The Nahj and the origins of the Lebanese Civil War

Author: C.R. Pennell, former Al-Tajir Lecturer in the History of Islam and the Middle East, University of Melbourne, Australia

Edited by: Erik Prins

The Nahj policy made the Lebanese elite rich because it fired up the economy, but the poor were left behind. Despite rapid economic development, the shanty towns grew, many of them populated by impoverished Shi’a who made common cause with the inhabitants of the Palestinian camps and suburbs of Beirut.

The Shi’a were both the biggest Muslim community as well as the poorest and least educated. As a result, they were the least powerful. Any attempt to make them richer – and therefore more powerful – might upset the sectarian balance.

President Shihab despised many of the old sectarian elites – he scathingly called them ‘fromagistes,’ meaning ‘cheese eaters,’ and he found support among modernising groups. One of those groups was the Kataib party (or Phalange in French) that Pierre Gemayel had formed in the interwar period in imitation of fascist parties in Europe.

It espoused ‘modernisation’: free enterprise, an efficient state, and a Lebanese identity irrespective of religion. The Kataib even had some Shi’a support. Kemal Jumblatt, the Druze leader, also supported Shihab. Jumblatt said he wanted a modern developed state.

To keep control, Shihab relied heavily on the Deuxième Bureau, the internal security service, and on an international balancing act, which meant neutrality between the eastern and western blocs. This second aspect of his policy upset those Arab nationalists who looked towards the USSR for inspiration and support. To hold onto Maronite support, he emphasised closer cooperation with France, rather than the United States. This upset the US government, as well as Arab nationalists.

President Shihab’s term as president ended in 1964; he did not try to hold on to power. The main contestants in the presidential election were Camille Chamoun and Pierre Gemayel. Both were Maronites, of course, but both had numerous enemies. A compromise candidate emerged: Charles Hélou, a former journalist and ex-ambassador. He supported Shihab’s Nahj policy, but he had no personal authority or power base within the army or a sectarian group, so he relied even more on the Deuxième Bureau.

However, the Bureau could not control external events. Among Sunnis, there was a widespread demand to support the “Arab” cause, which most Maronites rejected, and a growing Palestinian role in the economy.

Intrabank, a small currency exchange run by Palestinians, had developed into one of the biggest banks in the Middle East, which upset Maronite bankers. In 1966, there was a run on Intrabank and the Bank of Lebanon refused to help.

The Palestinians alleged the run had been engineered by the Maronite establishment. The affair did enormous damage, not only to the Palestinians, but to the Lebanese financial market. In its aftermath, a new Director of the Bank of Lebanon, Elias Sarkis, was appointed to restore financial order.

Lebanon stayed out of the 1967 war, which angered Muslims who supported attacks across the Israeli frontier by Palestinian guerilla groups after the war was over. As a result of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, more Palestinians moved to Lebanon as refugees, leading to an expansion of the camps.

Palestinian fighters (fedayeen) began raiding across the frontier into Israel. In 1968, Israeli forces responded by raiding Beirut airport. When the Lebanese army did nothing to resist the Israeli attack, Palestinian groups and left-wing Lebanese Muslims set up a joint militia, while the Maronite-dominated Kataib mobilised in response.

Then, in 1969, the army cracked down on Palestinians and by March 1970, the militias of the Palestinians and Kataib were fighting against each other. The Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser managed to broker a peace.

However, there was no stability. After the 1967 war, Palestinian armed groups had moved to Jordan from the West Bank and quickly fell out with the Jordanian King Hussein. In September 1970, Palestinian and Jordanian forces clashed, and the Jordanian forces expelled the Palestinian armed groups. This was yet another Palestinian defeat further destabilising Lebanon. “Black September” became the name of one of the most radical Palestinian armed groups.

By 1970 the Nahj was finished. A new presidential election produced a stalemate between Elias Sarkis, the Director of the National Bank and Suleiman Franjieh, a regional warlord from Zghurta in northern Lebanon. Franjieh was a neutral candidate: he disliked Chamoun, and publicly supported Nasser, but was vigorously opposed to the Palestinian presence in Lebanon. In short, he was a man for all seasons and one who had his own large private militia. He won the election in parliament by one vote: a result that was reportedly enforced at gunpoint.

