10. The Political Economy of Civil War in Lebanon

Elizabeth Picard

In the comparative study of the political economy of war, the case of Lebanon permits endless and rich insights. Yet unlike other cases of war making discussed in this volume, Lebanon’s experience between 1975 and 1990 shifts our attention to the political economy of civil war, a form of violence that implies the collapse of the state and thus breaks the causal chain that has linked war making to state consolidation in much of the literature on this topic.^[1] What Lebanon’s descent into civil war reveals, however, is not the eruption of disorganized, anarchic violence as a byproduct of the state’s collapse. Just the opposite proved to be the case.

Largely through the activities of various militia groups, pervasive and wide-ranging networks of social organization emerged in the course of the war as competing militias struggled to construct and defend institutional arrangements that would permit them not merely to survive but to manage the organizational, material, and human demands of war making; maximize the economic opportunities created by the war; and compensate for the absence of the state in the provision of essential social services to specific communities. Militias provided an institutional framework—organized largely around the interconnected tasks of coercion and predation—that nonetheless aspired to consolidate practices of economic and political governance that would have the legitimacy, predictability, and integrity of the Lebanese state whose collapse they had brought about. Ultimately this effort failed, but in the process it profoundly influenced the shape of Lebanon’s postwar political economy.

In addition, the civil war reveals a tremendous diversity in the responses devised by Lebanese militias in their modes of social domination and extraction of resources, their linkages with sources of external support, and, most important, their relation to the residual structures of the state, as well as their mode of access to the material and symbolic resources of its institutions.

Lebanon thus provides a fascinating window into the institutional and organizational logics that shape the strategic choices of those who take part in a distinctive form of war making. Almost inevitably, these are logics that produce high levels of fragmentation—territorial, social, economic—and Lebanon’s experience provides ample evidence of this. Yet here too, the image of fragmentation needs to be tempered by a recognition that, in the economic realm in particular, markets in wartime Lebanon operated not only within but across newly created territorial boundaries, producing forms of interaction, even interdependence and collaboration, that seem almost out of place given the intensity of the violence between (and sometimes within) Lebanon’s highly polarized communities.

After first situating the genesis and development of the wartime economy in a general framework characterized by a shift from clientelism to predation, I will focus on the redistributive dimensions of what I have called the “militia economy” and explore in detail the dynamics of these economies within specific territories under militia control. I will, moreover, go beyond an analysis of the formation of what might be called a “militia system” and begin to elaborate a typology of these militia economies in a comparative perspective. Finally, I will discuss various modes of adaptation of these militia economies to the end of the war and to the initial years of the postwar era.

The Genesis and Trajectory of the Militia Economy

The birth of a militia economy during the Lebanese war was marked by the transition from the local mobilization of armed defense groups in villages or neighborhoods that operated within the framework of a unified state to the monopolization of resources and means of coercion by large, organized, and hierarchical militias that gradually carved up Lebanese territory after 1976. These militias consisted primarily of the Lebanese Forces (LF), which united into a Christian stronghold between 1975 and 1980; Kamal Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), which ruled over the Druze community from its stronghold in Chouf; and ’Amal, which garnered support among the majority of the Shi‘ite population until its radical competitor, Hizballah, gained momentum after 1982. There were, in addition, other less influential militias, such as the South Lebanon Army (SLA) in the zone occupied by Israel, the Popular Nasserite Organization (PNO) in Sidon, and the Marada Brigade in Zghorta. The consolidation and territorialization of the militias unfolded under the financial and military influence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the regions with a Muslim majority, and in the shadow of Syrian hegemony in all of Lebanon starting in 1976.

In a general sense, the notion of a militia economy refers to various modes of adaptation to destruction, shortages, and more broadly, to a situation of deep social and institutional fragmentation. In other words it refers to the economy of Lebanon as it evolved during the war. However, it also refers to the various strategies the belligerents developed to turn the wartime economy into a strategic resource.^[2] In establishing the periodization of the transition to a militia economy, it should be pointed out that there was a lag between various phases in the development of this economy and the military trajectory of the conflict due to the greater inertia of economic processes relative to military operations, on the one hand, and the strong external dimension of the Lebanese economy, on the other. Broadly speaking, however, the militia economy took shape during two distinct phases in the course of the civil war.

