Lebanese Civil War : Ask Biography

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The Lebanese Civil War ( ) was a multifaceted civil war in Lebanon. The war lasted from 1975 to 1990 and resulted in an estimated 150,000 to 230,000 civilian fatalities. Another one million people (a quarter of the population) were wounded, and today approximately 350,000 people remain displaced. There was also a mass exodus of almost one million people from Lebanon. The Post-war occupation of the country by Syria was particularly politically disadvantageous to the Christian population as most of their leadership was driven into exile, or had been assassinated or jailed.

There is no consensus among scholars and researchers on what triggered the Lebanese Civil War. However the militarization of the Palestinian refugee population, with the arrival of the PLO guerrilla forces did spark an arms race amongst the different Lebanese political factions.

It has been argued that the antecedents of the war can be traced back to the conflicts and political compromises reached after the end of Lebanon's administration by the Ottoman Empire. The Cold War had a powerful disintegrative effect on Lebanon, which was closely linked to the polarization that preceded the 1958 political crisis. However, such accounts come from journalistic sources and are not consistent with such academic scholarship as is largely interested in comparative political research. These scholars (such as Michael Johnson) argue that the earlier conflicts in Lebanon were an expression of bourgeoisie war for influence amongst different political personalities. The 1958 war for example, often referred to as the War of the Pashas was an insurrection mounted by traditional political bosses who had lost elections to the parliament in 1957. However, due to Lebanon's historic openness towards the press and political organization, such local conflagration were always given more regional meaning because of the co-optation of such events by parasitic groups. The founding members of Fatah for example, although not as yet officially formed, had flocked to Lebanon and participated in the insurrections, aiding in the take over of the streets in Tripoli by armed protesters who had been directed onto the streets by the defeated political bosses.

This crisis in 1958 was not deep and ended very quickly. However by 1975, the presence of a foreign armed force in the form of the PLO guerrillas, who exercised a veto on Lebanese politics and exercised the foreign policy of other states within a period of regional polarization, had a visible effect on Lebanon. The establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of a hundred thousand Palestinian refugees to Lebanon (around 10% of the total population of the country) changed the demographics of Lebanon and provided a foundation for the long-term involvement of Lebanon in regional conflicts.

After a short break in the fighting in 1976 due to Arab League mediation and Syrian intervention, Palestinian � Lebanese strife continued, with fighting primarily focused in south Lebanon, which had been occupied by the PLO since 1969, in contravention of the Cairo accords signed with the Lebanese government. During the course of the fighting, alliances shifted rapidly and unpredictably: by the end of the war, nearly every party had allied with and subsequently betrayed every other party at least once. The 1980s were especially bleak: much of Beirut lay in ruins as a result of the 1976 Karantina massacre carried out by the Lebanese Front, the Syrian Army shelling of Christian neighborhoods in 1978 and 1981, and the Israeli invasion that evicted the PLO from the country.