111101 entry from the books the books disagree: each version, with the date it gives
1991
January 1991
From the books
The army is sent against the militiamen still in Greater Beirut.
From mid-January 1991 the army moved on militiamen still in greater Beirut, the LF protesting most. Militia offices and suspect sites were searched and armed men, now 'gunmen', arrested; arms and uniforms were banned.
The PLO fires rockets from the south to open a 'second front' for Iraq.
PLO units in the south fired Grad and Katyusha rockets at the Israeli-held zone and northern Israel when the Gulf War offensive began, drawing retaliatory shelling and helicopter raids.
Parliament votes confidence in Omar Karami's cabinet of former warlords.
Karami's thirty-minister cabinet, formed on 24 December 1990, won thirty-four votes of the forty deputies attending. Its policy statement took up the whole Taif agenda: militias dissolved, Syrian treaties, the displaced home, rebuilding. Seven militia leaders, Berri, Jumblatt, Geagea and Hobeika included, were ministers of state.
An army brigade is sent south to silence all guns.
Palestinian units split over a Lebanese ultimatum after an army brigade was sent south on 6 February 'to silence all guns', in Defence Minister Michel Murr's words.
The cabinet sets the end of April as the deadline for dissolving all militias.
Except for Hezbollah and the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army, militias had a month under a 20 March cabinet decision to surrender their arms to the army and wind up their intelligence services; 'the brotherly Syrian army' could enforce it.
The militias hand over their heavy weapons, some of them to Syria.
Having agreed in mid-April to disband, most militias had by 30 April surrendered their heavy arms and closed their bases. The Lebanese Forces returned weapons seized from the army but sent others abroad; Jumblatt gave his only to Syria's army.
The army takes over the main militia strongholds; militia rule comes to an end.
On 1 May the army took Jbeil, Kisrawan, the Chouf and the last militia ports unopposed, alone but on terms set with the Syrian army, after Zghorta, Koura and Batroun in late April. Light weapons went uncollected.
The government plans to find state jobs for 20,000 ex-militiamen.
The government planned to absorb former Christian and Muslim militiamen gradually into the army, security forces and administration. Only one intake followed: 6,000 men and some dozens of officers, announced in October 1993, and about 2,000 civil servants.
The cabinet approves the treaty with Syria; the Patriarch objects.
The Lebanese Forces and Kataeb ministers abstained. Patriarch Sfeir objected that, the partners being unequal, the treaty would mean domination by the stronger.
Lebanon and Syria sign the Treaty of Brotherhood, Cooperation and Coordination.
Hrawi and Assad signed it in Damascus. Lebanon pledged not to serve as a base or transit route for forces threatening Syria; it created a Higher Council and joint committees, leaving Syrian redeployment to the two governments. Assad spoke of one people in two states.
Camps open to retrain former militiamen for the army and police.
Under Law 88, ex-fighters who applied before the end of June were to enter the reorganised army and internal security forces under General Emile Lahoud.
The government appoints forty new deputies to parliament.
Among the forty were thirteen ministers; Elie Hobeika took Pierre Gemayel's old seat. Nine seats were new, thirty-one vacated by deaths since 1972. Picard says they were picked for compliance with Damascus or militia power.
The army drives the PLO out of its positions around Sidon.
The Palestinians announced on 4 July that they would hand over their heavy and medium weapons, and the Tyre camps followed a few days later. The army had attacked on 2 July, after artillery exchanges the day before, and taken every Palestinian position outside the camps in twelve hours.
Law 84/91 pardoned political and state-security offences committed before 28 March 1991, except killings of, or attempts on, religious and political figures and diplomats. Critics called this 'no victor, no vanquished' measure a self-amnesty that kept the warlords in power and hid the truth about the war.
Art and memory
film The state censor banned Randa Chahal Sabbag's Civilisées (1999), a savage comedy about 'the war of the Lebanese'.
film Only one Lebanese paper wrote about Harb Lubnan, Omar Issawi's fifteen-part al-Jazeera history, yet it became the region's most widely seen account of the war.
General Aoun is spirited out of the French embassy into exile in France.