During the first phase, from 1975 to 1983, the prewar liberal economy subsisted on the margins of the civil war, showing a certain measure of resilience. Prewar economic arrangements were reconstructed to a considerable extent following the destruction of the commercial infrastructure in the center of Beirut and of the industrial infrastructure in the eastern and southern suburbs of the city in the period 1975–76. However, this resilience was soon exhausted as the militias became an increasingly powerful economic force. Even in this first phase of the conflict, armed militias operated as predators in the communities in which they had sprung up during the earliest days of the fighting. Throughout this first phase of militia accumulation, these groups attempted to concentrate the means of coercion and administration within the confines of each community so as to maximize their own resources. The result was the emergence of more efficient “survival units” within the territory of Lebanon which represented, in effect, “ministates” in formation.^[3] In other words, this first phase represents a shift in the militias’ operating practices from banditry to organized forms of extraction and exploitation.

The militias’ mode of operation during the first phase of the war illustrates several important paradoxes associated with the political economy of civil war. First among them is that militia fighters were relentlessly seeking to destroy the very infrastructures they also sought to appropriate for themselves. All of the souks (markets) in the city center and half of the factories in the suburbs were either shelled or burned down. In Beirut’s port, militia members “sold” goods simply on the basis of their volume rather than their value; and through continued fighting they prevented any activity at the port during nine months in 1976. The logic behind the destruction of fixed capital assets was in fact twofold. First, it destroyed the physical infrastructure that constituted the material basis of the coexistence between communities to legitimize the militias’ bellicose project. And second, it deprived their adversaries of resources such as oil and electricity so as to secure a monopoly over them. The effect of this destruction was brutal, since Lebanon’s GDP fell by 30 percent in 1975 and by an additional 40 percent in 1976. As a result, populations and armed groups were quickly forced to turn to external actors, and especially to expatriates, to secure financial resources; the revenues obtained from diaspora sources were estimated at the time to be $1.5–2.5 billion per year.^[4]

Another paradox is that the maintenance of an overvalued exchange rate characterized by a strong pound relative to the dollar and to the money supply fostered overconfidence concerning the strength of the Lebanese economy even while the political system disintegrated.^[5] Among other things, the overvalued currency provided opportunities for speculation that earned Lebanese some $300 million per year. More important, however, and somewhat ironically, it provided the means for the besieged Lebanese state to retain some capacity to manage macroeconomic policy. Governments like Selim Hoss’s (1978–79) explicitly sought to alleviate the war’s effects on lower income wage earners. Salaries of civil servants were paid regularly, including those of soldiers who had deserted the armed forces to join militias as fighting intensified. And the government established price controls on oil products, flour, beets, and other essential commodities.

In the second phase, 1983–90, the state finally collapsed. Following the 1984 split within the army the state lost its means of coercion, controlled less than a tenth of Lebanon’s territory, and no longer controlled any of its financial resources. Whereas in 1980, the Ministry of Finance was still able to collect 90 percent of revenues from tariffs, this percentage dropped to 60 percent in 1983 and to a mere 10 percent in 1986. Worse, military goods worth several billion dollars, which had been bought from the United States to rebuild the army, fell into the hand of militias when the army rebelled in the western part of Beirut and split in February of 1984. The collapse of the army undermined confidence in the pound and resulted in a massive devaluation.^[6] Finally, the international context, especially the drying up in 1982–83 of the resources contributed by the PLO and the repercussions of the 1984 oil crisis, accelerated the decline of state revenues and contributed to a general condition of economic crisis.^[7]

The militia economy subsequently expanded on the ruins of a national economy that was falling back on agriculture as its leading sector. While agriculture’s share of GDP was only 10 percent in 1974, it grew to 33 percent by 1985. However, this was a larger share of a much smaller GDP; indeed, GDP had been halved between 1984 and 1987 and further reduced by a third between 1987 and 1990. Fixed capital assets that had suffered two waves of destruction in 1982–84 and 1989–90 were no longer replaced. Massive capital flight took place following the collapse of the pound. Civil servants and salaried workers in the service sector were the hardest-hit victims of a crisis that polarized Lebanese society, dividing it into a minority who benefited from the militia economy and a pauperized majority. This situation led to the long-term emigration of skilled and even unskilled workers. And as a result, Lebanon ended the war with a population of nearly 3 million people, no more than fifteen years earlier.^[8]

