Lebanon Stepchildren of a Nightmare

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For years French soldiers of the United Nations peacekeeping force and the moderate Shi'ite Amal militia had been friendly. Last week the peace was shattered by the thunder of rocket-propelled grenades and the crack of automatic weapons resounding through the dusty, Amal-controlled village of Marrakeh. Reason: as French guards at a U.N. security checkpoint attempted to disarm a local Amal commander, his bodyguard pulled his own gun. The French responded with a fusillade that killed both Shi'ites. Before long, 100 Amal fighters roared into Marrakeh, their guns blazing away at French positions. By the time Amal Leader Nabih Berri arranged a cease-fire 14 hours later, two more Shi'ite fighters lay dead, and 18 French soldiers were wounded.

The eruption of violence was the worst involving U.N. troops since Israeli forces withdrew from most of Lebanon 14 months ago. It was a bloody reminder of the dominant presence in southern Lebanon of the Shi'ites, the Muslims who now make up 40% of the country's population of 3 million. Long an impoverished rural people, Shi'ite followers in Iran and the Arab world split from the dominant Sunni Muslims over doctrinal issues concerning the descendants of the prophet Muhammad. In recent years the Shi'ites have waged a successful struggle for political equality and economic well-being. With success has come unprecedented power, and power has created a cauldron of shifting alliances and abrupt betrayals within their own ranks.

To the outside world, the Lebanese Shi'ites are chiefly known for the brutal acts that have made the extremists among them the Middle East's most feared and persistent terrorists. Shadowy radical Shi'ite groups, like Islamic Jihad, have claimed responsibility for a murderous catalog of suicide bomb attacks, skyjackings and kidnapings. Among them: the April 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in West Beirut that killed 63, including 17 Americans; the blast six months later that reduced the barracks of the U.S. Marine peacekeeping force to rubble, killing 241; and the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the subsequent hostage drama involving 39 American passengers.

What are the Shi'ites of Lebanon up to? Unlike other Arab groups, most Shi'ites despise the Palestinians, who occupied their country for twelve years prior to the Israeli invasion in 1982, almost as much as they hate the Israelis, who now control a six-mile by 40-mile security zone in the south. The extremists, including Hizballah, or Party of God, and Islamic Jihad, which is believed to be a terrorist unit within Hizballah, want to create in Lebanon an Iranian-style Islamic republic. The mainstream Amal, by contrast, wants to ensure that the Shi'ites have a major role in the Lebanon that eventually emerges from the destruction and chaos of the past eleven years.

In the murky equations of the Middle East, power is usually bought with gunpowder. Johns Hopkins Professor Fouad Ajami, author of the recently published The Vanished Imam, a profile of Moussa Sadr, the charismatic Shi'ite cleric and political leader, calls the Shi'ites the "stepchildren of the Arab world." After a docile history centered on agriculture, they first took up arms in a serious way when Lebanon's civil war broke out, in 1975. But it was not until 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, that the stage was set for the explosion of Shi'ite power.