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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Lebanon
Index
By the mid-1980s, more than a decade of war had reduced
drastically the authority and ability of the central government to
enforce law and to implement justice. The unofficial militias and
foreign occupying armies that governed much of Lebanon's civilian
populace tended to enforce their own version of justice, without
regard to the central government or legal norms. Nevertheless,
Lebanese law still pertained in some limited venues. In 1987
Lebanon's police forces had been virtually assimilated into the
armed forces and worked closely with the Syrian occupation force.
Under Lebanese law, a suspect must be arraigned before a
committee composed of three judges and a prosecutor within fortyeight hours of being arrested. Nevertheless, government prosecutors
sometimes held suspects for interrogation for indefinite periods of
time without notifying judges. Every prisoner had the right to
legal counsel, but there was no public defender's office. Bail was
permitted in most cases. In practice and custom Lebanese law
provided the right to a fair public trial, but many cases remained
unadjudicated. Trial delays resulted from the difficulty of
conducting investigations when most of the country remained outside
government control, from a shortage of judges, and from the general
breakdown in security. Courts existed in most parts of the country,
but the disposition of criminal cases depended ultimately on the
local power group. Militias frequently intervened to protect their
members from prosecution and detention.
Common crime, to the extent that it could be distinguished from
political violence, was rampant. In 1986 the Lebanese press
described a surge in violent crime, including a rash of over eighty
well-organized armed bank robberies in a two-year period and
numerous kidnappings for ransom.
The definition of terrorism is fraught with controversy,
particularly in the Middle Eastern context. But by almost any
definition, Lebanon is an epicenter of terrorist activity.
Assassination is an occupational hazard for politicians. The
slaying of Prime Minister Karami on June 1, 1987, when a bomb
exploded aboard his helicopter, was but another in a long string of
political murders. Car bombings, known in the Lebanese lexicon as
"canned death," were occurring almost on a daily basis. The United
States embassy had twice been attacked by suicide truck-bombers.
And the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in June 1985 was only the most
brazen of a long series of airliner hijackings originating in
Beirut. Over the years, literally hundreds of groups have claimed
responsibility for various acts of terrorism committed against
civilian targets. Most of the names, however, were merely code
words or noms de guerre meant to conceal the true identity of the
organization behind the attack.
In the judgment of most informed observers, a few men or
families have been responsible for masterminding the majority of
terrorist operations. For example, the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary
Faction, a terrorist organization that assassinated United States
and Israeli officials in Western Europe in 1982 and 1984 and staged
numerous other attacks, was revealed eventually to be run by a
single Maronite extended family, the Abdallah clan from the
northern Lebanese town of Al Qubayyat. In March 1987, ringleader
George Ibrahim Abdallah was sentenced by a French court to life
imprisonment. Likewise, virtually all of the Shia terrorist attacks
against Western interests in Lebanon since 1982, claimed in the
name of the Islamic Jihad Organization and a dozen other groups,
have been attributed by intelligence experts to two related Shia
families, the Mughniyyahs and the Musawis. Two leaders of these
families, Imad Mughniyyah and Husayn al Musawi, were widely
believed to be responsible for holding twenty-three Westerners
hostage in 1987.
Data as of December 1987
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