1995-10-01a- CIA Conference Report: THE CHALLENGE OF ETHNIC CONFLICT TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER IN THE 1990S GEOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES 01-Oct-95

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Lebanon was created by the French as a homeland for encouraged persistent tension. Moreover, because the
Christian Arabs, especially the Maronites. The French Lebanese who found employment abroad and sent
began to treat the Maronites as proteges early in the remittances from abroad were almost exclusively
19th century when Paris was competing with London Christians, the country soon developed a pattern of
for economic and political influence in the Middle extreme disparity in standards of living. The deeply
East. In 1860 the French intervened militarily to pro- rural Shia areas of southwestern and northeastern Leb-
tect their clients. during a Muslim-Christian civil war. anon were conspicuously backward. Even in the more
After that intervention the Maronite area enjoyed priv- prosperous Christian districts, democracy was com-
ileged status as an autonomous province of the Otto- promised by nepotism and the inability of elected
man Empire. The dismemberment of the Empire after leaders to think of national rather than sectarian inter-
World War I permitted the French to exercise direct ests.
control over this district and also over the much larger
adjacent territory of Syria. The French desire to create If Lebanon had been able to remain aloof from the
a state for their Christian proteges posed an interesting Arab-Israeli conflict, its tensions and ambiguities
dilemma. The territory occupied predominantly by might have been countered by faith that the country
Maronites (roughly the northwestern quarter of mod- was somehow better off than its neighbors. When Pal-
em Lebanon) would have been too small to be an estinian refugees acquired sufficient strength in Leba-
effective state. Therefore, they added land from their non to wage their battle from Lebanon, the tottering
Syrian mandate and announced the birth of a "Greater Humpty Dumpty created by the French could not
Lebanon," three times the size of the Maronite area. remain on the wall. The reason why the country disin-
This larger territory included a substantial number of tegrated so rapidly can be explained not only by its
Sunni and Shia Muslims, non-Maronite Christians, inherent cultural problems but also by the ineffective-
and Druze. ness of the small national army, which consisted
mainly of Christian officers and Muslim enlisted men.
A French-sponsored census of 1932 suggested that Caught in the crossfire of Palestinians already in Leb-
Christians formed a slight majority of the population anon, Israelis who felt free to attack them anywhere in
of Greater Lebanon and that Maronites, with about Lebanon, and Syrian "deterrent" forces that occupied
30 percent of the total, were the largest specific group. the eastern half-of Lebanon, it is no wonder that the
This was Lebanon's only formal census, and a vast Lebanese Army went AWOL. With its departure the
array of subsequent problems can be traced to doubts Lebanese Government, no longer able to protect its
about its accuracy. Suggestions that a new census citizens, could not prevent the proliferation of divisive
should be made were checked by insistence that militias and the beginning of a civil war-immensely
Maronites and other Christians "temporarily living complicated by foreign interventions-that led to the
abroad" should also be counted. Because the number de facto partition of Lebanon into areas controlled by
of Christian Lebanese abroad could be ascertained Maronites, Shiites, Syrians, Israelis, and Palestinians.
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 The Middle East in the Coming Decade
citizenship was defined by religion and political
power, and even minor government positions, were Scholars devoted to the Middle East have often been
allocated on the basis of religious affiliation inhibited able to offer convincing retrospective explanations of
the development of any collective sense of national developments in this complex and troubled region.
identity. Examples of-successful prediction are more difficult
to find. Within the past two decades, surprising events,
The list of problems inspired by the census contro- such as the collapse of the regime of the Shah, the
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 government largess
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