ABSTRACT
The history of Lebanon must be written in terms of men and women who made it, as well as of abstract historical 'forces'. True, in 1976, the Lebanon's regional environment was far harder to deal with than it had been in 1958. President Elias Sarkis probably came into office hoping that he could eventually apply some kind of Shihabist solution to the internal political problems of Lebanon. The socialist aristocrat who headed the Druze community and Lebanon's leftist coalition was killed on 16 March in a mountain ambush near his Shouf home. By contrast, the sun-scorched hills, winding valleys and citrus groves of south Lebanon entered into a new phase of increased violence, with the start of the Sarkis presidency. The early months of the 1975-6 civil war had been relatively peaceful ones for the people of south Lebanon. However, after the start of the large-scale Syrian intervention in Lebanon in June 1976, their situation rapidly deteriorated.
