LEBANON-POLITICS: Trial of Christian Will Test Muslim Leadership

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Cherif Cordahi

CAIRO, Nov 18 1994 (IPS) - The former head of the christian Lebanese Forces is due go on trial in Beirut Saturday for the bombing of a church north of the capital earlier this year and the killing in 1990 of a another prominent Christian leader Danny Chamoun.

It is a case that has great significance for Lebanon’s embattled Christian minority in a country now politically dominated by Muslims following the end of the civil war in 1990.

Samir Geagea, who was arrested in April after the church bombing two months earlier, faces the death sentence if found guilty. If the sentence were carried out it could have the Christian community up in arms.

Analysts in Beirut say the Christians, mainly Maronites linked to the Roman Catholic Church, will be watching the trial very closely to gauge how they will be treated now and in the future by the Muslims.

The trial is also seen as a test of Lebanese government resolve after years of ineffectiveness to deal with many alleged criminals of the calibre of Geagea.

After the end of Lebanese civil war the Lebanese authorities, at the behest of their Syrian overlords, offered an amnesty for all crimes committed during the country’s 15-year-civil war.

However, shortly after the war ended, gunmen burst into the Beirut home of Danny Chamoun, a prominent Christian leader opposed to Geagea’s Christian militia, killing him, his German-born wife, Ingrid, and their two young children. Only, their baby girl, Tamara, survived when the maid hid with her in a cupboard.

At the time, the assassination was widely blamed on the Syrians which Chamoun, son of former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, vehemently opposed. More than 30,000 Syrian troops are stationed in Lebanon, a country now widely seen as a Syrian protectorate.

In February this year, two days after an Israeli militant burst into a mosque in the West Bank town of Hebron and murdered at least 30 Palestinians, a bomb exploded in a Maronite church north of Beirut killing 11 people.

At first, the attack was blamed on Israel which, Lebanese Muslim leaders said, was trying to attract attention away from the Hebron massacre.