Saturday, December 27, 1997

Lebanese Maronite leader preaches reconciliation

By DAVID GARDNER / The Financial Times

DIMANE, Lebanon -- The Maronite Patriarchate at Dimane, high in the cedared fastness of northern Mount Lebanon, is so eerily still a place that the clocks on the belltower have stopped. But time has not stood still for the Maronite Christians, the paramount force in multi-faith Lebanon until the 1975-90 civil war.

The Maronites were the main losers from that carnage, which they started in order to preserve their dominance over Shiite and Sunni Muslims. The war ended with Israel occupying a swathe of the south, and with Syria -- from which Mount Lebanon was carved out as a Maronite sanctuary by the old French colonial authorities -- in political and military control of the rest.

Survivors among the traditional Maronite leadership, feudal and ruthless, are in exile in Paris, while big slices of the Maronite middle classes are dispersed around the world.

Leadership of the community, still the biggest concentration of Christians in the Middle East although dwindling yearly through emigration, has fallen on to the shoulders of Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, the Maronite Patriarch.

A slight, silken-bearded man with animated eyes, Sfeir has had the difficult task of trying to fill the Maronite leadership vacuum. But at the same time he articulates a far wider resentment towards Syrian hegemony, which a Lebanese government beholden to Damascus tolerates in no temporal leader.

This May, Sfeir and his community received the boost of a successful visit to Lebanon by Pope John Paul II, which brought half a million Lebanese into the streets, mostly Christians but with many Muslims among them.

"His visit has shown that the Christians are still here, in spite of fears that we are diminishing," Sfeir said. "The Holy Father has given courage to all the Lebanese, but especially to the Christians."

Moving with suppleness between politics and theology, the Patriarch explained that the future of Christians in the Middle East -- their numbers sharply down in virtually all countries with the partial excep tions of Syria and Egypt -- is intimately linked to the position of Christians in Lebanon.

The pope called for reconciliation between Christian and Muslim, for the Vatican-allied Maronites to resist the lure of emigration, and for the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty. While much of the euphoria surrounding the pope's visit has evaporated, the Patriarch remains hopeful.

"We cannot but be hopeful because this is our country. We have a role to play, which is to be a witness to Christian values in a country which is not fully Christian."

He believes the Lebanon has a future as a multi-confessional country but only if foreign troops -- Syrian as well as Israeli -- pull out. "People say that if Syria withdraws, Lebanon will fall back into war. This is simply not true. We have been here since the dawn of Christianity and they (the Muslims) have been here since the coming of Islam."

Israel, which this year suffered heavy losses from the Shiite Islamist guerrillas of Hezbollah fighting to evict them from the south, is currently wracked by debate about whether to end the occupation. But each time this happens, Damascus and Beirut tighten the screw on internal, particularly Maronite, dissent, which both governments fear would then concentrate its attention on Syria's 35,000 troops deployed in Lebanon.

The Syrians, the Patriarch complains, "have been able to say that it is not reasonable for the friend to withdraw while the enemy stays here."

In the early stages of the civil war, it was in fact Syria which waded in to prevent the Maronite militias being overwhelmed by the predominantly Muslim left and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The subsequent alliance of Maronite warlords with Israel, which poured its troops into Lebanon in 1982, eventually did most to undermine the community.

But all this, Sfeir believes, should be relegated to the past to make way for a future of inter-confessional movements based on equal political rights. Odd as it may seem, the only other Lebanese figure of stature who talks in these terms is Sheik Mohammed Hussein Nasrallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah demonized in the West.

"We have had no occasion to meet," the Patriarch smiles, "but yes, we have similar ideas about Lebanon's future." Islamist fundamentalism, he says, "derives from a lack of political and social justice." All Lebanon's Christians must "bear witness" to this "because if Christians and Muslims cannot co-exist here, then the world is in deep trouble."

Lebanon, in this view, is once again a sort of regional laboratory, testing the limits of religious co-existence -- and the future of Christians throughout the Middle East. The Maronite Patriarch clearly feels a great deal hangs on the outcome, and that Christians worldwide have a stake in it.

"Is it in the interests of Christians throughout the world that this land, where Christ was born and lived, should be without Christians?" Sfeir asks. "The pope said that the presence of Christians in the Middle East is conditioned by the presence of Christians in Lebanon. The day the Christians leave Lebanon, there will be no Christians left in the Middle East."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)