Round 3 Begins

No one was sure exactly how the latest round started. One report was that two Iraqi youths made a pass at a pretty Christian Lebanese girl in a suburb of Beirut. Unfortunately, the suburb was Ain Rumanneh, the stronghold of the right-wing Christian Phalangist Party, where violence broke out last April between Phalangists and Moslems. In no time, according to the story, the Iraqis were attacked by Christians. Before long the incident had somehow escalated into Beirut's third round of street fighting in as many months. The stutter of automatic weapons fire and the thud of rockets and mortars echoed through the streets once more, in a continuation of the worst crisis that Lebanon has suffered since 1958, when civil war broke out and U.S. Marines landed. An estimated 450 people were killed during the first two rounds of fighting in April and May. Last week, after four days of renewed violence, the estimated death toll was between 40 and 50.

Roadblocks and machine gun emplacements sprang up once again on the city's streets. Militants, their AK-47s at the ready, closed the main highway routes to Tripoli in the north and Damascus to the east. Shops shuttered quickly, and frightened Beirutis scuttled through rapidly emptying streets in last-minute efforts to stock up their larders. At the very last moment, the American University of Beirut canceled its commencement exercises, leaving capped-and-gowned students walking on an otherwise deserted campus.

The country's economy has been badly affected by the three rounds of violence, a flight of capital appears to be under way, and most businessmen consider the 1975 tourist season a dead loss. Beyond all that, the internecine bloodshed has shattered the morale of the dynamic city, which has become the financial capital of the Arab world.

The current clashes primarily involve hard-lining leftist Palestinian commandos (but not the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by relatively moderate Yasser Arafat), Lebanese leftists, and the fiercely nationalistic Phalangists, who deeply resent the fact that armed fedayeen form a kind of state within a state in Lebanon. The bitterness has been compounded by the political difficulties of Premier-Designate Rashid Karami, an eight-time Prime Minister (TIME, June 9), who after four frustrating weeks is still trying to put together a Cabinet that will be acceptable to Lebanon's principal political factions. The problem is that the Phalangists' leader, Sheik Pierre Gemayel, insists that his party be represented. Socialist Leader Kamal Jumblatt is equally determined that the Phalangists be frozen out.

Sectarian Distrust. Karami proposed a Cabinet, therefore, that would exclude both extreme right-and left-wing groups until the country had calmed down, but his proposal fell on deaf ears. So far the underlying issues --which cut to the heart of Lebanon's sectarian distrust between Christians and Moslems--have proved to be insoluble. "The difficulty in resolving the political crisis," observed a Western diplomat, "has hindered the resolution of the security crisis." At one point Karami threatened to give up his efforts to form a government, but by week's end had been persuaded by his colleagues to keep trying.

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