Word: druse
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...When Druse tribesmen slew thousands of Lebanese Christians, leading to European intervention and the establishment of Lebanon as an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire...
Favored by the pause in the fighting brought about by the marines' arrival, he called on a score or so of Lebanese leaders in both camps. He went into the hills to see Kamal Jumblatt, the Druse rebel chieftain. He talked with the elusive General Fuad Shehab, whose unwillingness to fight the rebels has avoided a civil war-but prolonged the chaos. He regularly saw President Camille Chamoun, who now seemed willing at last to help to find a successor agreeable to the most reasonable of his opponents...
...usual, the army did not follow up its advantage. At the height of the Tripoli barrage, Rebel Leader Kamal Jumblatt's Druse mountaineers launched a drive that took three villages overlooking Beirut itself. There, too, the army heaved into action with just enough heavy weapons to roll the rebels back to their old lines, prompting Chamoun to observe that the military situation was "leaning toward the government...
Kamal Jumblatt, 39, a hereditary chief of Druse mountain tribesmen and ex-Cabinet minister, formed his own socialist party in 1949, later backed the movement that installed Chamoun in office. A somewhat intellectual and moody mountaineer who studied in Paris and took to visiting an Indian ashram after his first parting with Chamoun, he now controls the south central area of Lebanon for the opposition. Chamoun's ultimate insult, he claims, was to deny him his ancestral parliamentary seat in last year's elections. As leader of a heretical Moslem sect, he is no friend to Islamic...
When the government made a halfhearted effort to arrest Saeb Salam, his private army of 100 bullyboys drove cops back from his sandbagged mansion. Near the Syrian border, where avengers knifed to death the five customs guards who seized De San's guns, a Chamoun-hating Druse tribal leader named Kamal Jumblatt took to the field with an army of 2,000. Cried Beirut's Al-Masa (it was a comment on Lebanese freedom that opposition newspapers appeared uncensored all week): "0 Chamoun, resign! O Shehab, take over...