In Lebanon, a crisis for Christians

As this mountain town in the Christian heartland north of Beirut mourns the murder of one of its most revered leaders, Pierre Gemayel, its residents ponder a future that many fear is slipping toward civil conflict.

"The Shiites want everything now and they are armed and we Christians and the Sunnis are being pushed aside," says Charbel Tannoury, a baker who fought in Lebanon's 1975-1990 war as a militiaman for the Phalange Party, once the dominant Christian political body.

With Lebanese soldiers flanking the main street Friday, mourners lined up in the courtyard of the magnificent stone mansion, seat of the Gemayel family, to offer condolences for the death of the 34-year-old Pierre, industry minister and Phalange chief who was shot dead last week.

Gemayel's death has cast a pall over a community that once dominated post-independence Lebanon, but today feels marginalized and torn apart in a new confrontation defined by a Sunni-Shiite political faultline rather than the more traditional Christian-Muslim division.

"The Christians see themselves as an embattled community which is being targeted and whose leaders are being targeted," says Ghassan Moukheiber, a Christian member of parliament (MP) in the bloc of Michel Aoun, a former Lebanese Army commander in opposition to the government.

Gemayel was the latest victim in a sporadic campaign of assassinations and bombings that has shaken Lebanon over the past two years. All the bomb attacks have occurred in Christian neighborhoods and all but two of the assassination attempts have targeted Christian figures, both politicians and journalists.

But instead of uniting the historically divisive community, the killings and heightened sectarian tension has polarized the Christians even further.

"Today, there is a big difference of opinion among the Christians and I don't think anyone will change positions easily," George Adwan, an MP for the Christian Lebanese Forces party, said Sunday after meeting with the Maronite patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir.

Lebanon's political class traditionally comprised several feudal dynasties drawn from all the major sects – the Maronite and Druze families in the Mount Lebanon range, the Shiite clans in the south and Bekaa Valley, and the wealthy Sunni merchants of the coastal cities.

Following independence from France in 1943, the divisions between the Maronite families were largely defined by rivalry for the presidency that is reserved for the sect. After the end of the civil war in 1990, the militant Shiite Hizbullah and Rafik Hariri, the former Sunni prime minister, came to dominate their respective communities, overshadowing the traditional families. But the Christians emerged from the conflict weakened and split under Syria's postwar domination of Lebanon.

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