By Sam F. Ghattas
The Associated Press, 12 April 2006
It started gradually — an assassination, then a bus ambush. Slowly, gunmen took to the streets and sporadic fighting erupted.
Then the tit-for-tat kidnappings broke out, and the "liquidations" and the car bombs. Those lucky enough to survive quickly picked up and moved — to another part of town or away altogether.
For many months starting in the spring of 1975, the citizens of Beirut did not know for sure if they were living through a civil war or just something that was awful but would — they hoped — end soon. But then the government split. The army disintegrated, businesses were looted and hotels sacked. Armed militias took over.
In the end, Lebanon's civil lasted 15 years. When the fighting between Muslims and Christians and among those groups themselves finally ended in 1990, the toll was colossal: 150,000 people killed, about half a million wounded and nearly a similar number displaced. One quarter of the population, or about 900,000 people, had left the tiny Arab country.
These days, many are harkening back to that time — in worry — wondering if Iraq and specifically Baghdad might not be headed for much of the same. On Iraqi TV, government-sponsored ads show brutal images of past civil wars in Lebanon, and Bosnia and Rwanda, too, warning: "We don't want to be next."
For now, it's an unanswerable question. No one knows if Baghdad will continue falling ever-more into the sectarian violence that has broken out, or recover and move toward peace.
But a look at the first days of civil war in 1975 in Beirut is instructive about how things might look in Iraq, if they get worse.
It was 31 years ago — on April 13, 1975 — that the first major spark flared in a Christian suburb called Ein el-Rummaneh.
Lebanon already was on edge. Its old Christian-dominated power structure was under pressure as the country's demographics changed. Muslims sought new power with the help of Palestinian guerrillas whose presence exacerbated the tensions.
The initial spark — the assassination of a Christian Phalange Party official — was followed shortly afterward by a reprisal ambush on a busload of Palestinians that drove through the neighborhood, killing 22. Sporadic gunfire erupted, followed later by heavy gunbattles.
"A lot of people fled," recalls resident George Soueidi, 63, sitting outside the bullet-scarred building in Ein el-Rummaneh where he still lives. "Life was fear and despair."
He lost a cousin and that cousin's son, in addition to friends and neighbors. And his brother, Albert, now 52, was displaced within Lebanon five times, to northern mountains and to southern Lebanon.
Albert Soueidi likens what is happening in Iraq today to what he — and Lebanon — went through.
"I say it already started," he said of Iraq. "Civil war is not one that is declared — there is no need for it to be declared.
"This is what happened to us: Every time the shooting stopped, we said, 'It's over.' Then it started again."
In the ensuing weeks and months, Palestinian guerrillas and Muslim forces overran Christian neighborhoods and towns, while Christians overran Muslim towns and Palestinian refugee camps. Lebanese fled by speedboats and cargo ships, or walked through the chill of the high mountains for days.
Hijackers found safe haven, while terrorists operated at will, kidnapping foreigners and blowing up U.S. and French forces, who came and left in an ill-fated attempt to stop the conflict.
Within two years, the lines were drawn — lines that would last another 13 years: Beirut was split into a Christian eastern sector and a Muslim western sector. The regions were turned into fiefdoms run by militias, who freely collected taxes, set up seaports and arrested and tried people. They also controlled security and politics through their own gunmen or loyal army units.
Government authority was reduced to a few institutions that limped aimlessly for years.
Rashid Shakar remembers how he lost his father, Mikhail, for a few days in the Chouf mountains during revenge killings in his mixed Druse-Christian hometown in 1977.
"The gunmen broke into the houses. My father fled the village along with his cousin, walked up to the cedar mountains and lost his way. He stayed in the mountains and returned to the village after it calmed down," said Shakar, an insurance broker.
"We went from one hospital morgue to another looking for him, thinking he was dead," the younger Shakar recalled.
Some, like Albert Soueidi, see similarities between Lebanon's civil war and Iraq's slide in that direction. But there are differences, too.
The conflict in Lebanon was Christian vs. Muslim, worsened by Palestinian guerrillas, Syrian and Israeli troops, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and American forces. The money for the warring sides came from Iran, the Persian Gulf states and Libya. There also were spinoff wars within the same Christian and Muslim communities.
Under the 1989 accord that ended the civil war in 1990, Lebanon is run under a complex parliamentary democracy system that reserves the highest offices for various certain religious/sectarian groups: a Maronite Christian must always be president, a Sunni Muslim must be prime minister and a Shiite Muslim must be speaker of parliament.
The number of seats in parliament is divided evenly between Christians and Muslims.
In Iraq, the three players are the ethnic Kurds in the north, the Shiite Muslim Arabs mainly in the south and the Sunni Muslim Arabs in the center and the west. Syria and Iran, Iraq's neighbors, have been accused of fomenting trouble. The mixed Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish center, which includes Baghdad, is the main battleground.
If there is a lesson the Iraqis should learn from Lebanon, it is that civil war is a futile effort, many here say.
"Nothing can be solved through violence," Albert Soueidi says with a conviction born of firsthand experience. "Violence begets violence."
Sam F. Ghattas, the Associated Press' correspondent in Beirut, covered Lebanon's civil war. Associated Press writer Bassem Mroue, who reports regularly from Iraq, contributed to this report.
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Citation: Sam F. Ghattas. "Will Iraq Follow Lebanon's Path to War?," The Associated Press, 12 April 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060412/ap_on_re_mi_ea/lebanon_iraq_civil_war
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