Word: chamoun
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...weeks ago, Abu Hassan heard from the Christian Maronite leadership that the Israelis had assigned a new assassination squad to get him. A week before that he had protected a young Christian leader, Dany Chamoun, from a Palestinian mob, and the Christians were repaying the favor. Despite the warning, Abu Hassan is not known to have taken extra precautions. When TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis asked him a few months ago if he was worried about the Israelis' determination to kill him, he replied: "They're the ones who should be worried after all their mistakes. But I also...
Israel, too, was building up its Christian allies: the "Tigers" commanded by former President Camille Chamoun and the Phalangist fighters under Pierre Gemayel. By night, Israeli ships brought in arms, medical supplies and food to Jounieh, twelve miles north of Beirut. About 150 Israeli advisers - distinguishable from their Christian clients because they do not wear the pearl-handled revolvers and outsize crosses favored by the swaggering militiamen - were providing counsel and logistical support. Christian officers of the Lebanese armed forces turned over to the militiamen an arsenal of U.S. weapons that had been destined for the country's moribund...
Neither the Christians nor their foes are backing away from the prospect Of more slaughter. "As long as the Syrians are in Lebanon, there is no peace," warned Chamoun last week. Equally adamant was Syrian President Hafez Assad, who insisted that his troops had opened fire on the Christians in order to "establish the authority of the Sarkis government." But when the Lebanese President proposed that a buffer force of Lebanese soldiers be deployed between the Christians and Syrians, Assad had a brusque reply: "There is no Lebanese army, and what there is represents the Christians." After Sarkis completed...
Affection very quickly turned to estrangement after the Syrian peace keepers ordered the Maronites to lay down their arms, while making no similar demands on the Palestinians. Chamoun and Gemayel began laying the groundwork for partitioning Lebanon and creating a pro-Israeli Maronite state along Syria's border. When Gemayel's Phalangists murdered the son of Assad's friend Franjieh and more than 35 other pro-Syrian Christians in June, Syria became convinced that the plot was already in motion. Assad was further alarmed when the Camp David talks foreshadowed a separate Israeli-Egyptian peace, thereby tipping...
...leave Lebanon in the hands of radical Muslim leftists and Palestinians-in effect creating a new "confrontation" state. TIME has learned that two months ago, Assad attempted to cut his losses in Lebanon by bluntly demanding that the Christians make a final choice between Israel and the Arab states. Chamoun's reply: "We choose the Israelis." At that point Assad decided to cripple the militias by Oct. 28, when the legal mandate given to the peace-keeping force by the 21-nation Arab league expires...