.” This is not to be dismissed as a transient, benign feature. Given the resistance of displaced groups to return and reclaim their original homes and property, this drastic redrawing of Lebanon’s social geography might turn out to be more ominous and fateful. At the least it is bound to complicate prospects for rehabilitation and national integration.

Impressive as they may seem, one need not be deceived by the public mood of optimism and symptoms of national well-being generated by the massive, often exuberant, schemes for reconstruction and physical rehabilitation of the country’s devastated infrastructure. Nor does the outward political stability rest on firm foundations or consensus over substantive issues of national sovereignty and ultimate political destiny. The sociocultural polarization-visible in striking differences in values, normative expectations, life-style, public display of wealth and privilege, cultural artifacts, popular entertainment, consumerism, the reassertion of spatial and communal identities and, more recently, in the polemics over public issues such as civil marriage, electoral reforms, and foreign policy-are much too apparent to be masked by the fickle manifestations of national solidarity and collective consciousness. Sentiments, and avowed claims on behalf of the transcending entities of national unity and secular allegiances, pale when pitted against symptoms of social division, sharp cultural differentiation, and distance between communities.

The precepts of history in this regard are not on Lebanon’s side. At least if modernity and progressive change stand for diversity, mix, hybridity, and openness, then what has been happening in Lebanon, in a majority of areas, is a movement away from such enabling encounters. Social and intellectual historians are keen on reminding us that a fascinating transformation in the historical evolution of most societies involves their passage from a relatively “closed” to a more “open” system: membership, exit or entry, access to privileges and benefits are no longer denied by virtue of limitations of religion, kinship, or race. Such openness accounts for much of the spectacular growth in the philosophical, artistic, and political emancipation of contemporary societies. It is in this sense that Lebanon is now at that critical threshold, since it is about to invert and reverse this natural course of history. Indeed, what we might be witnessing is the substitution of one form of pluralism, imperfect as it has been, for a more regressive and pathological kind. We are destroying a society that permitted, on and off, groups with divergent backgrounds and expectations to live side by side. What is emerging is a monolithic archetype that is hostile to any such coexistence or free experimentation.

While such reawakened communal solidarities provide shelter, the needed socio-psychological support and access to welfare, benefits, and privileging networks, they also heighten and reinforce the intensity of enmity toward groups perceived as different. Though open fighting and warfare have been momentarily suspended, the country remains riven with suspicious, unrelenting, and unforgiving recriminations.

Altogether then, the resort to violence—willful or otherwise, generated from within or without, byproduct of fortuitous circumstances or conspiracy and design—has been wasteful and futile. It has had little effect on redressing the gaps and imbalances in society or in transforming Lebanon’s communal and confessional loyalties into more secular and civic entities. Indeed the very persistence of such enmity means that something is not changing.

Inferences of this sort prompt me to carry the argument even further and suggest that insofar as violence has served to widen rifts and cleavages in society, it has already become counter-productive and self-defeating. The process of “breaking eggs and making omelets,” to borrow a trite metaphor, need not in other words always prove judicious. I take my hint here from Hannah Arendt, who has suggested that “the practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.” (Arendt 1958: 182) It is also in this sense, as will be elaborated shortly, that civil violence slips into incivility.

Who is to rescue Lebanon from the savagery and scourge of violence unleashed upon it for so long? In all earlier episodes of collective strife, though foreign powers and regional brokers had a role in inciting and escalating hostilities, they also stepped in to contain the conflict when it began to undermine their strategic interests. Both, for example, in 1860 and 1958, conflict ended largely because the interests of the superpowers were better served by stabilizing Lebanon. As will be seen, it took 32 weeks and about 50 meetings of intensive diplomatic negotiations between the concerned foreign actors at the time (i.e. France, Great Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Turkey) to arrive at the Re`glement Organique which reconstituted Lebanon as an Ottoman province under the guarantee of the six signatory powers. Through French initiative, the international commission was set up to fix responsibility, determine guilt, estimate indemnity, and suggest reforms for the reorganization of Mount Lebanon.

Likewise, in 1958 the strategic stature and significance of Lebanon was at its height. The region was seething with political ferment and ideological disputes. The Cold War had transformed the region into a proxy battlefield for superpower rivalry. The Baghdad Pact of 1955, the Suez Crisis of 1956, unrest in Jordan in 1957, the formation of the United Arab Republic (the abortive union between Egypt and Syria), the military coup in Iraq in 1958, all had unsettling implications. Since Lebanon at the time was identified with the Western camp, by virtue of its support of the Eisenhower Doctrine, the events had, naturally, direct bearings on the political standing of Lebanon. Indeed, the peace accord which ended the war was brokered by the U.S. and Egypt.