Franjieh’s supporters wanted him to end the Shihabist system, but the state itself collapsed. Franjieh purged the army and administration of Shihabists – except for Sarkis who remained Director of the Bank of Lebanon. The Deuxième Bureau stood down, taking with it its accumulated experience and knowledge of the various Palestinian groups. Franjieh relied on interest groups who prevented reforms of health, education, the tax system and so on. The cabinet was formed from old guard politicians, many of them “on the verge of physical disability,” as one commentator put it.

Beirut was still rich, but the countryside was getting poorer and the growing shanty towns were not only filled with impoverished Shia but also with poor Maronites. Once people had left their villages, old links were disrupted, and they could only identify themselves on a sectarian basis. Many Maronites joined Kataib and although Muslims did enlist in the army, that too was run by Maronites. So many Sunnis looked to the Palestinians for support.

Opposition to the Franjieh regime came from left-wing and pan-Arab groups in Lebanon, which included Nasserist parties, the Lebanese Communist party and Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party, which had links with radical Palestinian factions (fedayeen) in the refugee camps.

In 1972, the Front for Progressive Parties and National Forces, an alliance of the above-mentioned parties, fought the parliamentary general election from a reformist and secular position. It was then reorganised as the Lebanese National Movement (LNM).

The initial successes of the Egyptian army in the October war of 1973 energised the pro-Palestinian Arab Nationalist groups in Lebanon but it infuriated right-wing Maronite politicians and further destabilized the country, even though, once again the Lebanese army and state kept the country well clear of fighting.

A third force was emerging in the south of Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in the east where Shi’a were numerically strong. It was led by Imam Musa al-Sadr: a popular figure whose demands for protection from Israeli raids on the south alienated older Shi’a, who feared they would become even more frequent. The struggle for power within the community pushed the new contenders into radical sectarianism.

Musa Sadr came from a family of distinguished clerics tracing their ancestry back to Jabal Amel, the Shi’a heartland in the highland region southeast of Sidon, around the Litani River. He was born in Qom in Iran, where he underwent both seminary and secular studies and later in Najaf in Iraq.

In 1958, following the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy, he returned to Iran, before moving to Tyre in southern Lebanon as the emissary of powerful Iranian and Iraqi ayatollahs. He worked among the Lebanese Shi’a community to develop modern Shi’a political activity, founding schools and charities.

Declaring that “Arms are an ornament to man” Musa Sadr set up the Movement for the Deprived, with its own militia called Amal (Arabic for hope). His international connections were profound: he had marriage connections with Mohammad Khatami’s family and with Khomeini’s.

By July 1974, the LNM started to talk about ending the National Pact. Old-style politicians tried to contain the situation, but there was rioting in Sidon in early 1975. On 13 April, feuding spread after a clash between PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) militiamen travelling in a car and Kataib militiamen in a Christian part of Beirut; the PLO driver was shot.

Later that day, gunmen in cars decorated with PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) insignia attacked a church where Pierre Gemayel was attending a baptism service. His bodyguard & others were killed. Kataib forces responded by ambushing a PLO bus near Sabra, one of the major Palestinian refugee camps outside Beirut. Over twenty passengers were killed. This ‘Bus Massacre’ is often taken as the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War.

Fighting quickly spread through Beirut and, despite frequent attempts at a ceasefire, it continued for several months. In mid-September, the Syrian government persuaded Lebanese factions to join a Committee for National Dialogue on which Jumblatt and Gemayel were both represented.

Nevertheless, they could not agree: the Maronite factions prioritised an end to the fighting while the LNM and its supporters wanted reforms to the political structure. In October 1975, units of the Palestine Liberation Army arrived in the Bekaa region, ostensibly to help Muslims there.

It now looked as though Lebanon was being partitioned. The civil war had begun.