Lebanon Left to Face Most Basic of Issues

War Exposes Deep Conflicts About the Nation's Identity and Its Future

BIKFAYA, Lebanon -- From the terrace of former president Amin al-Gemayel's ancestral mansion, Lebanon appeared so beautiful that it seemed it should go on forever. Traditional houses of ocher stone huddled far below in close-knit villages, and churches with tiny domes stood sentinel along the twisting roads. In the distance, the Mediterranean gleamed under a warm Middle Eastern sun.

But the recent 33-day war between Israel and Hezbollah has raised fundamental questions about Lebanon's future and its identity, straining the political institutions on which the country was built, perhaps to the breaking point. In Bikfaya, Gemayel's tranquil little town in the hills behind Beirut, and across the rest of Lebanon, people have begun to think that their country and its historic melding of Christians with Muslims may not prevail after all.

"Lebanon is at a crossroads," said Gemayel, who was president during wars from 1982 to 1988. "Either we draw the lessons from the war and build a Lebanon that is genuinely democratic and liberal, and an example of intercommunal coexistence, or we are headed for the disintegration of Lebanon."

In their own ways, Israel and the Bush administration have grappled with the same problem in Lebanon. In parallel policies, they have insisted that Hezbollah disarm and fully join in the Lebanese political process. But because Lebanon's political institutions do not reflect Hezbollah's wider support in the population, the militant Shiite Muslim movement has made it clear that greater changes will be needed before it lays down its arms.

The Gemayel family, Maronite Christians, had a lot to do with the creation of Lebanon's old landscape, a place where Christians and Muslims coexisted and business flourished while the tax man looked the other way. Amin al-Gemayel's father, Pierre, was a pharmacist who became a leader of the independence movement. His elder brother, Bashir, was president briefly in 1982 before being assassinated at the behest of the Syrian government.

The Lebanon most foreigners think of -- tolerant, easy-living, Western-oriented -- bore the imprint of Maronite families such as the Gemayels, and not by accident. France, the mandate power here until just after World War II, originally carved Lebanon off from Syria to provide a place for the Maronites in the predominantly Muslim Middle East. They made it into a "hinge country," linking East and West.

To rule the new country and preserve its unusual personality, France left behind a system under which the president and the army commander must be Maronites, giving decisive power to what was then the major community. The prime minister was to be Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shiite.

Lebanon's demography has changed drastically since then. No official census has been taken, a reflection of how delicate the issue is here. But academics said that over the past two decades, Shiites have become a plurality -- estimates range from 32 percent to 45 percent of the population -- and Maronites a minority of less than a quarter. With Sunni Muslims and other sects counted, the overall balance has changed to more than 60 percent Muslim.

Hezbollah's emergence as a political party and armed militia was in large measure a response to that shift. In effect, the organization stepped in to represent Shiites because many of them felt the government did not, particularly in the southern hills along the border with Israel.

"We are not a replacement for the state," Hasan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, said in a recent televised interview. "But where the state is absent, we have to take up the slack."

The war with Israel further dramatized the gap between Lebanon's institutions and its new political demography. Communal strains had been swept under the rug for years under the leadership of Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005. But in the crucible of a destructive, bloody war, those strains suddenly seemed glaring.

Lebanon's official, Maronite-led army sat out the conflict, for instance, while Hezbollah's militia, which was better armed, did the fighting and dying. President Emile Lahoud, the other Maronite pillar of power, was also on the sidelines because of his association with Syria, an ally of Hezbollah.