The Making of Modern Lebanon by Helena Cobban

Author:Helena Cobban [Cobban, Helena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, International, Social Science
ISBN: 9781000303179
Google: 0WJtAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 3339602
Publisher: Hutchinson
Published: 1985-01-15T00:27:34+00:00

Notes

1 Salibi (1976), pp, 126-7.

2 Quoted in Fiches du monde arabe, no. 1798 (21 January 1981).

Syrian soldier of the Arab peacekeeping force in Beirut, 1978

7 A troubled inter bellum (1977–82)

Some 30,000 residents of Lebanon had died during the 1975-6 civil war. An estimated quarter of a million required immediate relief, and 600,000 had been displaced from their homes. Capital losses caused by the war had totalled 7.5 billion Lebanese pounds - about 3 billion dollars.1 The losses suffered by Lebanese manufacturers were particularly heavy: a total of 172 large manufacturing firms suffered direct losses totalling 244.6 million Lebanese pounds, which came to some 51.4 per cent of their aggregate authorized capital.2

From 1976 on, the Lebanese economy became even more heavily dependent than previously on its service sector, which had been relatively less hard-hit by the fighting than manufacturing, and on remittances from the many Lebanese who now migrated down to the oil states. These two sources of income, along with a continuing inflow of hefty political subsidies from various Arab states, were sufficient to keep the economy afloat, and the Lebanese pound relatively stable, right until the Israeli invasion of 1982. The functioning of the economy was, however, radically affected by the de facto partition to which the country was subject after 1976. With Beirut's former downtown centres reduced to a heap of rubble, new commercial centres grew up in both East and West Beirut - as well as in Jounieh, Sidon and other outlying regions.

The man who, as the Republic's new president, was in charge of putting the country back together again was Elias Sarkis. Sarkis broke the mould of 'big family' presidents much more thoroughly than Camille Chamoun had done, twenty-four years earlier. When he came into office, he was 52 years old, unmarried, a meticulous but grey technocrat whose experience had been gained in the nation-building Shihabist school.

Why was Sarkis unable to replicate, in the years after 1976, the stunning political achievements Shihab had registered after the civil war of 1958?

The history of Lebanon must, I think, be written in terms of men and women who made it, as well as of abstract historical 'forces'. True, in 1976, the Lebanon's regional environment was far harder to deal with than it had been in 1958. True, by 1976 deep historical and demographic processes were underway inside Lebanon which more fundamentally challenged the status quo than had been the case in 1958. Nevertheless, my judgement remains that Sarkis himself contributed substantially to the breakdown which occurred during and following his time in office.

A man from a modest, small-town Maronite background, in the end Sarkis proved that he lacked the compelling vision of the Lebanese nation, which had been one of his master's major motive forces. Even if Shihab himself had come into office in 1976, he could not have achieved as much then as he had done in the period after 1958. But he would not have failed as abjectly as Sarkis. At points where crucial decisions had to

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