Word: druzes
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Beginning at dawn on several days last week, Druze and Christian militiamen exchanged artillery fire in villages on both sides of the Beirut-Damascus highway. Ambulances, their sirens wailing, raced up and down the main road as shells whizzed overhead. Small-arms fire echoed in the hills a few hundred yards from the Lebanese Defense Ministry. Much of the time, Christian East Beirut was largely shut down, the streets empty, most shops closed. Shells and rockets fell on the predominantly Muslim southern suburbs as well as on the Christian areas along the coast to the north...
...villages of the hills and the mountains beyond, Christians and Druze alike were feeling the effects of the fighting. Dwellings were destroyed, people uprooted, and hundreds reported killed, some of them in incidents that amounted to undocumented slaughter. The Christian village of Beit ed Din, site of the long-unused Presidential Summer Palace, is a shambles, its houses burned and its shops looted. It is deserted except for its Druze occupiers, who sit idly in the shade, cradling their weapons. Across a narrow ravine, within easy sniping distance, is the besieged Christian town of Deir al Qamar, scene...
Indeed they are, as are the people of Ain et Tine and other shell-shocked Christian towns that are not surrounded. But then so are the people of Aley and Ain Zhalta and other Druze towns, all prisoners of collective folk memories in which rights and wrongs are forever remembered. "We are the first people of Lebanon," says a Druze village elder, referring to his sect, which broke away from Islam in the 11th century (see box). "We cannot be ignored. We respect the rights of others, but they must respect our rights...
...When Lebanon became independent in 1943, followed by the evacuation of French troops three years later, the preponderance of political power was apportioned between Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims on the basis of the 1932 head count, with a minimal share of representation for such minority groups as the Druze and the Shi'ite Muslims. In the late 1950s and 1960s, with Lebanon prospering as a Maronite-dominated haven of stability and mercantilism and as the only real parliamentary democracy in the Arab world, its rulers shrewdly neglected to take a new census. But a higher birth rate among...
Thus last week the symbol of this ancient and hopelessly intricate struggle became the hill town of Suq al Gharb. Here the Druze, having already virtually driven the Christian militiamen out of the mountains, hoped also to hold off the army of the Christian-led government. Here the Syrians hoped to weaken the Gemayel government, and here the Palestinians hoped to win a victory and perhaps a chance to return to West Beirut. The government and its army knew that they must make a stand. At midweek Gemayel, who has been slow in his efforts to broaden his political base...