What Next, Lebanon?

The goal now, he said, was for each community "to protect itself."

U.S. officials have insisted that Lebanon cannot return to a status quo ante, but Taryaki expressed fear about what a new order would bring.

"We're not a strong country," he said grimly.

'We Already Had a War'

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Sidon is the birthplace of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister who played a pivotal role in rebuilding Beirut's infrastructure and reconstructing its downtown, a symbol of the country's recovery from the 1975-90 civil war. His assassination last year unleashed mass protests in Beirut's Martyrs' Square that helped force the Syrian government to end its 29-year military presence in the country. The demonstrations culminated on March 14. A week earlier, Hezbollah had organized a pro-Syrian demonstration. While huge, it was the smaller of the two. In a way, Lebanon still remains a country of those two protests.

In the year that followed, efforts at reconciliation among Lebanon's factions went nowhere, and Hezbollah effectively blocked any effort to disarm its militia, the last from the civil war to still bear arms.

"We already had a war going on inside this country before this war started," said Tayseer Shaalan, a 28-year-old Shiite Muslim who fled in a 10-car convoy of 100 people 10 days ago from his village of Bidyas, near the southern city of Tyre.

On the bluff along the edge of the campus, he sat with his neighbors. In their words were the sometimes ambiguous sentiments of the Shiite community: confidence in their numbers as the largest single sect in Lebanon, underlined by a sense of siege of a group long mistreated, ignored and marginalized in Lebanese politics, their fate in the hands of feudal lords and reactionary clerics.

They often talk these days about the 1982 Israeli invasion, when thousands of Palestinian fighters were forced to leave on boats from Beirut, ending what was for a time a Palestinian-run state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon.

"They can't put us all on a boat," said Abu Malek Jiha, a 40-year-old driver from Tyre.

Sitting on the ground, sharing cups of bitter coffee, others nodded in agreement. A blast echoed in the distance. "Did you hear that?" Shalaan asked. A friend, Ghaleb Atwi, glanced in the distance toward the explosion, then looked to the future.

"What's the justification to take the weapons away from Hezbollah?" he asked. "To protect Israel? It has the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world, and we have rifles and old rockets defending our children and our land on which our grandfathers lived."

Each offered his own warning of what would happen if Hezbollah were forcibly disarmed.