USCFL - The Syrian Conspiracy for the destruction of Lebanon

The first direct and official intervention by the Syrian army in Lebanon occurred on 16 January 1976. Its objective was the Christian town of Damour, a small market town of 30,000 inhabitants situated on the southern coastline, 12 kilometers from Beirut. The town was leveled, its population massacred or forced into exile. The operation enabled Syria to carve the country in two. The country's physical and societal partition started with the occupation of Damour.

In June 1976, the Syrian army deploys in the Bekaa and on the first mountain ranges that buttress Mount Lebanon, under the pretext of intervening between the Christians and the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA), a force composed of Palestinians subordinated to Syria, armed by it and commanded by Syrian officers.

On 26 October of that same year, The Arab League, faced with the Lebanese conflict, decides to send to Lebanon the so-called Arab Dissuasion Force (ADF), consisting of 30,000 Syrian soldiers as well as a few symbolic contingents furnished by other Arab countries. This force was placed at the disposal of the President of the Lebanese Republic. Its mission was limited to a stay of six months, renewed at the President's request.

At any given chance, bloody conflicts erupted in diverse places in Lebanon, forcing the President to renew the ADF's mission . Starting with 1978, the mission was composed solely of Syrian soldiers. Henceforth, Syria had a free hand in Lebanon.

On 6 September 1982, at the request of Lebanese President Elias Sarkis, the Arab League suspended the ADF's mandate. But the Syrian army refused to leave.

On 1 September 1983, both the President of the Republic and the Lebanese government requested once more, officially and solemnly, the departure of the Syrians, but again to no avail.

And yet Syria, profiting from the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Mount Lebanon and a part of Southern Lebanon (1983-1984), stirred up new internal wars between Christians and Druzes, Druzes and Shi'ites or different Shi'ite factions, and once rid of the Multinational Force, it advanced its troops to the positions from which it had been chased in 1982 by the Israelis.

At present, the Syrian army occupies the totality of the Lebanese territory militarily, politically, juridically and economically under cover of the Taef Accords. Syria incites the Lebanese communities against each other, sows discord and division. It has wrecked institutions and demolished infrastructures.

The Damascus leaders do not conceal their wish to deploy their domination over Lebanon though they do not say under what form. They confirm willingly that Lebanon is a Syrian province. And yet this country, the traditional home of the Middle East's minorities, had been ruled, up to the 16th century by indigenous princes. Its autonomy had gained international sanction in 1861 in the Paris Conference, while the territories that make up present day Syria remained Empire lands up to the French Mandate.

Let's recall, too, that Lebanon was mentioned 75 times in the Holy Scriptures. Moreover, the date in which the name Lebanon makes its appearance matches the period when the name Israel first appears in the Bible. One notices on the other hand that the name Syria never occurs in the Bible. The reason is very simple: Syria has never existed, and the name is derived from the Phoenician town Sour (Tyr), a name that was attributed as well to the territories belonging to the Kingdom of Sour. These territories were called Tsouria or the Tyr territories, and with time, Tsouria was simply transformed into Souria or Syria. In other words, the present Syria is no more than a collection of territories that fought one another. The present Syria was founded in 1943 by the French.

In fact, the objectives that Syria is looking for in Lebanon are complex and varied. They reflect the ambiguity of the Alawite regime established in Damascus. A minority (8% of the population), the Alawites have been ruling Syria for over thirty years. Forced to conduct a pan-Arab policy in order to gain the acceptance of the Sunnites and their everlasting nostalgia for the Omayades, they devise concurrently a strategy of retreat for the day in which they will no longer rule.

As concerns pan-Arabism, the conquest of Lebanon, a country predominantly Christian, forms part of the vast project regarding Islam's recuperation of all lands that had belonged once to the Islamic corpus and that colonialism is accused of having torn apart. This is why the Syrian enterprise in Lebanon is not seen, generally, with disfavor by the Arab-Moslem countries (especially Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran).

From a strictly Alawite point of view, Lebanon's annexation has the further advantage of integrating into Syria numerous Lebanese minorities as a counter-weight to the Sunnite majority in the Syrian population.

Lebanon's annexation in the strictest sense has failed, its partition into small denominational states foreshadows Syria's partition the day when the Alawite regime is severely threatened. The regrouping of that ensemble into an Swiss-type confederation will break definitively the Sunnite monopoly in the region.

This multi-headed strategy explains on the one hand the reason why, between 1975 and 1990, Lebanon's Christian regions remained the preferred target of the Syrian artillery. It explains likewise the cause for the Syrian regime's persistent hostility towards all Lebanese leaders who seemed resolute to restore Lebanon's unity) and thus get rid of the Syrians. Lebanon's occupation consists for the Syrian regime of other advantages as well. It had enabled it:

1). To exercise its hegemony over the Palestinians, whose principal bases remain at all times in Lebanon and to retain that way one of the keys to the resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

2). To practice a flight forward: The war in Lebanon, that enabled the Syrian regime to persevere, serves as a counter-measure for problems of a political (inability to recuperate the Golan) or socio-economic nature (reduced by the pillage of Lebanon).

