Targetted slayings resume in Lebanon

I once visited President Amin Gemayel at his residence in Bikfayya on Mount Lebanon. The ex-President, a courteous man, was obviously someone who was proud of his roots, both as a member of the Gemayel family and a Maronite Christian. He complained, like most Maronite notables, that the Christian community in Lebanon has been greatly marginalised since the Civil War ended in 1990.

Gemayel, whose family had spearheaded the pan-Maronite movement since the early 1930s, was obviously not pleased at where the Christians were heading in the 21st century. He pointed out that the Gemayel family is the "legitimate and historic representative of Maronite leadership." He also expressed his desire to re-assume leadership of the Phalange Party, the traditional pulpit for Maronite nationalism that had been founded in 1936 by his father Pierre Gemayel.

One month after my encounter with the president, however, he nominated himself for Phalange Party elections and lost. To the dismay of Maronite conservatives, Karim Pakradoni, an Armenian Catholic who had excellent relations with Syria, replaced Gemayel (a declared anti-Syrian hardliner). If anything, the incident shows that the Maronite community in Lebanon, as Gemayel claimed, is in a state of "depression" and needs to be saved.

The Gemayels

I still remember the President telling me: "Look around, this house I live in was constructed in 1540 exclusively for the Gemayel family." As the president was dragging on about his roots, his son, the Metn MP Pierre Gemayel walked in. I was introduced to Pierre, who has been named after his grandfather Pierre Gemayel, founder of the famous Phalange. Gemayel was obviously proud that his son was in parliament and saw his political career as a must, "to carry-on" the Maronite family legacy. Amin's father had founded the Phalange, helped liberate Lebanon from the French, and held numerous cabinet posts from the 1940s to the 1980s. His brother Bashir was elected President of the Republic and had been assassinated in 1982.

Now there was Pierre Gemayel Jr. serving in Parliament. Despite the nostalgia, however, the Gemayel family is no longer the torchbearer of Lebanon's Maronite community. In fact, none of the traditional Maronite leaders are. Most of them were either killed in the Civil War or have been forced into exile since then. Gemayel himself, who left Lebanon in 1988 and did not return until 2000, has been forgotten by a new generation of Maronites. This generation of Lebanese, who were born in the 1980s and matured in the 1990s, has never experienced the leadership of a Gemayel.

All the other Maronite leaders have been absent since 1990. Raymond Edde, leader of the National Bloc, died in France in 2000 and had been in exile since 1990. His successor Carlos Edde is a political amateur who still lives off the popularity of Raymond and has no independent following of his own. Camille Chamoun, the veteran President of Lebanon, died in 1987, while his son Dany was slain in 1990. Their successor Dory lives in the shadow of both men and enjoys a power base that does not exceed a handful of Maronites. The elder Pierre Gemayel died in 1984 and his son Bashir Gemayel, a legend in Maronite history, was killed in 1982. His son is still too young to assume political leadership. In the meantime, nostalgically carrying Bashir's flame is his wife Solange. President Rene Mouawad, another traditional leader from Zhorta, was slain in November 1989. Tony Franjiyieh, the son of ex-President Sulaiman Franjiyieh, was murdered with his wife and daughter in 1978, and of all the rest, his son Sulaiman Jr. is the only active Maronite leader at the present. He is an ally of Syria and is being groomed to become a future President of Lebanon.

Other contemporary leaders who have been sidelined by events include Army Commander Michel Aoun, who has been in exile since 1990, and Samir Geagea who has been in jail since 1994. This "vacuum" in Maronite leadership was what led to the political emergence of the Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir in November 2000. He established himself as a political leader, saying that it is the duty of men of religion to speak out when the men of politics are unable to speak, or absent altogether.

This threat against the Maronites of Lebanon has taken a new turn today. In January 2002, Elie Hobeika, the last surviving Maronite warlord, was killed in Beirut. Less than 10 days later, his aid-de-camp Michael Nasser, a prominent member of the disbanded Lebanese Forces (LF) was killed in Argentina. Shortly before Hobeika's own death was the death of Jean Ghanem, the parliamentarian who stands second-in-command to Hobeika's Waad Party. On New Year's Eve, Ghanem had a car accident and died on January 14 while in hospital. Hobeika's own death on January 24 raised suspicion that Ghanem's death was no accident. People began to speculate that "targeted assassinations" had returned to Lebanon. Then, in May 2002, Ramzi Irani, another member of the LF who is in charge of LF student politics in Lebanon, was murdered in Beirut. He was declared missing then found, bound and slain in cold blood, in the trunk of a car. The fact that all of them belong to one political party, and all of them were advocates of a rapprochement with Syria, shows that the consequence is not a coincidence.

LF decimated

The LF had been a topic of concern in Lebanese discourse in recent years. In 1990, like all other militias, the LF had been disbanded. Its leader Samir Geagea had been first groomed as an ally of Syria, even offered a cabinet post, then transformed into an enemy, charged with war crimes, and locked up for life in 1994. Its other leader Elie Hobeika defected from the Christian fold and became a tactic ally of Syria, thereby angering many conservatives who wanted to end Syrian hegemony in Lebanon. Hobeika's alliance with Syria paid handsomely, and he served as government minister and deputy in the early 1990s. In 2001, Hobeika came up with the idea of resurrecting the disbanded LF, which was responsible for many war crimes, with a new image under his leadership. President Emille Lahhoud, his Syrian patrons, and other pro-Syrian Maronites endorsed the proposal. Then, Hobeika was killed and other moderate members of the LF start to disappear and die under mysterious circumstances. Following his assassination, an unknown party, believed to be composed of LF hardliners, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the killing and stating that Hobeika was a "traitor" who was paying the price for his allegiance to Syria. While some in the Maronite community rejoiced, others grieved deeply.

Of all those who had been killed from the LF, only Hobeika can be called a true Maronite leader. The rest are either second-in-command officials, or leaders-in-the-waiting who might have had a future role to play - had they lived. One thing is certain, however, that there is an organised campaign against the Maronites, and particularly those who are allies of Syria. In the absence of true anti-Syrian Maronite statesmen, and if pro-Syrian Maronite leader start to fall off as well, the Maronite community as a whole will start to waver. Of course, those who stay behind will fight to keep Maronite leadership alive. The latest Metn elections, where an anti-Syrian Christian leader emerged victorious, are an indicator that the Christian