Tiger at the Helm

In Beirut, police stand blithely by while taxis careen up one-way streets the wrong way, honking every time they pass a sign reading "Klaxon Interdit." Smuggling of everything from hashish to hand grenades proceeds under the benign eye of the customs inspector, and buying a judge's opinion is sometimes as easy as buying a crate of Lebanese apples. When mild, soft-spoken Charles Helou, 52, was elected President of Lebanon by its Parliament in 1964, everyone expected him merely to preside over this happy chaos, because, as one Beirut parliamentarian puts it, "Corruption is the Lebanese way of life, and it is no use to fight against it."

Imagine the general amazement when, quoting the popular expression that "The fish rots from its head, not from its tail," the President set out to hack away graft in government from the top down. First hit was the judiciary. At Helou's prodding, the Supreme Judicial Council in December fired 13 prominent judges whose "irregularities" were well known. Last week the diplomatic service was called up on its own red carpet. Sacked "for not properly representing Lebanon" were the ambassadors to Russia, Iran, Cyprus, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Senegal and Argentina (the ambassadors to Britain and Egypt had quit beforehand).

Possibly in the interests of international decorum, the government did not specify charges, but every Lebanese trader could itemize the likeliest opportunities for a safqa (deal) in the foreign service: peddling diplomatic codes and official reports, for example, or trading in black-market currencies. One confidential dispatch recently turned up in a Cairo newspaper before it reached the foreign office in Beirut.

Helou seems far from finished. Next on his lengthy list are top men in the government ministries, the customs, the police and the military. He may even take on the faction-ridden, absentee-prone Parliament itself, whose members spend much of their time lobbying to place themselves or friends in key civil service slots. Remarked one member of Parliament last week, more (at this stage) in wonder than in rage: "The tame man we elected has turned into a tiger."

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