| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
__NEWS__Lebanon_________________________
A Nation Reborn?
Accepting his historic role as the voice of the Lebanese people, the Maronite Patriarch has
become an outspoken critic of the Syrian occupation in his country.
By Michael Hirst and Nicholas Jubber
“This is the safest place on Earth.” Such thoughts are not what one expects to hear in South Lebanon, where tanks and military checkpoints line the roads in defense as much against the militant activities of the Hezbollah as against the threat of spillover from the simmering tension in next-door Israel. But such is the renewed sense of optimism in war-torn Lebanon that a local worker on the UN’s interim peacekeeping team felt confident his hometown of Tyre was a haven of peace. Some of his neighbors, however, were less positive. “This area has seen war and bloodshed for more than fifty years,” said a local tailor. “When will it stop? I don’t know.”
Israelis and Palestinians may be bearing the brunt of the Middle East conflict, but neighboring countries are not impervious to the ramifications. Air raids and rocket attacks have been conducted with the reciprocal pattern of a tennis match between Israel on the one side and Syria or Hezbollah on the other. The territory in which their weapons are deployed remains—as it has been for the best part of half a century—the south of Lebanon.
It is only recently that the Lebanese have begun to crawl out of a debilitating and vicious civil war that left their economy in tatters, their people divided, and their capital city of Beirut reduced from its former proud status as “the Paris of the Orient” to its sorry current state in which it looks like a massive, disorganized construction site.
A fertile strip of land, whose wealthier inhabitants boast that they can ski in the cedar-ridged mountains in the morning and swim in the warm Mediterranean sea in the afternoon, Lebanon is wedged between Syria, whose army controls it, and the Holy Land, where the inflammations of the intifada threaten to overflow and consume it. The Lebanese are petrified that another period of sustained national hardship could be only a gunshot away.
For the Christian community—most of whom are Maronite Catholics loyal to the Holy See, and trace their descent from the ancient Phoenicians—the problems go beyond the threat of warfare and consequent economic destruction. Their greatest fear is emigration, which has already seen their numbers dwindle to such an extent that Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, who is as much a spokesman for his people as he is their spiritual leader, fears that “if this situation continues, there will be no Christians left.” There are still 1.2 million Maronites in Lebanon, representing the largest proportion of Christians in any country in the Middle East. But in the last fifteen years, they have ceased to represent the majority in a country where Christianity has thrived ever since St. Maroun started preaching to the pagan Phoenicians more than 15 centuries ago.
The Maronite tradition
The Maronite Christians are an independent Church, loyal to Rome but self-governing and self-sufficient. Their founder, St. Maroun, lived on a mountaintop near Antioch at the end of the 4th century, emerging at a time when the Church was splintering into factions caused by the Nestorian, Jacobite, Arian, and Monophysite heresies. His success in converting the previously pagan communities of the Lebanese mountains produced a Catholic bastion in an area where the enemies of Catholicism had flourished. Consequently the Maronites found themselves an isolated minority, subject to persecution by their Christian neighbors as well as by the forces of Islam who emerged within two centuries after St. Maroun’s death. In 451, after the Maronites opted to accept the Council of Chalcedon, they were pursued by Jacobites who massacred 350 of them. According to an eyewitness, they were slaughtered at their altars, their monasteries burnt, and their churches looted. This was the first of a series of atrocities that would test their religious integrity over the next 1,500 years.
The Maronites remained loyal to Rome, supporting Pope Honorius at the Council of Constantinople in 680 AD and receiving reciprocal honors when the Pope acknowledged their first Patriarch seven years later. When the Crusaders arrived in the Levant, Maronites flocked to serve them as guides and interpreters, and worshipped with them in Latin churches. Such was their support for their fellow Catholics that the French Crusader King Louis IX wrote a letter of solidarity to the Maronite Patriarch, extolling the “sincere friendship” between their respective peoples. But the defeat of the Crusaders was a defeat for the Maronites, and they found themselves abandoned by the West and left once more to fend for themselves.