Aoun, sheltering in the French embassy since 13 October 1990, was removed ten months later in the secret 'Hortensia' operation, run by General Philippe Rondot with French gendarmes and RAID police. He remained in exile until 2005.
Lebanon attended on the basis of Resolution 425; its direct talks with Israel, guided from Damascus, amounted to only a few meetings near Washington in 1991–1992.
Demolitions begin in downtown Beirut for the reconstruction company.
From 1992 Solidere blew up shell-damaged central Beirut: part of the medieval wall, the gold souk ruins, Ottoman façades. Its 'tabula rasa' angered press and universities.
Syria's vice-president Khaddam comes to arbitrate the 'troika'.
In January 1992 Vice-President Khaddam came to Beirut to explain how Taif should regulate the troika of president, prime minister and speaker: the first of many Syrian arbitrations, mostly his.
A general strike against the cost of living brings down the Karami government.
Karami resigned after the 6 May general strike paralysed the country and rioters, often anti-Syrian in tone, attacked the prime minister's office and property of leading figures. Rashid Solh's cabinet, formed in Damascus, called elections.
Army commander Emile Lahoud deploys troops to take back public property held by wartime militias.
Protests by Druze clerics and civilians, organised by Walid Jumblatt, blocked the army in the Chouf; the government gave way and left Beiteddine palace in his hands.
Hundreds of Aoun supporters are arrested for distributing leaflets.
Leaflets urging 'real independence' or a boycott led military police to detain young Aounists; some faced military courts. Amnesty International counted about 200 arrests by December 1992, citing ill-treatment.
Parliament passes a new electoral law for 128 deputies.
Mixing large and small constituencies, the law set 128 seats, not Taif's 108; Hanf sees Syria's allies as the gainers. Albert Moukheiber called it 'imported and imposed'.
A general strike against the elections; the main Christian forces call a boycott.
The 23 July strike against the elections held where Syrian troops were absent. The Patriarch and his synod led opponents, wanting no vote until the displaced returned and the occupation ended; the Kataeb, LF, NLP, National Bloc and some Muslim figures joined.
First parliamentary elections since 1972, boycotted by most Christians.
In Baalbek-Hermel Hezbollah's list defeated the speaker's, and with Amal it took the Shiite seats. Few voted: about 10 percent in Beirut and 6.5 percent in Jbeil, where one deputy won with 41 votes. The major Christian currents had no seats.
The Taif deadline for Syrian redeployment passes without a withdrawal.
In September 1992 Lebanese pressing for the partial Syrian pullback that Taif tied to a two-year deadline after the constitutional reforms were told the reforms, deconfessionalisation first, remained unfinished.
Hariri, a billionaire contractor and not a deputy, formed a cabinet of business people and technocrats in late October, centred on reconstruction. Within two weeks the dollar fell from 2,200 to 1,900 pounds. Berri became speaker that month; Jumblatt minister for the displaced.
Syrian withdrawal is made conditional on ending confessionalism.
On 8 December Hrawi declared that deconfessionalisation would rest on consensus, Taif and the Constitution. Khaddam tied any partial Syrian withdrawal to ending confessionalism, and a Damascus summit's communiqué left withdrawal out.
Around 2000 the new district was still mostly deserted (Picard), though the state had given the company unusual property rights. Hariri set it up to rebuild central Beirut; its razing of historic buildings and sweeping expropriations caused fierce dispute. Fisk notes that Hariri owned 10 percent of the shares.
Art and memory
place Bernard Khoury gave B018, built in 1998 where the Karantina massacre took place, the look of a shelter or a coffin; it became the press's favourite example of Beirut's war-themed nightlife. In 2004 a bar called '1975', with sandbags and camouflage netting, opened on Monot Street.
film Ziad Doueiri's West Beyrouth (1998) was a popular success that showed a 'war without blood'; its 1975 bus helped make the Ain al-Remmaneh bus a memory symbol.
A Ministry for the Displaced and a central fund are created.
Laws 190 and 193 created the ministry and a fund to pay for the return of the displaced, most of them Christians forced out of the Mountain. Walid Jumblatt, whose forces had driven out many of them, ran the ministry from 1992 to 1998.
