ABSTRACT
Lebanon's politics are a clear representation of, and a response to, this seminal truth. It should be noted that political assassination targeting non-Christians was not unknown in modern Lebanon—with the murder of Sunni Prime Minister Riad al-Sulh in 1951 and Druze chieftain Kamal Jumblat in 1977 being among the most notable cases. But the "war of the Maronite brothers" during the 1970s and 1980s highlighted the fact that neither ethnoreligious kinship nor political imperative could silence the guns aimed at fellow Maronites. In 1970 Sleiman Franjiyyeh was elected president of the Lebanese Republic. He would occupy that office until 1976, overseeing one of the most volatile and violent periods in modern Lebanon's history. Driven by the civil war that erupted in April 1975 the ensuing breakdown of government the collapse of Lebanon's national army Sleiman's son Tony organized and commanded the Zghorta Liberation Army as a regional Maronite militia intended to protect the Franjiyyehs' fiefdom from potential Muslim intrusions.