Communication with Rome continued, and messages were exchanged between popes and patriarchs. In 1584, a Maronite College was established in Rome. In the next century Capuchin, Carmelite, and Jesuit missionaries penetrated Lebanon, working alongside the Maronite clergy, with whom they established schools that raised the level of education and propelled the Maronites to the foreground of the Arab cultural renaissance. But the arrival of the Western missionary priests proved to be a mixed blessing for the Maronite community. The educated class that emerged was Westernized and Latinized; and lines of separation appeared between the educated elite and the poor, more distinctly Arabic people who predominated in the eastern part of the country.
Many Lebanese point out that their country has always been a haven for persecuted minorities. If the horrors of the bloody religious conflict in the 1970s and 1980s seem to contradict that notion, there was certainly solidarity amongst the disparate Druze, Shi’ite Muslim, and various Christian denominations in the country when they swore to fight together in 1840, taking their oath at the altar of St. Elias in Antelias. That unity was sundered in 1860, when 120,000 Lebanese Christians were massacred; but the alliance ultimately led to independence in 1943, after Christian priests and Muslims sheikhs stood side-by-side in demonstrations and sat side-by-side in prisons, in mutual defiance of the Ottoman Turks and later the French mandate.
But the Lebanese only enjoyed their hard-won independent status for five years before the establishment of Israel created a wound in the region that is still far from being healed. As Palestinian refugees fled into Lebanon, bereft of their homes and possessions, and the Arab world began to tear itself apart, Lebanon became an unwilling battlefield. Sectarianism flourished. Christians now took arms against Muslims, whose grandparents had stood beside theirs only half a century earlier. Syrian troops surged in from the north, Israeli tanks from the south. Lebanon was ripped apart in one of the bloodiest and most destructive episodes of the Middle East conflict. The Christian community dwindled, as those who had the means to do so fled to a more stable life elsewhere—away from the tanks and guns that had rendered their homeland almost uninhabitable.
Voice of the people
The Maronite Patriarchate, with administrative headquarters at Bkerke, is situated near the seaside resort of Jounieh—famous for both its casino and nightclubs and for the mountaintop statue of Our Lady of Lebanon. Here, Christians and Muslims congregate to enjoy spectacular views under the protective gaze of the Virgin who is revered by both faiths. Arriving at the Patriarchate, we were led down a corridor lined with paintings of past patriarchs to a large conference room adorned with two portraits: one of the current Patriarch, the other of Pope John Paul II: a graphic display of the communion between the Maronites and Rome.
Patriarch Sfeir is the 76th Patriarch of Antioch and all the East, and the third to have been made a cardinal, since his appointment to that office in 1994. Having been ordained 51 years ago, he brings a wealth of experience to his role, garnered from work not only in Lebanon but also in Damascus, where he was secretary to the bishop for four years in the 1950s. After spending the subsequent three decades in high-ranking positions in Lebanon, he was elected Patriarch in 1986—a time of extreme tension, when Beirut had become a byword for hostage-taking and the civil war had reached its nadir.
With his academic background forged in the St. Maroun seminary at Ghazir and the St. Joseph University of Beirut, where he studied philosophy and theology, the Patriarch brings a wide spectrum of knowledge to his position. “How else,” he asks, “would I be able to speak to my people?” His policies must of necessity span a broad range of spiritual and political issues, in a country where the role of patriarch has traditionally entailed more than simply spiritual duties. “Traditionally,” Cardinal Sfeir told us, “the Patriarch was a referee to all his faithful, so it is a tradition, whenever the people have problems, that they come to the Patriarch and they expect me to speak out.” He holds traditional meetings with governmental ministers on major feast days such as Easter and Christmas; but it is during his monthly meeting with the other bishops of the Maronite Church that his real political influence takes shape. The bishops, through their public declarations about the current social and political developments, attempt to reflect the needs and concerns of their community, as the Patriarch explains. “We must speak out,” he says, “about the problems facing our people, be they Christians or Muslims.”
The Maronite Patriarch is widely recognized as the most influential figure to voice his opposition to Syria’s effective control over the Lebanese government. He was recently criticized by Lebanese President Emile Lahoud (a Maronite who supports the current status quo) for provoking “confessional sectarian instincts which do not serve the nation’s highest interests” through his persistent condemnations of the Syrian military occupation of the country. Patriarch Sfeir believes, however, that he must speak out or face the destruction of his Maronite community. Christians are leaving Lebanon in droves as a direct consequence of the occupation, he argues, and unless there is a complete Syrian withdrawal, the country may be drained of all its indigenous Christians within a generation.
