LEBANON: Revenge, Revenge, Revenge’

The scene was sickeningly familiar: an ambush on a twisting mountain road, gunfire and death. This time, however, the victim was not a hapless villager caught in the middle of sectarian strife. He was Kamal Jumblatt, 59, leader of Lebanon’s Muslim left and feudal landlord whose power base was rooted among the 150,000 members of the Druze sect. His assassination last week threatened to reopen the bloody civil war in Lebanon, which since November has been living under a “peace” enforced by three divisions of Syrian troops.

Confronted by the prospect of renewed fighting, Syrian troops refrained from going on alert in order not to create a crisis atmosphere. Christians in East Beirut fired rifles in joy, and Syrian troops had to keep gangs of Muslim leftists from setting up the kind of barricades that had divided the city at the height of the fighting. Outside the 300-year-old family castle in the mountain town of Mukhtara, some 50,000 mourners, including Premier Selim Hoss, a Muslim, gathered in the rain for Jumblatt’s funeral.

“Revenge, revenge, revenge,” ran the trilling wail of the women at the funeral. Revenge against whom? Many of Jumblatt’s followers thought they knew the answer: they turned their wrath upon Lebanon’s Christian community. At week’s end security officials said that more than 250 Christians had been killed; many of them had their throats cut.

Actually, no one really knew who had killed the leader of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party as he was being driven to a meeting with party members. Slowing down at a corner to begin a steep climb 18 miles southeast of Beirut, the car was blocked by a Pontiac with an Iraqi license plate. Four men machine-gunned Jumblatt, his driver and his bodyguard; all three died almost immediately. The assassins sped away, crashed their car two miles down the road and hijacked a Fiat.

The assassination fitted the pattern of Jumblatt’s life, as well as that of recent Lebanese history. His father, a Druze chieftain, was assassinated in a sectarian squabble in the 1920s, and his sister was gunned down ten months ago in her Beirut apartment. Jumblatt himself was as paradoxical as his fractured society. Educated in law at the Sorbonne in Paris and at a Roman Catholic university in Beirut, he fought throughout his career to revise the antiquated sectarian political system whereby Lebanese Christians automatically held the balance of power in the government. Although Jumblatt was a Socialist, and a Moscow favorite who won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1972, he owned vast tracts of land and opposed Communism. Revered by the Druzes as their secular leader, he studied Buddhism, Hinduism and Christian theology and regarded himself as a mystic. Shortly before his death, in fact, Jumblatt had been planning a trip to a monastery in the Himalayas for “spiritual exercises.” He had last gone there —for the same purpose—before beginning the final fruitless struggle to reform his country.