It should be noted, however, that before the Iraqi coup Eisenhower was reluctant to intervene directly despite the repeated requests made at the time by President Chamoun and foreign minister Charles Malik. Even when the US finally decided to commit its Marines, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles put it, “Lebanon was not very important in itself” (For this and other details, see Gerges 1997: 88–89). Hence, the intervention should not be taken as evidence of Western commitment to the security of Lebanon as such. Rather, Lebanon served as a proxy for other broader regional interests. The ultimate concern of the Eisenhower administration at the time was, of course, to curtail the spread of communism and radical Arab Nationalism which were perceived as threats to America’s vital interests in the region, mainly oil supplies.

The deployment of American troops was also intended to demonstrate America’s military clout and its determination to protect its regional and global interests. The US was also beginning to realize that with Nasser’s charisma and growing influence in the region, Egypt was fast becoming the epicenter of Arab politics. This must account for its inclination to abandon Chamoun and work jointly with Cairo to arrive at a resolution of Lebanon’s crisis. This, as in earlier and subsequent crises, served to reconfirm what was to become a recurrent modality in the resolution of conflict in Lebanon: the state is so enfeebled and divided that foreign and regional brokers take on this responsibility. Lebanon’s impotence, or at least the failure of the state to immunize or protect itself against regional destabilizing forces, was of course translated into that ironical political doctrine, namely that the “country’s strength lies in its weakness”! In effect this meant that the state was to surrender or relinquish its national security responsibility to other regional and global actors.³

Lebanon in the early and mid-seventies was not even in that mildly privileged a diplomatic or bargaining position. The détente between Russia and the U.S. defused much of the Cold War tension. Egypt under Sadat shifted toward the U.S. American inroads into the Arab Gulf and Iran became more substantive. Hence the major powers, in the wake of the first round of the war of 1975–76, had no immediate or vital interests at stake to interfere in the conflict. France was in no position to mobilize international initiative on behalf of Lebanon as it did in 1860. Unlike 1958, the U.S. also found little justification (at least initially) to dispatch their Marines or to engage in sustained diplomatic effort in settling the conflict.

Little wonder that when the war broke out in 1975, neither Washington nor Moscow felt the need to be involved in any direct diplomatic engagement as long as the conflict did not affect their vital interests. Henry Kissinger’s disengagement diplomacy toward Lebanon, as Fawaz Gerges has persuasively argued, was “informed not only by his perception of the inherent precariousness of the country but also by the strategic need for a safety valve where Arab-Israeli tensions could be released without the threat of a major Arab-Israeli confrontation” (Gerges 1997: 78). Theodor Hanf (1993) was even more explicit in arguing how by abandoning the search for a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East, Kissinger’s step-by-step diplomacy had actually increased the risk of proxy war in Lebanon. Indeed, Lebanon’s suffering seemed of little or no concern as long as the internal hemorrhaging did not spill over, contaminate, or destabilize other vital spots in the region.

There is no evidence that the USA ever had a ‘plan’, as Palestinians and Christian Lebanese believe. As early as 1969 the USA took the view that the Lebanese state could not effectively control the Palestinians. By abandoning the search for a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East in favour of a policy of step-by-step diplomacy or bilateral agreements between Israel and the Arab states, Kissinger de facto brought peace to Syria and Egypt, but greatly increased the risk of war in Lebanon. Kissinger’s objective was gradually to reduce the risk of another conventional war in the Middle East. He regretted the fates of the Palestinians and of Lebanon, but regarded them as of secondary importance. Kissinger had suggested a policy of benign neglect toward Latin America; his policy toward Lebanon was in word benign, and in practice neglect. This attitude persisted in US foreign policy in the post-Kissinger era. Lebanon was to play a role only when, and in so far as, conflict there threatened to spill over into other states: Lebanon per se counted for little in American foreign policy (Hanf 1993: 176–77).

The “quick-fix” diplomacy the Reagan administration resorted to was ill-conceived, ill-timed, and mismanaged. There was, of course, more than just a civil war raging in Lebanon at the time. The country was already a proxy battlefield for other peoples’ wars and a succession of unresolved regional/ global rivalries. Reagan’...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. On Proxy Wars and Surrogate Victims
• 2. The Radicalization of Communal Loyalties
• 3. The Drift into Incivility
• 4. Peasants, Commoners and Clerics: Resistance and Rebellion: 1820–1860
• 5. Civil Strife of 1958: Revolt and Counter Revolt
• 6. Lebanon’s Golden/Gilded Age: 1943–1975
• 7. From Playground to Battleground: Preludes to Civil Strife
• 8. Scares and Scars of War
• 9. From Shakib Efendi to Ta’if
• 10. Prospects for Civility
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index