Eight days that ended with a military government
On the morning of May 20, 1975 — four days after Prime Minister Rashid Solh’s resignation — fighting erupted around the Tel Zaatar refugee camp and the adjacent Beirut neighborhood of Dekwaneh. Over the next eight days, the Embassy would file eight cables documenting what it called the “heaviest and most widespread firing of the current crisis.” Approximately 100 people would die. Some 300 would be wounded. Five successive ceasefires would be negotiated and broken. And for 72 hours in the middle of the eight-day arc, Lebanon would be governed by its first military cabinet in decades — a cabinet the Phalange immediately welcomed, the Muslim political class rejected as unconstitutional, and domestic opposition (combined with Syrian mediation) forced to resign on the third day of its existence.
This cluster of eight cables is the Embassy’s real-time record of the round that proved April 13 was not an isolated incident.
The parliamentary preference that Frangieh refused
The single most analytically important cable in the cluster is 1975BEIRUT06670, filed May 25, classified SECRET, sent IMMEDIATE. A source the Embassy describes as a “close confidant” of President Frangieh — one who nonetheless opposed the military-government decision — explained to the Deputy Chief of Mission exactly what had happened inside the Baabda Palace over the preceding weekend.
Speaker of Parliament Kamal As’ad, believing he had Frangieh’s blessing to canvass deputies for prime-ministerial preferences, polled them. The count: 21 explicitly for Rashid Karame; 9 for Karame with an alternative; 40 deferring to the President’s choice. In ordinary Lebanese political practice, that count would have produced a Karame premiership. Frangieh said as much to a friend of Karame’s.
But Frangieh conditioned his appointment on a commitment Karame would not make: that the new Prime Minister would commit in advance to using the Lebanese Army to quell the fighting. Karame, in the cable’s phrasing, “quite understandably” responded that “no head of government could give such a commitment because the use of the Army would obviously depend on the circumstances.” No Sunni leader would have made that commitment; Frangieh, concluding “there was no political alternative,” appointed the military cabinet instead — without, the cable notes, “much consultation with others.”
What the Muslim political class believed had happened
Muslim political leaders believed Frangieh had been waiting for this opportunity since Pierre Gemayel began his public campaign against the fedayeen. The Embassy’s informant disputed that reading; the Embassy itself acknowledged the reading was hard to refute given the circumstantial evidence. Two facts in particular:
First, the Phalange stopped fighting the moment the military cabinet was announced. If the Phalange had been pursuing some objective in the fighting that ended upon announcement of the military cabinet, then by inference the military cabinet was that objective — or at least a sufficient condition for cessation.
Second, main Christian quarters of Beirut fired shots in the air in approval when the military cabinet was announced. The symbolism was unmistakable.
The Embassy’s own retrospective judgment, in cable 1975BEIRUT06966 filed June 3, was that Frangieh had “grievously misjudged” the domestic reaction. Syrian Foreign Minister Khaddam’s intervention — sometimes credited with forcing the reversal — had “merely assisted (albeit considerably) the process whereby this miscalculation was brought home to Frangieh.” The military government, the Embassy wrote, could not have significantly altered the balance of force between the GOL and the fedayeen; the notion that it might have imposed greater restrictions on the fedayeen struck the Embassy, in retrospect, as “highly academic.”
The PLO was not a unitary actor
Cable 06611, filed May 23, records a fact that sits uneasily with most narratives of the PLO in Lebanon. Under pressure from Egyptian President Sadat and other Arab leaders, Yasser Arafat on May 21 convened the Palestinian faction leaders and proposed that Fatah assume military command of all fedayeen groups in Beirut. Other Palestinian factions — the PFLP, Sa’iqa, the Arab Liberation Front, and others — initially resisted.
Arafat had to negotiate command. He did not exercise it. That the Chairman of the PLO had to attempt, mid-crisis, to consolidate operational control of Palestinian armed groups in Lebanon’s capital — and that his attempt met resistance — is a critical piece of context for understanding the fighting.
Foreign actors, again
The May 22 cable (06591) identifies Libyan and Iraqi actors as attempting to escalate tensions. The identification is consistent with cable 1975BEIRUT05387 (April 26), which had documented the Libyan Embassy’s ~$6 million-per-month payroll to dissident Lebanese factions. When snipers were arrested in Beirut at the end of the round, the Embassy noted (cable 06698) that they included members of the Communist Party and the Syrian Popular Party (PPS). The PPS had been documented as participants in the April fighting. Its continued operational presence in May is on the record in these cables.
The count
By noon May 27, the Embassy’s eight-day accounting stood at approximately 100 dead and 300 wounded. The Rifai government had fallen. Parliament’s original choice — Rashid Karame — was designated Prime Minister the following day. The Lebanese state had survived an eight-day armed political crisis at a cost that would have been unimaginable two months earlier.
That this round had been followed the same week by a military government, and the week after by its collapse, and the week after that by a new civilian cabinet, suggested to the Embassy that Lebanon’s political class retained a capacity to muddle through. The fighting that would resume in the summer and autumn would test that capacity to its breaking point.
The record of eight days in May is in these cables.