(Estimated Pub Date) the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990S: Geographic Perspectives- October 1995

Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
Lebanon was created by the French as a homeland for
Christian Arabs, especially the Maronites. The French
began to treat the Maronites as proteges early in the
19th century when Paris was competing with London
for economic and political influence in the Middle
East. In 1860 the French intervened militarily to pro-
tect their clients during a Muslim-Christian civil war.
After that intervention the Maronite area enjoyed priv-
ileged status as an autonomous province of the Otto-
man Empire. The dismemberment of the Empire after
World War I permitted the French to exercise direct
control over this district and also over the much larger
adjacent tenitory of Syria. The French desire to create
a state for their Christian proteges posed an interesting
dilemma. The territory occupied predominantly by
Maronites (roughly the northwestern quarter of mod-
ern Lebanon) would have been too small to be an
effective state. Therefore, they added land from their
Syrian mandate and announced the birth of a “Greater
Lebanon,” three times the size of the Maronite area.
This larger territory included a substantial number of
Sunni and Shia Muslims, non-Maronite Christians,
and Druze.
A French-sponsored census of 1932 suggested that
Christians formed a slight majority of the population
of Greater Lebanon and that Maronites, with about
30 percent of the total, were the largest specific group.
This was Lebanon‘s only formal census, and a vast
array of subsequent problems can be traced to doubts
about its accuracy. Suggestions that a new census
should be made were checked by insistence that
Maronites and other Christians “temporarily living
abroad” should also be counted. Because the number
of Christian Lebanese abroad could be ascertained
only by those remaining in Lebanon, that prospect was
never accepted by Muslims. The absence of believable
data on the size of religious groups in a country where
citizenship was defined by religion and political
power, and even minor govemment positions, were
allocated on the basis of religious affiliation inhibited
the development of any collective sense of national
identity.
The list of problems inspired by the census contro-
versy is long and melancholy. For example, the ten-
dency of each religious group to try to get more than
its dubious “official” share of govemment largess
encouraged persistent tension. Moreover, because the
Lebanese who found employment abroad and sent
remittances from abroad were almost exclusively
Christians, the country soon developed a pattern of
extreme disparity in standards of living. The deeply
rural Shia areas of southwestern and northeastern Leb-
anon were conspicuously backward. Even in the more
prosperous Christian districts, democracy was com-
promised by nepotism and the inability of elected
leaders to think of national rather than sectarian inter-
ests.
If Lebanon hadbeen able to remain aloof from the
Arab-Israeli conflict, its tensions and ambiguities
might have been countered by faith that the country
was somehow better off than its neighbors. When Pal-
estinian refugees acquired sufficient strength in Leba-
non to wage their battle from Lebanon, the tottering
Humpty Dumpty created by the French could not
remain on the wall. The reason why the country disin-
tegrated so rapidly can be explained not only by its
inherent cultural problems but also by the ineffective-
ness of the small national army, which consisted
mainly of Christian officers and Muslim enlisted men.
Caught in the crossfire of Palestinians already in Leb-
anon, Israelis who felt free to attack them anywhere in
Lebanon, and Syrian “deterrent” forces that occupied
the eastern half~of Lebanon, it is no wonder that the
Lebanese Army went AWOL. With its departure the
Lebanese Govemment, no longer able to protect its
citizens, could not prevent the proliferation of divisive
militias and the beginning of a civil war—immensely
complicated by foreign interventions——that led to the
de facto partition of Lebanon into areas controlled by
Maronites, Shiites, Syrians, Israelis, and Palestinians.
The Middle East in the Coming Decade
Scholars devoted to the Middle East have often been
able to offer convincing retrospective explanations of
developments in this complex and troubled region.
Examples ofsuccessful prediction are more difficult
to find. Within the past two decades, surprising events,
such as the collapse of the regime of the Shah, the
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268