Bloodletting

Outwardly the most stable of all Arab countries, prosperous and democratic little Lebanon (pop. 1,500,000) has been rocking for months on the rim of the Arab nationalist volcano. Last week all the pent-up flames of its religious feuds and political frustrations burst into the wildest and bloodiest rioting of Lebanon's twelve years of independence.

Little Lebanon, smaller than Connecticut, likes to think of itself as a Switzerland, peacefully balancing its internal factions, staying out of trouble and making money. Today, as in the time when the Phoenicians pushed their biremes seaward from Tyre and Sidon, the business of Lebanon remains business. Rich in universities, nightclubs, banks and commerce, Lebanon sought to sustain itself as officially half Christian and half Moslem, but it has found the delicate cultural, commercial and political balances increasingly harder under the thrusting forces of East-West rivalry and the Arab surge toward unity.

The Suez showdown drove silver-haired President Camille Chamoun, 57, a Maronite Roman Catholic, as Lebanon Presidents must traditionally be,* to align Lebanon with the West, and later to accept the Eisenhower Doctrine. No sooner had he done so than Nasser flew into nearby Damascus to merge Syria into his new United Arab Republic and fire the hearts of Lebanese Moslems to join in the same sort of positive neutrality. Moslem opposition leaders were alarmed at the way President Chamoun, who won a three-quarters majority in last year's parliamentary elections, now proposed to alter the constitution so that he might run for a second term when his six-year term expires next September.

"Crush the Despot!" Fortnight ago the pro-Nasser editor of the newspaper Telegraph (a man believed also to be a disciplined Communist) was assassinated outside his Beirut home. Who killed him? Nobody knew. Some suspected that he might have been murdered by the Communists themselves to create a martyr. The pro-Nasser National Front immediately called a general strike against the regime. "Crush the despot and save Lebanon!" cried chunky ex-Premier Saeb Salam.

Beirut was slow to rise. But in the northern Moslem stronghold of Tripoli, crowds poured from a mosque to pillage, smash and burn every unshuttered shop. Goaded by agitators, the mob gutted the U.S. Information Agency library; some seized a model of the Vanguard satellite from a desk and kicked it about the street in a grotesque soccer game. In the city's chief square, troops fired. Ten died.

"The people of Lebanon have risen as one man against imperialism," shrilled Nasser's Radio Damascus. Said Radio Moscow: "The Lebanese people have had enough of the American system." In Tripoli Communists and other underground forces won control of the mobs. Saboteurs blew up the Iraq Petroleum Co.'s pipeline to the Mediterranean, forcing the company to pump its oil through a branch line in Syria. At the Syrian border, customs guards stopped a suspiciously sagging Chevrolet sedan driven by Louis de San,

Belgian consul general in Damascus, and found 33 submachine guns, 37 pistols, a time bomb and 1,500 rounds of ammunition jampacked in the trunk. De San, a millionaire eccentric who admitted making ten such trips in the last few weeks, was found to be carrying riot directions fc-r persons in Beirut.

"O Shehab, Take Over!" Then barricades and fires erupted in Beirut itself. Beaten off by police at the U.S. embassy, a mob smashed another U.S. Information Agency library and -the invariable habit of Arab nationalist mobs these days -burned its books. Shirtsleeved young men with clubs ranged the streets looking for a fight. One gang of thugs incongruously cruised the avenues in a black Cadillac, stopping from time to time to order shopkeepers to close up.

When the government made a halfhearted effort to arrest Saeb Salam, his private army of 100 bullyboys drove cops back from his sandbagged mansion. Near the Syrian border, where avengers knifed to death the five customs guards who seized De San's guns, a Chamoun-hating Druse tribal leader named Kamal Jumblatt took to the field with an army of 2,000. Cried Beirut's Al-Masa (it was a comment on Lebanese freedom that opposition newspapers appeared uncensored all week): "0 Chamoun, resign! O Shehab, take over!"

"We Are Determined." But through a week of rioting, President Chamoun held out against quitting, and Brigadier General Fuad Shehab, the arthritic professional officer who commands Lebanon's brigade-size army, rebuffed all hints to move in -or even get tough. Six years ago he had ended a crisis by taking over as Acting President when Chamoun's predecessor had to resign over charges of corruption. But Shehab now insisted: "I do not want to be known as the destroyer of Presidents," and because he refused to take responsibility, the government refrained all week from imposing martial law.

Foreign Minister Charles Malik sent a note to Cairo charging "massive interference" by Syrian and Palestinian infiltrators, including some 30 fedayeen raiders caught coasting up to Lebanon in small boats from the Gaza Strip. As the riots raged on, the U.S. Sixth Fleet stood into the eastern Mediterranean, a U.S. cargo ship fetched 14 Americans unscathed from battered Tripoli, and U.S. Air Force transports roared into Beirut with tear gas and small-arms ammunition. "We are determined to help this government maintain internal security," said U.S. Ambassador Robert McClintock.

At week's end more and more shopkeepers began raising their shutters, and in the countryside rival tribesmen took up arms to help fight the rebel Druses. The government, growing bolder, made so many arrests that movie houses had to be commandeered for auxiliary jails. Some 12,000 Syrians were transported to the border and dumped into Syria. But the Chamoun government, still unable to assert authority in many places, had yet to round up any opposition leaders, and some observers began to say that the crisis might just peter out in victory for nobody, but at the cost of at least 150 lives so far.

* To balance the Premiers, who must be Sunni Moslems. Cabinet seats are divided proportionately among the six major religious groups.

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