Lebanon Between Hana & Mana: No President, Two Cabinets, No End in Sight

By Richard B. Parker

Lebanon, a country which has been limping along for more than 12 years in a de facto state of partition between warring factions, with presidents whose writs frequently have not extended much beyond the palace grounds, now has no chief executive at all. Even such remnants of central authority as there are are split between two cabinets which do not recognize each other.

It is therefore tempting to proclaim that the country is now completing the final descent from chaos to catastrophe. If history teaches anything about this environmentally blessed but politically tortured land, however, it is that Lebanon belies the conventional wisdom.

Were it not a new and perilous phase in an off-and-on bloody civil war, it would be comic opera.

Pundits confidently predicted that if the Parliament did not meet on September 22 and pick a successor to outgoing President Amin Gemayel, the next step would be at least formal partition if not a resumption of full-scale fighting. That has not yet happened.

The Parliament did not meet on September 22, and no president was elected. President Gemayel, shortly before stepping down at the end of his six-year term as required by the constitution, appointed a transitional government headed by the commander of the army, Gen. Michel Aoun, to run the country. Gemayel also accepted the unproffered resignation of the previous government, headed by Prime Minister Selim Al-Hoss, which had been boycotting the president anyway since January 1986.

Two Governments Scramble for Recognition

Hoss responded by saying that his was the only legal government. Both Lebanese governments are now calling on civil servants and the public to recognize only them. Neither has any following outside a limited sector: Hoss in Muslim West Beirut and Aoun in Christian East Beirut. Even there, both are under the thumb of military forces they do not control—the Syrian army in West Beirut and the Lebanese Forces in East Beirut. Were it not a new and perilous phase in an off-and-on bloody civil war, it would be comic opera.

Because the Lebanese have been coping with an intolerable situation for so long, they have become accustomed to it. Observers, therefore, never exclude the possibility that the Lebanese will find some way of dealing with their new, bifurcated power vacuum. Many civil servants continue to function in spite of the void at the top. The Lebanese UN mission in New York, for example, is operating in spite of conflicting instructions from the two governments. "We listen to both sides and carry out what can be described as constant state policies," the Lebanese deputy permanent representative to the UN, Chawki Choueri, told the New York Times.

There are limits, however, as to how long this sort of arrangement can last. Sooner or later there will come issues on which such expedients will not work in the absence of some overall understanding. These are likely to be bread-and-butter issues such as the allocation of electricity and water, access to the reserves of the Central Bank, control of the currency, and repair of the telephone system.

As long as there was the fiction of a central government with a president of a unitary Lebanon at the top, the Lebanese could continue to pretend that there was a constitutional framework within which they were operating and that this provided a basis for limited cooperation across sectarian lines. That framework is now gone. The factions must either replace or reconstruct it, or they will be locked into their separate ways by the logic of events.

A New Type of Constitutional Agreement

This does not necessarily mean that they must elect a new president. If they do not, however, they must agree on some new constitutional arrangement if they are to have their claim to be living in a unitary state taken seriously. The presidency was not as important for what it was actually doing the past six years as for its symbolic value. It represented legality. If that symbol is gone, and not succeeded by another that people agree on, the charade will be over.

While factional differences and religious rivalries are in large part responsible for the sorry state in which Lebanon finds itself today, the Lebanese are also justified in complaining that they have not been allowed to decide their own destiny. Much of their country has been occupied by the Syrian army since 1976, while the south of the country has been under Israeli hegemony for the same amount of time. Further, Palestinian militias have controlled much of the area between Beirut and the Israeli zone throughout most of the same period. Even if they were united in mind and spirit, the Lebanese would have difficulty dealing with these foreign intruders, none of whom take Lebanese independence and territorial integrity seriously. Nor have the Lebanese had much help from some of the other Arab states, who also, by and large, do not take them seriously, or from the international community, which has expressed dismay at the fratricide but which is unwilling to commit the forces needed to bring it to an end.

Nevertheless, in spite of active blundering or passive hand wringing by these outside powers, the situation in Lebanon was actually looking up in the summer of 1988. Thanks in part to US mediating efforts led by April Glaspie, now ambassador to Baghdad, it appeared that a compromise candidate could be found to succeed President Gemayel and to cooperate in long-delayed reform of the political system. That hope foundered on the Syrian effort first to impose former President Suleiman Frangieh, and then to impose Mikhail Daher as president, efforts which were blocked on the Christian side by the Lebanese Forces, to the secret satisfaction of many Muslims on the other side of the line who resented Syrian tactics.

The presidency was not as important for what it was actually doing the past six years as for its symbolic value. It represented legality.

By allowing itself to be associated with the Syrian effort, the US negated the points it had won by its earlier mediation effort. Neither Syrians nor Americans, however, seemed able to generate a consensus around a candidate. Although it might be possible for Syria to impose a candidate if it brought enough force to bear, it would be difficult to do so over the opposition of a well-armed militia like the Lebanese Forces, supported by outside powers. This is the situation in which Syria finds itself today.

The lesson in all of this is that some way should be found to let the Lebanese settle their own affairs without the interference of outside powers, none of whom understand Lebanese politics. That is easier said than done. On the one hand, many Lebanese argue that they cannot be expected to reach any sort of national understanding between the factions as long as much of their territory is occupied by Syria and Israel. On the other hand, were the Syrians to withdraw in the absence of such an understanding, serious fighting would probably resume.

The argument advanced by some Lebanese politicians that the pieces will all fit together as soon as the Syrians leave is not received with much enthusiasm by outsiders familiar with the previous history of Lebanese factional and sectarian bitterness. Some sign of serious progress toward reconciliation is necessary to generate the international pressures required to make Syria give up Lebanon. How such progress is to be made under occupation is another question.

In Anis Frayha's repertoire of proverbs from Lebanon's rural Ras Al-Matn is the story of an old man who had two wives, one old and one young. The former plucked the dark hairs from his beard to make him look older, while the latter plucked the gray ones to make him look young. He ended up beardless, saying: "Between Hana and Mana I lost my beard."

The Lebanese beard is being plucked today by many hands, each with a different purpose. If Lebanon cannot rid itself of them all, the Lebanese will lose what little they have left of liberty and independence. For that, we will all be the poorer.

Richard B. Parker, a retired Foreign Service officer, was US ambassador to Algeria, Lebanon and Morocco, and served also in Jerusalem, Jordan, and Egypt. He is a former editor of the Middle East Journal, author of books on Islamic architecture and North Africa and is now president of the Association for Diplomatic Studies, a non-profit organization working with the Foreign Service Institute at the Department of State.