Religious Minorities, Nation States and Security: Five Cases from the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean by Mario Apostolov

Author:Mario Apostolov [Apostolov, Mario]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138705364
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

International interventions The multilateral intervention in the Lebanese crisis, such as the deployment of the Arab Deterrent Force and of the Western Multinational Force supporting the efforts to re-establish Lebanese national unity were not always free of contradiction. The Arab regimes were sincere in their effort to rebuild a non-sectarian coalition government, rather than to support the Muslim sects. Islamic rhetoric was consistently lacking from Arab statements on Lebanon in 1960–90. The concept of inclusive Arabism clearly prevailed. The Maronite patriarch Sfeir was seen as a positive figure facilitating the reunification of Lebanon even in Saudi Arabia, while the idea of establishing an anti-radical US-Saudi-Lebanese alliance was popular among the Lebanese Christian politicians. So, the Arab foreign ministers decided at their 1976 meetings in Riyadh and in Cairo to establish a joint Arab Deterrent Force, with a mission to restore peace in Lebanon. Yet this became a camouflage for the policy of Damascus, whose troops made up the bulk of the Deterrent Force, and which dominated Lebanon by crushing any local militia which grew too strong. Biased action plagued this operation.

The second intervention consisted in the deployment of the US, French, and Italian Multinational Force in 1983, which had to clear up the mess created by the Israeli invasion of 1982 and to assist in restoring the Lebanese state. This was a philosophy of intervention, later applied in Somalia, Liberia, and Bosnia, which from the beginning revealed the risks of involving the peacekeepers in complex communal conflict. The Multinational Force actually completed the task of the Israeli invasion by removing the Palestinian resistance from Lebanon. Only after the US special envoy Philip Habib and the French ambassador Paul-Marc Henry watched the last fidayeen leave, did the peacekeepers attend to the Lebanese civilians (Picard, 1996, p. 126; Korbani, 1991, p. 53). The Multinational Force did not end factional fighting in Lebanon. There was a confusion in the objectives of the peacekeepers, who felt that their mission was accomplished after the evacuation of the Palestinians. The tension fell, but the restoration of the overarching loyalty to the Lebanese state was far from sight. The Multinational Forces withdrew in September 1982, but urgently returned several weeks later, after the assassination of the Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. This time it was a complete disaster. On 23 October 1983, a suicide attack by Hizbullah extremists took the lives of 58 French and 239 American soldiers. The peacekeepers then engaged in a war of retaliation against Hizbullah with the ill-fated attacks on Baalbek and Souq al-Gharb.

Cold War strategy played an important role in the decision of the Reagan administration to intervene. Moreover, the US engagement already entailed a partisan bias, because it adopted the Israeli logic of eliminating the PLO first, and co-opting selected Lebanese politicians (Korbani, 1991, p. 20). Many Muslims looked with suspicion at the US support for the Lebanese government and the Lebanese Army, whose officers were mostly Christian. The misfortunes of the US-mediated Israeli-Lebanese accord of 17 May 1983 inflicted a blow on the image of Washington as an “honest broker”.

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