In February, the Patriarch spoke of the need to stem this exodus. His goal of preserving the Christian presence could be achieved, he argued, by bringing an end to the country’s current economic crisis. If living standards improve, he reasons, families will stay. But he does not see such improvement as possible as long as Syria continues to play such a dominant role in the day-to-day governing of Lebanese affairs. The effects of the Syrian presence range beyond military occupation and political dominance. There are currently more than 1 million Syrian workers employed in Lebanon, and their presence makes it more difficult for the local population to find jobs. And as Syrian traders flood Lebanese markets with their own goods, their Lebanese counterparts are finding it harder to sell homemade products.
One solution to this problem is to emigrate. This is an easier option for Christians—who are, on the whole, better educated than local Muslims, and have more contacts in the West. In an effort to raise public awareness of the Lebanese Christians and their plight, Patriarch Sfeir recently traveled to America and Canada on an extensive 42-day trip. He met with political leaders, corporate executives, and Lebanese expatriates. “This trip was intended to strengthen the profile of Lebanese problems with the international community,” he said, “and particularly the Lebanese community in the United States.” It was one of many international expeditions that he has undertaken in recent years in an effort to strengthen ties between the Lebanese who have left their homeland and those who have stayed behind. Such ties are necessary now more than ever before, since today the Maronites in Lebanon represent only a fifth of the Church’s worldwide membership. There are now more Maronites in Brazil, and nearly as many in the United States, as there are in Lebanon; and significant numbers of Maronites can now be found in every part of the globe—in Canada, France, and Australia, as well as the other countries of the Middle East.
Patriarch Sfeir’s trip to Canada and the United States was aimed at enlisting the support of these Lebanese Christians living in the diaspora, as well as the host nations’ governments, for the cause of real Lebanese independence. The Maronite leader wants Syria to comply with the stipulations of the 1989 Taif Accord, in which it was agreed that all Syrian troops would re-deploy to the north of Lebanon by 1992 as a prelude to complete withdrawal. Twelve years later this agreement has still not been implemented. But the constant pressure applied by Patriarch Sfeir and his Christian allies has been a major factor leading to the recent movement of some 10,000 of Syria’s 40,000 troops, who moved out of Beirut in June.
The Patriarch would like to see an increased effort on the part of the international community, and in particular the United States, to ensure a total Syrian withdrawal. He insists that the Lebanese people must “assume responsibility for our own destiny without Syria’s interference.” He rejects the argument that the Syrian military presence is necessary in order to ensure peace with Israel:
For half a century the region has been living in a state of confusion. Over the last five years there has been reduced Israeli bombing and shelling of Syrian forces in Lebanon, so the economic situation has improved slightly. But the Syrians exploit occasional Israeli attacks as an excuse to maintain their presence as a “protectorate force” in Lebanon. This situation could continue eternally, and is unsatisfactory.
No shrinking from controversy
Ideally, the Patriarch envisages a Lebanon “at peace, arranging its own affairs, and maintaining good relations with its neighbors—Syria in particular.” But the current situation is not conducive to such a scenario. Therefore, he believes, “it is a crucial obligation for us to speak in the name of our people.” Although he regards himself as “a pastor, not a political man,” he notes that the Maronite patriarch has always played a vital role as a spokesman for Christian concerns in particular, and for the people of Lebanon in general. Indeed, while the Patriarch has heard criticism from some quarters because of his outspoken protests against the Syrian occupation, he says that many Lebanese Muslims, feeling themselves unable to speak out because of their religious connections with Muslim Syria, have appealed to him to raise his voice on their behalf.
Inevitably, such responsibility makes his role in contemporary politics both unavoidable and, he believes, essential to the ongoing struggle of Lebanese citizens, Christians and Muslims alike, for independence. He refused to attend the funeral of Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad in Damascus last year, and even refused to take part in an ecumenical service during the Pope’s recent visit to Syria, as part of his protest against the occupation. Had he attended either of these services, he believes, “many Christians and Muslims would have fled the country,” assuming that he had made some sort of private concession to the Syrian regime. However, he hastens to add that he regards the papal visit to Syria as a positive sign of solidarity for the faithful in another country that was once predominantly Christian but is now largely Muslim.
