World Notes Lebanon

The scene was numbingly familiar. A 550-lb. car bomb exploded in a crowded commercial section of Christian East Beirut, setting eight buildings ablaze and gouging out a 9-ft. crater in the street. The toll: 30 dead, l33 injured.

Western observers assumed that the explosion was linked to an ongoing struggle between Lebanon's rival Christian factions. Less than a week earlier, 350 died when troops loyal to President Amin Gemayel defeated a militia force headed by Elias Hobeika, who fled to Paris and then to Damascus. The fight stems from Gemayel's rejection of a Syrian-brokered agreement that was supposed to have brought an end to Lebanon's eleven-year-long civil war. The accord was signed by leaders of Lebanon's Druze and Shi'ite Muslim militias and even by Hobeika, but was turned down by Gemayel because it would have reduced the Christian community's political power. The enraged Syrians told Gemayel, following his eleventh meeting with Syrian President Hafez Assad, "There will not be a twelfth summit." Renewed fighting immediately broke out in Lebanon, and worse was expected. Concluded Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt: "We are back to the language of the gun."