President Gemayel vows to link Christian and Muslim
"This is not the time for tears. It is the time for work." So declared Amin Gemayel, 40, last week as he addressed the members of the Lebanese Parliament, who had just elected him by a vote of 77 to 0 to a six-year term as President of their fragmented country. Gemayel spoke while standing beneath a black-draped portrait of his brother Bashir Gemayel, 34, who was killed by a bomb blast on Sept. 14, nine days before he was to have assumed the presidency. In that somber setting the new President-elect said: "I pledge to shoulder the monumental responsibility of reuniting and reconstructing Lebanon in the fashion my martyred brother had hoped to accomplish."
The selection of Amin Gemayel—a Maronite Christian, as was his assassinated brother—was the result of a rare display of unity between the country's Christians and Muslims. A lawyer who worked diligently as a member of Parliament for the past ten years to maintain ties with the country's various Muslim and Christian factions, Amin Gemayel has little of the charisma that made his tough-minded brother a popular hero among Lebanon's Christians. Still, Amin is no less dedicated than Bashir was to the main goals of the Phalangist Party: preserving the country's existing political balance, which in effect means the supremacy of Lebanese Christians.
Lebanon's 500,000 Maronites trace their history back to the 5th century. Followers of St. Maron settled in the rugged mountains of what is now northern Lebanon. In those years, Lebanon was a haven of tolerance for persecuted Muslim and Christian sects. The Maronites, who formed a union with Rome in the 12th century, are one of the so-called Eastern rites of the Roman Catholic Church, with their own jealously guarded traditions (including a married clergy and a liturgy celebrated in ancient Syriac).
A hardy and fiercely independent people, the Maronites struggled to preserve their culture through hundreds of years of foreign rule, first by the Arab caliphs (632-1258) and then by the Ottoman Turks. In the late 19th century, following a devastating massacre at the hands of the Druze sect, the Maronites were granted formal autonomy by the Turks. After the Ottoman empire was finally dissolved in 1920 and Lebanon came under French mandate, the Maronites continued to rule themselves. When Lebanon became independent in 1943, political power was divided among the various religious groups according to a 6-to-5 ratio of Christians to Muslims in the population. Under the National Covenant, an unwritten agreement reached at the time, the country's President is always a Maronite, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament a Shi'ite Muslim. But the Maronites overwhelmingly dominated the setup through their power in the military and their economic influence. Moreover, the Muslims are now believed to be the majority in the population.