Sectarian with a New Vision

Gemayel was aiming for national unity when he was killed

During his five years as TIME’S bureau chief in Cairo, Wilton Wynn frequently covered the fighting in war-torn Lebanon. Now the bureau chief in Rome, Wynn was back in Lebanon last week when Bashir Gemayel was assassinated. A few days earlier, Wynn had obtained the only interview with Gemayel after his election as President, and the last one, it was to turn out, that the Christian leader was to give. Wynn’s impressions of the man:

LIKE A CEDAR THAT HAS BEEN FELLED! was the banner head used by the Beirut daily L ‘Orient-Le Jour in reporting the violent death at age 34 of the country’s President-elect, Bashir Gemayel. The cedar is the symbol of Lebanon, especially associated with the mountains. Like the cedar, Bashir Gemayel was a product of Mount Lebanon. The cedar grows and flourishes in harsh surroundings, in unfriendly weather, and so did Bashir Gemayel. He lived in a tough and uncompromising world, reached its zenith, and was felled.

It was in his 400-year-old ancestral home in the mountains outside Beirut that Bashir Gemayel received us for the interview. From the windows of the pink stone house there is a breathtakingly beautiful view of the mountain slopes with their olive groves and grapevines among gray boulders. But Maronite Christians like the Gemayels did not settle in Lebanon because of its beauty. They chose those mountains because of security, a rugged area ideal for defense, where a lonely Christian community could defend itself and survive in a sea of sometimes hostile Muslim neighbors. The Maronites survived without ever being reduced to minority status, not because of law or the goodness of their neighbors but because of their mountain toughness, their reliance on the gun as readily as on the courts or the promises of others. During the years of sectarian conflict when the Maronite community and its culture were threatened with destruction, Gemayel re-introduced to his people the old mountain defenses of toughness and self-reliance. As President he intended to do the same thing for Lebanon as a whole.

“In the past, we Lebanese thought our strength was our weakness,” he told TIME. “We wanted to be the merchants, the bankers and the tourist guides of the Middle East, leaving the fighting to others. We thought that because we had no military power, nobody would attack us, nobody would fear us enough to want to fight us. The result was that today one-third of our country has been destroyed and two-thirds of it is occupied by foreign armies.”

The solution, said Gemayel, was to build a strong army that could guarantee Lebanon’s own security. He had in mind an army of 100,000 to 150,000 men and women. With the calm self-confidence that was characteristic of him, the stocky President-elect said: “I know how to build an army.”

He did indeed. There were no places for weaklings in the beleaguered Maronite enclave during the civil war that began in 1975. Initially the “war” did not involve pitched battles but individual acts of violence. Snipers hidden in high buildings or on rooftops would pick off civilian pedestrians. Muslim gunmen would set up roadblocks, check the identity cards of those passing and kill anyone who was a Christian. The reverse happened at roadblocks manned by Christians. Kidnapings were common, and often the bodies of the victims were found with eyes gouged out, testicles chopped off or arms and legs severed.

“We had to show the Muslims and Palestinians that we were as tough and mean as they were,” a young member of Gemayel’s Phalange said at the time. “I once studied to be a doctor, but I had to drop out of medical school after two years because I was too squeamish for vivisection. Now, after what I have done to Muslims and Palestinians,

I could get my medical degree easily.” In that charged and bloody time, Gemayel emerged as a leader of the Maronite community. He got his chance originally because he was the second son of Pierre Gemayel, founder of the Phalange back in the ’30s. Brother Amin, nominated by the Phalangists as their new candidate for the presidency, chose to handle the political side of the party, and Bashir went to work to build Maronite military muscle.

In rising to Maronite leadership, Bashir had to fight not only Palestinians and leftist Muslims but also some of his fellow Maronites. In the tense atmosphere, a minor automobile mishap could touch off a firefight between Bashir’s Phalangist warriors and the “tigers” of former President Camille Chamoun, often with bloody results. Gemayel’s Phalangists were accused of murdering a son and granddaughter of former President Suleiman Franjieh (whose own followers, according to local belief, had once gunned down 17 members of a rival family in a church in northern Lebanon).

Eventually Gemayel concluded that to defend the community successfully he could not afford the luxury of internal strife. His Phalangists took on Chamoun gunners and won. As the undisputed leader of the Maronites, young Bashir Gemayel welded the Phalangist, Chamounis and other Christian militias into one fighting group called “the Lebanese forces.”

Bashir fought and killed when he found it necessary, but after his election the man who was considered a narrow and fanatical sectarian by his enemies acknowledged that he had to make concessions to non-Christian communities if he were to develop a national consensus.

Gemayel alienated the whole Arab world by openly going to Israel for help during the civil war, and his frank intention was to have close, friendly relations between Lebanon and Israel. But he intended to do it only on the basis of national consensus. He meant to go slowly rather than leave behind those he needed in order to govern.

Probably no one elected President of Lebanon had ever prepared himself better than Gemayel. He envisioned a Lebanon with a streamlined administration, a meritocracy rather than a bureaucracy of patronage, and he intended to have an army strong enough that Syrians or Israelis or U.S. Marines would not have to come into his country regularly. He would guarantee that Lebanon no longer would be a launching pad for terrorist acts against Israel or other neighbors of Lebanon. But he had no time to achieve even a portion of his ambitions, and his death brought a new wave of terror to the stricken country of Lebanon. –