Word: moslem
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Even by Middle Eastern standards, it was a week of abnormal tension and turmoil. The carefully engineered truce imposed on that divided nation by Syria had collapsed (see below). Bitter fighting continued between hard-pressed Christian rightists and forces of the National Movement, an amalgam of Moslem leftists and Palestinians led by a gaunt, shambling politician-mystic, Kamal Jumblatt (see page 34), who vowed to fight on until Lebanon's antiquated sectarian political system was reformed...
Although Brown conferred with a wide range of Christian and Moslem leaders (including President Franjieh), the man principally responsible for arranging the freeze was Syrian President Hafez Assad. He was greatly embarrassed by the collapse of the January 23 cease-fire arranged by his Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam. Assad's government launched a diplomatic offensive to get Jumblatt's forces to stop fighting...
Although Assad regained some lost prestige by arranging the freeze, his credibility as claimant to leadership of the Arab world suffered when the Pax Syriana collapsed. For one thing, it appeared that Damascus had far less sway over the Lebanese Moslems, leftists and Palestinians than it had claimed. For another, Syria's frantic efforts to gain another cease-fire were backed primarily by Jordan's King Hussein and Saudi Arabia's King Khalid, two conservative monarchs who are anathema to radical Arabs. The U.S. also endorsed Syria's peace efforts, as did Moscow, although the Russians played no perceptible role...
Both Israel and the U.S. now face the problem of how to deal with a new ingredient in the Middle East morass: a Lebanon that is not the Lebanon of old. It seemed certain last week that the Moslem leftists were on the verge of forcing the country to abandon the old sectarian political system, either by accepting reform or by facing the muzzles of 25,000 AK-47s. As King Hussein observed in Washington, it is no longer "a question of changing a President in Lebanon, but of changing a regime and its shape...
...gate last April and shells were exploding everywhere, but a small band of doctors continued to treat patients at battered Gia Dinh Hospital. During a recent lull in Lebanon's civil war, a medical team entered Beirut and set up an emergency clinic in an isolated Moslem enclave which had been blockaded for nine months. In Guatemala last February, the ground was still trembling when a special task force of doctors arrived to care for victims of that country's disastrous earthquake...