Question

a good introduction paragraph on the 1975 civil war in lebanon

Answer 1

The Lebanese Civil War was both an internal Lebanese affair and a regional conflict involving a host of regional and international actors. It revolved around some of the issues that dominated regional politics in the Middle East in the latter part of the 20th century, including the Palestine-Israel conflict, Cold War competition, Arab nationalism and political Islam. Conflicts over these issues intersected with longstanding disagreements in the Lebanese political elite, and in parts of the population, over the sectarian division of power, national identity, social justice and Lebanon’s strategic alliances. During 15 years of fighting, around 90,000 people lost their lives, according to the most reliable statisticians, Labaki and Abou Rjeily (1994). The much higher numbers of up to 150,000 that are often given appear to have been based on international press reports from the early 1990s and subsequently repeated uncritically. By contrast, Labaki and About Rjeily, supported by the second most reliable statistical sourceb,t figures on information from the Lebanese army, security forces, Red Cross and various professional organisations, parties and militias, as well as reports in the Lebanese press during the war. Even so, this information was gathered under extreme difficulties, and it is possible that the real number exceeds 100,000. Of the 90,000 killed, close to 20,000 are individuals who were kidnapped or disappeared, and who must be assumed dead as they have not been accounted for. Nearly 100,000 were badly injured, and close to a million people, or two-thirds of the Lebanese population, experienced displacement.

In addition to the large number of dead, much of Lebanon’s infrastructure was shattered, as was Lebanon’s reputation as an example of cross-sectarian coexistence in the Arab Middle East. The Lebanese Civil War was one of the most devastating conflicts of the late 20th century. It left a number of political and social legacies that make it paramount to understand why it involved so many instances of mass violence. The question of Civil War memory is acute for many Lebanese, who have come together in the post-war period to debate the war and create public commemoration. In their view, the war has continued through other means in the post-war period, and the periodic rounds of violent conflict plaguing Lebanon since 1990 are directly related to the Civil War. Remembering, analysing and understanding mass violence in Lebanon, therefore, is not just an academic exercise, but for many Lebanese an urgent task directly linked to political reform and reconciliations

Lebanon is not an anomaly, and its experience with mass violence does not defy social analysis. It does, however, require the outside observer to be aware of the deeply divisive context in which Civil War historiography is being produced. The perceived unfinished nature of the war has rendered debates about it very contentious inside Lebanon. Some historical work has been politicised under the influence of the political and physical reconstruction process that followed in the 1990s and 2000s, and, more generally, under the influence of political discourses surrounding the immediate past in reconstructing Lebanon, while other work – much of it produced by scholars of Lebanon in Western universities – maintains a high standard of objectivity. This is not to extol non-Lebanese scholars over Lebanese ones. In fact, two of the most painstaking and convincing histories of the war were written in French by Lebanese scholars (Beydoun 1993, Kassir 1994). However, as Beydoun (1984) has shown, Lebanese scholars during the war were under the heavy influence of political and ideological projects that sought to mould history in their shape. Given the vast amount of historical work on the war, this review does not pretend to be all-inclusive, but seeks to summarise some of the main debates surrounding the war.

Some of the most salient engagement with the Civil War has been produced outside the realm of academic history, in elite and popular cultural production, political discourse, urban space and mass media. It is a key point of this scholarly review that such material should be viewed as part of the historiography of the war. By making a conceptual distinction between academic history and memory culture, the review does not validate one over the other, nor claim that the two realms are hermetically sealed from one another. On the contrary, the aim of this review is to show how the different genres of memory production overlap and form part of the ongoing assessment of the war. Hence, it gives an overview of the main themes and topics in academic literature, cultural and media production, and public debate relating to the war. Finally, it examines a body of meta-historical literature analysing the production of historical memory in Lebanon.