ABSTRACT
The Syrian occupation of emaciated and fatigued Lebanon became in the decade of the 1990s the political consummation of many years of intensive penetration of institutional political power and national cultural levers by the Baathist regime of Hafez el-Assad. The primary dimension of domination was based in the military and security domain, by over 30,000 Syrian troops, an intelligence network spread throughout society, the demotion of the Lebanese Army, and the use of arbitrary arrests, assassinations and torture as brutal methods to subdue Lebanon to the iron-fist rule of Damascus. The Syrians stood behind the assassination of Kamal Junblatt in 1977 and that of Bashir Gemayel in 1982. They had attempted to assassinate Pierre Gemayel in 1979, which left him slightly injured. In 1980 there was an assassination attempt against Camille Chamoun, and another failed attempt at eliminating Bashir which left his baby daughter Maya and three others dead in Ashrafiyyeh. The Sunni Mufti of Lebanon, Hassan Khaled, was murdered in a car explosion in West Beirut in 1989. Samir Geagea was imprisoned in 1994 on charges of bombing a church in Jouniya. In the same year, a Lebanese court doing the will of Syria sentenced Abu-Arz in abstentia to 15 years imprisonment on a charge of ‘collaboration with Israel’. Hundreds of Lebanese, primarily political opponents of Syria among whom many Lebanese Forces personnel and a large number of officers and soldiers belonging to General Aoun, were abducted and disappeared, ending up in Anjar in the Bekka or Mezze prison in the Syrian capital-and never heard from again.