Despite his repeated denunciation of the occupation, the Patriarch reports that his relations with the Syrian government are generally cordial. He has received friendly messages, through various emissaries, from the new Syrian President, Bashar Al-Assad. But he stresses that these friendly sentiments need to be “proved by facts rather than words.” Indeed, he places a high emphasis on the effectiveness of deeds. He cites the success of the Palestinian group Hezbollah in achieving the removal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon as a prime example of achieving goals by whatever means are necessary. Unwilling to temper his views in order to avoid controversy, the Patriarch refuses to condemn the guerrilla tactics of the Hezbollah, which have been widely denounced by other world leaders. In fact he takes an even more provocative position. He rues the fact that, since Hezbollah is sponsored by the Syrian government, the group is unlikely to use the same violent tactics that worked to end the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in order to achieve the liberation of the rest of the country from the Syrian occupation.
There can be no lasting peace in Lebanon, Patriarch Sfeir continues, without a wider sense of security in the region. The basis for such security would be the establishment of a Palestinian state, which he believes would bring an end to the current intifada in the Holy Land and produce an easing of tensions in the region on the whole. He states his position in simple terms: “The current position is not just, and without justice there will be no peace.” He is sympathetic to the Palestinians, but ambiguous about the presence of a half million Palestinian refugees inside Lebanon’s borders. On the one hand, he believes that the presence of such a high number of Palestinians has fostered a strong rapport between these two long-suffering peoples; on the other hand, he questions whether the Lebanese government can deal effectively with the drain on resources caused by such a high number of refugees. (In this case, the strain on government resources is not simply economic; the active involvement of groups like Hezbollah among the Palestinian refugees gives rise to significant concerns about national security as well.) So the Patriarch’s belief that Palestinians should be enabled to return to the homes from which they were displaced in the warfare of 1948 and 1967 derives as much from a concern for Lebanese interests as it does from support for the Palestinians.
Lebanese society comprises a diverse cross-section of religious groups, and education plays an important role in reducing the social and cultural differences between Christians and Muslims: “Better education would increase the capacity for harmonious coexistence,” he says. Muslims, he claims, are adopting the culture of their Christian neighbors, having only one wife, for instance. Their children are now being educated at Christian universities and will soon go to work alongside Christians, thus increasing the potential for mutual understanding.
The Lebanese government is supporting this new movement toward inter-religious unity, by producing a manual that will be distributed among the people, explaining the theological positions of the country’s different religions—a project in which the Maronite prelate has been involved in a consultative capacity. He sees improved education as the bedrock for the successful future of Lebanese society: “We have no oil or minerals, so education is vitally important,” he reasons. To this end, each of the three Maronite religious orders has its own university, and the Church supports a broad network of schools; there are 1,200 Maronite diocesan priests, 1,000 religious and 1,500 nuns coordinating various educational programs around the country. These are overseen by the Patriarch together with the Synod of the Maronite Church, a committee of thirty bishops and archbishops. Their educational mission is to promote both human and religious virtue, with faith in God, justice, equality, and human rights as the principal goals of their enterprise.
Regarding the state of inter-religious dialogue between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, the Patriarch is optimistic:
We have been living here since the origins of Christianity, and together with the Muslims since the birth of Islam, so our interests are the same. Christian theology is able to embrace Muslim philosophy, because our policy is to help the people to live together without difficulties.
Difficulties are sure to come. They may take the form of Syrian efforts to exploit differences among the different religious communities in Lebanon, in line with a “divide and conquer” policy. Or they could stem from Israeli efforts to undermine Lebanese society, thereby placing greater burdens on the Palestinian cause. Patriarch Sfeir believes, though, that the nineteen different religious communities that are active today in Lebanon (seven of them Catholic, five Orthodox, and seven Muslim) “came here to find an atmosphere of liberty in which to practice their own doctrines.” This common cause can bring them together despite all differences, he believes. It is the Patriarch’s fondest hope that such harmonious coexistence will characterize the future of Lebanon, leaving behind the ugly sectarianism and civil strife that has marred the nation’s recent past.
Michael Hirst and Nicholas Jubber are free-lance journalists who specialize in reporting on the Middle East.
Back to Catholic World Report August/September 2001 Table of Contents