Guardians of the Cedars

The Guardians of the Cedars are an extremist Maronite movement and former militia in Lebanon. It was formed by Étienne Saqr (nom de guerre Abu Arz) and others along with the Lebanese Renewal Party in the early 1970s. It operated in the Lebanese Civil War under the slogan:

No Palestinian will remain in Lebanon.

Creation

The Guardians of the Cedars started to form a militia in the years leading up to the Lebanese Civil War and commenced military operations in April 1975.

In September 1975, Communiqué No. 1 was issued to denounce advocates of the partition of Lebanon. The second communiqué contained a bitter attack on the Palestinians. The third articulated the party's attitude on the issue of Lebanese identity: Lebanon should dissociate itself from Arabism. The party spread its messages by means of graffiti in East Beirut, including such slogans as: "No to Syria, no to the Palestinian Resistance, no to Arabism; Lebanon will be the graveyard of the Palestinians."

The Guardians joined with other Lebanese Christian and right-wing forces in 1976 to form the Lebanese Front.

Participation in Civil War

Guardians of the Cedars was able to field about 500-1000 fighters during the civil war. It was made up of mostly Christians, but also Druze and Shiite Lebanese. Despite its relatively small size its militia numbering around 1,000 at their peak, the Guardians fought very aggressively and were involved in some of the heaviest engagements of the war and earned a reputation both for bravery and for ruthlessness against the Palestinians.

In March 1976, they confronted Palestinian and leftist forces in West Beirut. A Guardians unit was also dispatched to Zaarour, above the mountain road to Zahle, to support Phalangist forces. In April, Guardian fighters defended a line in the area of Hadeth, Kfar Shima, and Bsaba, south of Beirut, against a coalition of Palestinian, PSP, and SSNP forces. In the summer of 1976, the Guardians were among the first militias to assault Tel al-Zaatar, the last remaining Palestinian camp in east Beirut, which fell after a 52-day siege. The actions of the Guardians and its allies following the capture of the camp have been widely reported as amounting to a massacre of many of its civilian inhabitants. During this battle, Saqr led a unit of Guardians force to Chekka, where Christian civilians were being slaughtered by leftist-Palestinian forces, and fought off the attackers. With his own hands he helped bury the dead. The Guardians and allied Christian militias then invaded the Koura region and reached the doors of Tripoli, saving Christian residents trapped there. In 1978 as part of the Lebanese Front they battled the Syrian army in Beirut and again in 1981 in the Battle of Zahle. In 1985 the Guardians of the Cedars mounted a fierce defense of Kfar-Fallus and Jezzine.

Political Beliefs

The politics of Guardians of the Cedars is an extreme form of Lebanese nationalism which holds that the Lebanese are an ancient race and it is they, and not the Greeks, who are the founders of western civilisation. This has led Guardians of the Cedars to maintain that Lebanese people are not Arabs, indeed, to advocate the de-Arabisation of the Lebanon and call for the restoration of the Phoenician language and alphabet. As a consequence, the Guardians of the Cedars have adopted positions hostile to Pan-Arabism and to Arabs in general. Saqr himself had fought against Muslim rebel forces back in the Lebanon Crisis of 1958. Fiercely anti-Palestinian, they cultivated close ties with the Israeli military. Unlike the Phalangists and the Tigers, who both cooperated semi-secretly with Israel, the Guardians of the Cedars incorporated collaboration with Israel into their ideology. This was based on the conviction that there was a commonality of interest between the Jewish state and the Maronite cause.

Attitude to Palestinians

The attitude of Guardians of the Cedars to the Palestinian presence in Lebanon is apparent from the content of one of their leaflets distributed in Sidon: "Germs live only in rot. Let us prevent rot from infiltrating society. Let us continue the work of destruction of the last bastions of the Palestinians and smash whatever life is left in this poisonous snake."

Saqr summed the Guardians of the Cedars attitude to Palestinians in an interview with the Jerusalem Post on July 23 1982: "It is the Palestinians we have to deal with. Ten years ago there were 84,000; now there are between 600,000 and 700,000. In six years there will be two million. We can’t let it come to that." His solution: "Very simple. We shall drive them to the borders of ’brotherly’ Syria ... Anyone who looks back, stops or returns will be shot on the spot. We have the moral right, reinforced by well-organized public relations plans and political preparations."

End of the militia

1989 saw the Guardians once more fighting the Syrians this time alongside the Lebanese Army, since the Guardians strongly supported the Lebanese government of General Michel Aoun. In a statement in 1990, it greeted the occupation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein by asserting that "Arabism is the undisputed lie of the 20th century."

The Guardians called upon the people to rally around the leadership of General Aoun, and it demanded the withdrawal of Lebanon from the Arab League.

The party suffered a setback in October 1990 when the Syrian army and Lebanese government troops forced Aoun out of power. Saqr suffered an unspecified injury after being detained by Samir Geagea's forces for supporting Aoun. He was forced to seek refuge in Jezzine and then leave Lebanon for Europe after Israel pulled its forces out of Lebanon. Several members of the Guardians are still wanted by the current Lebanese Authorities.

From the end of the civil war in 1990 until the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 the Guardians of the Cedars formed an element of the South Lebanon Army. Since that date their military operations have ceased and they operate solely politically, campaigning to remove the Syrian presence in Lebanon.

They have reorganized as a political party which, although it remains banned in Lebanon, continues to operate; lately, the party has added the term Harakat al-Qawmiyya al-Lubnaniyya (the Movement of Lebanese Nationalism) to its name.

References

Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War

External links

Lebanese Politics - lebanese political discussions
Guardians of the Cedars

Political parties in Lebanon

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