3). To use occupied Lebanon as a platform for its policy of overall terrorism and blackmail (Western hostages in Lebanon, assassination of Western civilian and military citizens, bombing of northern Israel under cover of the Hezbollah). Lebanon has likewise turned into one of the main junctions of the drug traffic whose profits are distributed as lucrative incomes to officers and others of the regime's dignitaries. (See files on the history of the drug traffic in Lebanon and war crimes committed in Lebanon by the Syrians.)

What is involved here, historically, beyond the contingencies of Syrian politics and the Middle East crisis, is the elimination of Lebanon's Christians.

Lebanon's Christians have one advantage over the Christian citizens in other Arab countries: They enjoy a fully distinct citizenship. The preeminent role that they play in their country's government enabled them to create a free space within a region stifled by unionist and theocratic currents. Their dispersion over the ensemble of the Lebanese territory, with their convents, schools and know-how had been the crucial factor in the unity of the country and its cultural and economic thrust. It had thus been possible to create, within the framework of a single political entity, a Judeo-Islamo-Christian conviviality unequalled at any time.

The program for the elimination of Lebanon's Christians was evolved from the beginning of the war. In 1976, one of the Lebanese leaders, an ally of Syria, declared publicly that it would suffice to kill twenty thousand Maronites to prompt the departure of the majority of Christians, and that the few who remained would be easily dominated.

With regard to the Christians, the war in Lebanon took the form of a rampant genocide by means of heavy artillery shelling of residential quarters, destruction of infrastructures, urban terror, kidnappings. The Christians, to defend themselves, will use the same methods, albeit with their backs to the sea.

The Syrian tactics consisted from the beginning of the war in raining heavy blows, tightening the yoke and then allowing the departure of a new flow of emigrants before starting anew.

The elimination of the Christians will have as an immediate consequence the disappearance of Lebanon. And indeed, emptied of its Christians whose presence and activities had fashioned its specificity, Lebanon won't have any reason to exist.

Let us recall that the Christians of Lebanon and the Middle East were the promoters and the defenders of Arab culture and of the Arabic language, particularly when under Turkish domination. Thus, the Middle East Christians in general, and the Lebanese Christians in particular, served the political, economic and cultural interests of Islam. Hence, their physical elimination from the Arab world will serve as an irrefutable proof of that world's lack of conviviality, the dire political consequences of which must be speedily drawn:

1).As concerns the Israeli-Arab conflict, the elimination of Lebanon's Christians provides the proof, if still needed, that there will never be a definitive solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict until the Jews of Israel are eliminated in their turn.

2). On a global level, the elimination of Lebanon's Christians, the last vestige of Christianity in the Middle East, will constitute a historical and living proof of the Moslems' incapacity to co-exist anywhere with non-Moslem populations within the framework of a secular, political entity. See the recent attacks on the Christians of Pakistan or the Synagogues of France.

The war for the destruction of Lebanon started officially 27 years ago and still goes on. The incarcerations of Lebanese opposed to the Syrians continue, the torture and cold-blooded murders never stopped. Lebanon is nowadays the only state whose territory is occupied by a foreign army.

Syria's stranglehold over Lebanon was implemented on the background of civil wars between the different Lebanese communities and factions that Syria had mutually antagonized and whose conflicts she never stopped igniting. An Islamo-Christian entente was presented at that time as the sole condition for the resumption of peace and the presence of the Syrian army - as a factor of pacification.

But no one has any doubts that an entente among Lebanese will not be possible as long as Syria does not relinquish its domination over Lebanon and as long as its army occupies the country.

For that matter, any inter-Lebanese entente was reached chiefly against the Syrians. This entente was perceived whenever a unifier such as Saad Haddad dared defy the Syrians. Similarly, the regrouping of Lebanese from different religious communities (Shi'ite, Druze and Christians) in Southern Lebanon within the South Lebanon Army (SLA) proved the cohesion of the Lebanese against Syrian-Arab hegemony, occupation and terrorism.

We, predominantly, must not become impressed by the complexity of the situation on the ground. This is a trap. The Syrians have complicated it all the more to dissuade whoever wishes to try and see clearly. In fact, things are infinitely simpler. All it needs for order and peace to be reinstalled on the spot is Syria's incapacity to cause any more harm.

In certain Western milieus, despite the above, the minority regime in Damascus is considered a favorable element for regional equilibrium and its presence in Lebanon -an ideal means to distract Syria from the Israeli-Arab conflict. It is therefore assumed that any Syrian reversal in Lebanon would weaken the Alawites' power at the profit of a more radical regime (primarily Islamist) that would imperil Israel's security.

But we have seen that Syria has used and is continuing to use the Lebanese Hezbollah as well as other Palestinian terrorist organizations to sow terror inside Israel before it tears itself apart by its own hands.

These are the same Western milieus who, for that matter, preach the respect of Human Rights and of Peoples' Liberty. In actual reality, the states are rare who, in their political actions, take into account considerations of a moral and humanitarian order.

One does not resolve a problem by creating another. Realpolitik has conducted only to catastrophes. It is not by letting Syria digest Lebanon that peace in the Middle East will be attained, quite on the contrary. Stronger from having absorbed Lebanon, and feeling far more free henceforth in its movements, the Syrian regime's appetite will simply grow twice as big. The phenomenon is a classic.

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Article:	The Syrian Conspiracy for the destruction of Lebanon
Author:	Dr. Jihad Rene Albani
Date:	June 2002