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Lebanon

Lebanon has been called “the precarious republic” because of the delicate balance of power among its 18 ethno-confessional communities and because it has often been a battleground for external actors. Old tensions reemerged soon after the withdrawal of Syrian troops in the wake of ex-Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri’s assassination in 2005, well before the developing crisis of the summer of 2006.

Since the unwritten National Pact of 1943, the president of Lebanon has been a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of Parliament a Shiite Muslim. The 128 seats of Parliament are similarly allocated along confessional lines, with seats also going to the Druze and the many smaller Christian denominations. These arrangements were made formal by the 1989 Ta’if Agreement, which helped to end the civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990. Shiites, the largest of Lebanon’s communities, are under-represented in government and disproportionately poor and disadvantaged.

Nearly 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon. Lacking citizenship rights and barred from numerous occupations, they are among the poorest Palestinians in the region. Prior to 1982, the Palestine Liberation Organization was headquartered in Beirut. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982, the second time expelling the PLO and then occupying a “security zone” in south Lebanon until May 2000.

Hizballah, the Shiite militia that sprang up to fight Israel in the south, kept its weapons under Ta’if because of the continuing Israeli occupation. Following the Israeli withdrawal, the militia remained under arms. Hizballah also runs schools and hospitals, and functions as a political party, sending ministers to the Lebanese cabinet for the first time in 2005. The party resists UN calls to disarm; political opponents call it a “state within a state” and decry its Iranian and Syrian backing.

After the civil war, the government sought to reclaim Lebanon’s reputation as the “Switzerland of the Middle East”—a bustling center of banking and tourism, as well as the intellectual hothouse of the Arab world. Reconstruction ran up huge national debt, and, along with privatization of state-owned enterprises, helped to deepen the country’s already profound disparities of wealth and income.


Facts and Figures »