Word: beirutization
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...series of setbacks. A five-day truce between P.L.O. factions ended abruptly on Tuesday when rebel forces attacked and seized the Baddawi camp, causing hundreds of deaths and forcing Arafat and some 4,000 troops still loyal to him to seek refuge in the heart of Tripoli. In Beirut, 45 miles to the south, an eight-week truce was frequently violated as "phantom artillerymen," presumably Druze, shelled predominantly Christian East Beirut and sporadically hit parts of the Muslim western quarters as well. The continuing peace negotiations among Lebanon's warring factions were hampered by bickering over some...
...Tripoli, Arafat was surrounded on three sides by Syrian and rebel Palestinian forces and on the fourth by the Mediterranean. As he had done at Beirut in the summer of 1982, when he was fighting the Israelis instead of the Syrians, he delayed and postured as long as possible in the hope that some Arab states, and perhaps even the superpowers, would come to his rescue. The Soviet Union had already stressed to its Syrian clients the need to "overcome strife and restore unity" within the P.L.O., but the effect on the Syrians had been negligible...
Arafat has been losing his power base ever since his forced evacuation from Beirut last year. Then, last May, a Syrian-backed rebellion broke out within the P.L.O.'s ranks. The rebels were angry with Arafat for having left Beirut and for taking what they regarded as too moderate a line on future negotiations with Israel. They resented his talks with King Hussein of Jordan a short time earlier and his growing quarrel with Assad...
Reported by Barry Hillenbrand/Tripoli and Roberto Suro/ Beirut...
...meantime, random firing of rockets and artillery broke out again around Beirut. Shells were falling in the neighborhood of the presidential palace as Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam arrived for a talk with President Gemayel. The immediate problem is Syria's insistence that Lebanon's withdrawal agreement with Israel be abrogated or at least radically modified. Summarizing the impasse, a former Lebanese Cabinet minister declared bitterly: "The Syrian position is clear: simple intransigence. All this shelling is simply a means of keeping up the pressure on Gemayel...