LEBANON: Clearing the Way

• Share

Convoyed from his native coastal village by a task force of rifle-slung motorcyclists and troop-filled jeeps, Major General Fuad Chehab rode to his inauguration as Lebanon's new president through a capital seething under a 48-hour curfew. In all its five-month civil war, Lebanon had never been more tense. This time it was the Christians who had erupted into new violence in protest against the abduction of a Christian journalist and backer of retiring President Camille Chamoun.

Ignoring the tension, the new President called on his countrymen to work with him for the "reestablishment of government authority" and "above all, the speedy evacuation of foreign forces." A Christian elected with Moslem support, Chehab pledged himself to uphold "the unwritten constitution." This was the 1943 compact in which Lebanon's Christian and Moslem communities agreed that Moslems would refrain from urging merger with other Arab states, Christians would hold back from aligning the country too closely with any Western power.

From the Barricades. But next day the announcement of the new Cabinet set off fresh protests from Christians and pro-Western Moslems. Chehab's choice for Premier was Rashid Karami, 37, a Moslem lawyer who led the rebel resistance in Tripoli. Chamoun's most fanatical backers vowed that they would fight rather than accept a Premier from "the barricades." From the mountain village to which he had retired, Chamoun fanned the flames with a statement: "The new Cabinet is not satisfactory to me." Members of the khaki-shirted Christian Phalange, a strong-arm outfit that has been in the forefront of the Lebanese fighting, printed posters proclaiming "Death rather than government by Karami," stormed into the streets to shoot up Beirut stores, fire cars and fight sharp scrimmages with Moslem partisans, in which 26 died and 35 were injured.

That night Chehab's army cracked down as it never had when Chehab was merely army chief, charged with upholding the authority of the Chamoun government. Troops were ordered to shoot armed civilians on sight. Army patrols shot and killed two men who pulled guns to stop a car in the Moslem quarter. Phalange Chief Pierre Gemayel hastily announced he was all for peace.

By week's end tension eased, and the barricades first put up last May began to go down in Beirut streets. Premier Karami helped cool things off by announcing that "our chief responsibility is to bind up the wounds and wash the traces of blood from the face of Lebanon." At heart an Arab nationalist ("I consider Nasser a superman," he said recently), Karami is nevertheless on record as opposing merger with the United Arab Republic.