Lebanon Saving a City From Itself

There are only 2.7 million Lebanese, but they are divided into so many feuding factions that the sound of their fighting can be heard round the world. Week after week over the past decade, battles have taken place among confusing groups of militants who seem united only in their determination to blow themselves and their country away. The outside world has become an unhappy participant in the civil war through the hostages held by one group or another. Amid all the car bombings and shellings and kidnapings, the only certitude of Lebanon seems to be that the battle will go on.

But last week, after another prolonged period of anarchy in the Lebanese capital, Syrian President Hafez Assad took one of the biggest gambles of his 16 years in power. He sent 7,500 Syrian troops into West Beirut to try to restore order there -- a task that several countries, including the U.S., France, Israel and Syria itself, had previously tried without success. Was Assad about to become the latest victim of Lebanon's endless civil war, or could he restore peace to the troubled land?

The last time Assad sent in his army was in 1976. At that time the Syrians were trying to save the Maronite Christian forces from total defeat at the hands of an alliance of leftist Lebanese Muslims and the Palestine Liberation Organization, thereby disrupting the country's delicate balance of power. The Syrians ended up fighting the Christians they had come to save, suffered heavy casualties, and had to pull out of the Beirut area in a hurry after the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982.

This time a worried Assad decided to occupy West Beirut, the predominantly Muslim half of the divided Lebanese capital, because of what he regarded as an ominous series of threats to Syria's long-term strategic interests. In the first place he was concerned about the renewed strength of the P.L.O. in West Beirut, especially in the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila and Burj el Barajneh. More specifically, he was angry about the resurgence of P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat, with whom Assad has been feuding for years. The one good thing about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, from Assad's point of view, was that it drove Arafat and most of the P.L.O. out of the country. But during the past three years, Arafat has been quietly rebuilding his strength in West Beirut. Since last fall, Assad's closest Lebanese ally, the Shi'ite Amal militia, headed by Nabih Berri, has waged a merciless battle against the P.L.O. in the refugee camps but failed to defeat it.

The Shi'ites are the largest of Lebanon's principal religious groups, with a population of more than 1 million. They are also the poorest and politically the most unstable. Founded in 1975, Amal quickly became the main Shi'ite political movement. One of its aims has been to wrest a more equitable share of power from the Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims, who have divided most of the political spoils since Lebanon became independent of French rule in 1943. In recent months, however, Amal has lost ground within the Shi'ite community to the radical Hizballah (Party of God). Hizballah's rising power concerns Assad because the group, which is allied with Iran, has dreams of establishing an Iranian-style Islamic republic in Lebanon.