Lebanese Christians and Druze urge unity as they commemorate 18-year-old reconciliation
▶ Recent tension was put aside at the event, but memories of massacres in the early 1980s remain, writes Sunniva Rose in Chartoun
Hundreds of people congregated on Sunday afternoon in a church in the small village of Chartoun in the Lebanese mountains of Aley to commemorate the August 5, 2001 reconciliation between Druze and Maronite Christians.
The meeting came weeks after the communities’ worst falling-out in decades.
Politicians from the two parties that spurred the 2001 reconciliation, the Druze Progressive Socialist Party and the Maronite Christian Lebanese Forces, organised the celebration and called for unity.
“Reconciliation is the only way to consolidate a shared life, turn the page and look towards the future,” said PSP minister Akram Chehayeb.
“If the mountain is fine, Lebanon is fine,” LF MP Anis Nassar told The National, echoing one of the favourite
sayings of his party’s leader, Samir Geagea. The celebration of what has come to be known as the “reconciliation of the mountain” was delayed by a few weeks as Druze-Christian tension remained high after a deadly shoot-out in late June that pitted the PSP against its smaller Druze rival, the Lebanese Democratic Party, near the village of Qabr Shmoun, half an hour away from Chartoun through the winding mountain roads. The exact circumstances surrounding the death of junior Druze minister Saleh Al Gharib’s two bodyguards is still under investigation, but Christians became involved in the blame game as fingers were pointed at Foreign Affairs Minister Gebran Bassil.
He has been accused of repeatedly igniting old sectarian hatreds by mentioning massacres committed by the Druze against the Christians in the early 1980s, threatening to endanger the reconciliation.
“Return is not done, and reconciliation is not complete,” said Mr Bassil in October 2017, quoted by Lebanese daily Al Liwaa.
“Is it not natural that people want to know where their families are? And where their bones are?”
On June 30, only hours before the Qabr Shmoun clash, he repeated in a speech that “you [Christians] will be guaranteed a real return”.
During the 1975 to 1990 Lebanese civil war, a series of massacres were committed by the Christians and the Druze living in Mount Lebanon in 1983, ultimately driving hundreds of thousands of Christians out of the area while the Druze remained.
Memories of the killings are still raw.
Mr Al Gharib’s family, including his father, were killed by the LF in September 1983, said Makram Rabah, a history professor at the American University of Beirut who is preparing a book on the 1983 conflict in Mount Lebanon, locally referred to as “the mountain”.
Analysts say that by repeatedly referring to the 1983 events, Mr Bassil is trying to pose as a strong Christian leader in hope of succeeding his fatherin-law as the country’s president – who is, by tradition, always a Maronite Christian.
After the June 30 shoot-out, the government was paralysed for 40 days before LDP and PSP leaders finally made up on August 9 during a meeting at the presidential palace in Baabda in the presence of the president, the prime minister and the speaker of Parliament.
The meeting came as a relief to locals. Elie Habr, 21, who came from a neighbouring village to watch Sunday’s celebration in Chartoun, said that the 2001 reconciliation meant that he felt safe even after what happened in Qabr Shmoun.
“The Druze could have taken revenge against the Christians, but they did not,” he said. “They are more than us today – they could easily hurt us if they really wanted to.”
That impression is not correct, Mr Rabah said. But because the local Druze community are very involved in local activities and Christians spend more time in secondary homes on the coast, some Christians such as Mr Habr have the impression of being outnumbered, he said.
On Saturday, President Michel Aoun repeated in front of high-ranking PSP officials and Druze sheikhs that despite political differences, the reconciliation of the mountain would not be shaken.
But underlying tension remains, as shown by banners welcoming him to his summer palace in Beiteddine, a PSP stronghold, being torn down before he arrived on Friday.
Mr Aoun, who led the Lebanese army during the civil war, was in exile in France when the reconciliation of the mountain was signed in 2001, and his party did not exist in 1983.
But he still fully rallied behind the agreement, which was blessed by the Maronite patriarch at the time, Nasrallah Sfeir.
The reconciliation was a precursor to an alliance of Lebanese political parties to evict Syrian troops from Lebanon.
The troops left in 2005 under intense international pressure after the assassination of prime minister Rafiq Hariri. But Mr Aoun started moving away from Druze-Christian reconciliation after he struck an alliance with Hezbollah, a Syrian ally, in 2006, Mr Rabah said.
“For Aoun, backing the reconciliation was a way to get rid of the Syrians. But after he brokered a deal with them [in 2006], he started to doubt it.”
Like the president, Mr Bassil regularly denies any intention to reignite sectarian tension or to call the reconciliation of the mountain into question.
Preserving “the mountain, the land, the identity, and the diverse culture of our country” is his main aim, he said yesterday after meeting Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Bechara Rahi.
But Mr Rabah argues that Mr Aoun and Mr Bassil’s claims are insincere. The president should tell Mr Bassil to stop referring to the country’s troubled past in his speeches, Mr Rabah said. “If you want to walk the walk, you should talk the talk,” he said.
The mountain has been the home of the Druze community since the 11th century.
With the encouragement of Druze leader Fakhreddine Al Maan, Maronites settled in Druze areas in the 16th century to provide manpower to work the land or in silk factories.
Fighting between the two communities goes back to the 19th century, when the Druze took revenge on the Christians for collaborating with the invading Egyptians.
In 1983, the LF militia hoped to take power in the mountain with the backing of Israeli forces, which had invaded the country the year before, reaching Beirut. Supported by Palestinian and Syrian fighters, the Druze reaction against the Maronites was “borderline ethnic cleansing”, Mr Rabah said.
To escape the massacres, the Christian population fled to the coast or abroad.
“The evacuees carried nothing with them. Some left in their pyjamas. Some were half naked. Some were barefoot. A mother lost her child on the way,” wrote Paul Andary, Mr Geagea’s second in command in 1983, in his book, War of The Mountain.
“And the ones who chose to stay behind were slaughtered like sheep.”
The effects of the fighting can be felt to this day in villages like Chartoun, which was destroyed and emptied of its inhabitants.
“I remember visiting it in 1983. It was bulldozed,” Mr Nassar said. Born in a neighbouring village, he fled the fighting to the US.
“Today, we are barely 500, but before, we were thousands,” George Nakhle said. “Everything was destroyed.”
Two years ago, the former LF fighter came back from Beirut with his daughter Carla, 27, and her family to open the village’s second sandwich shop.
Born two years after the end of the war, in 1992, his daughter said she was happy to have left Beirut for Chartoun and bore no ill will towards her Druze neighbours.
But for her, ceremonies such as Sunday’s have little significance. She would rather forget, she said. “If we keep remembering, it might all happen again.”
Reconciliation is the only way to consolidate a shared life, turn the page and look towards the future AKRAM CHEHAYEB Progressive Socialist Party minister