During the early postwar period, from 1990 to 1995, the restoration of state sovereignty remained partial, and it unfolded in ways that preserved many of the political prerogatives of the militias. One-tenth of the country remained under Israeli occupation in the south. The remaining 90 percent was under tight Syrian control following the signing of the Treaty of Brotherhood, Cooperation, and Coordination in May 1991. Moreover, both the Lebanese Forces and Hizballah successfully resisted an April 1991 law that mandated the disarming of militias. The LF complied with the law only in June 1995, while Hizballah still retains its military autonomy. The legitimacy of the regime resulting from the Ta’if accords of October 1989, as well as that of the legislature elected in August of 1992, was contested. The government and the bureaucracy incorporated militia leaders, and their participation renewed political communitarianism by bringing brute force to bear on the competitive relations between communities.^[9]

Nor did the end of the war and the partial reassertion of state sovereignty mean the breakdown of the militia economy. In the economic as in the political realm the government sought to mobilize and engage militias rather than to control them. In its effort to rebuild the country it gave priority neither to public services nor social infrastructure. Rather, it privileged land and real estate operations such as Solidere in the center of Beirut and Elyssar in the southern suburbs, as well as rampant privatization (for example, of Lebanon’s state-run telephone company). By so doing the government sought to attract the participation of the businesses created under the militias—as well as to attract the capital they had accumulated—in support of its efforts to reconstruct the Lebanese economy. Given that reconstruction was estimated to require between $15 and 20 billion, the global needs of the economy constituted a perfect opportunity for the state to rein in the militia economies by facilitating their integration into leading sectors of Lebanon’s reemerging, postwar national economy.

From Clientelism to Predation

Wartime economies, of course, are not born sui generis. In the case of Lebanon, they can be traced back to widespread clientalist practices that consisted of exchanging personal loyalty (such as a vote during the legislative elections that take place every four years) for protection, a job, or various material or financial advantages.^[10] But new phenomena would grow out of these long-standing practices. At the outset of the war, most local militias were self-defense organizations formed in response to a real or imagined threat, and they had a symbiotic relationship with the populations in which they originated. The first militia fighters did not receive wages. Unlike those of the “professional” fighters of the PLO, their initial arms purchases were financed by local entrepreneurs, and administrative tasks were performed by neighborhood volunteers. These early militias thus shared certain features with citizen-based vigilante movements that arise in other contexts, and even with such volunteer organizations as the neighborhood watch groups found in the United States. At this stage one cannot yet talk of a militia economy. Although the destruction and interruptions of economic activities had an impact on the resources of households, they did not really have structural effects on the overall economy of the state. Nor did localized economic hardship have an effect on popular perceptions and official representations that blamed the fighting on insidious foreign elements.

Next, the proliferation of defense units and the eclipse of regular forces encouraged petty criminality among urban gangs that lived off the looting of territories under their control—both those they protected and those they captured. Such petty criminality took the form of stealing cars, hijacking for ransom, squatting, and racketeering either at roadblocks or by patrols plundering neighborhood buildings. The resulting insecurity gave rise to new activities such as locksmithing, armor plating, and private security services. Meanwhile, activities such as the setting up of the large souk organized in 1975 by the Lebanese Forces in the port of Beirut, or the salvage of furniture by the Mourabitoun in the part of the city where the big hotels were located, constituted implicit modes of payment for the fighters whose allowances ranged from very meager to nil.

It was only later, during the 1980s that the big militias (primarily the Lebanese Forces, the Druze PSP, and later, Hizballah) turned into professional organizations whose members were paid a wage. This evolution, however, was enormously important, transforming the status of the militias. From then on, militia fighters were less “neighborhood youths” than servicemen in uniform. Their salaries were often the only resource for families hit by unemployment and the paralysis of the economy. Yet, this contribution was probably less important than the “extraordinary” resources that were available to militia fighters as a result of their new status. It was these new “professional” militia members who had ready access to rationed resources such as flour and gas, to “free” goods obtained by looting (even Israeli soldiers looted private homes during their 1982–85 occupation), and to profitable illicit activities such as the smuggling of cigarettes and drugs. In a fragmented social field, where the old aristocratic and commercial elite kept a low profile (those who had not emigrated), these new actors acquired prestige based not only on their weapons but also on their command of economic resources. They had the capacity to create a clientele for themselves even if the population condoned neither their project nor their practices. It is noteworthy that the members of Hizballah, who were notoriously the best paid, also had the reputation of being the least corrupt and least predatory with respect to the populations they controlled.^[11] And yet they too knew how to manufacture artificial shortages (in water and electricity, for example) in the southern suburbs of Beirut so that the aid they offered would be appreciated to a greater extent.

Compared to the ultraliberal clientalist system that characterized the boom years of the prewar era, the militia economy operated on a different scale, with a different character, and through different spatial arrangements. It operated on a new scale because criminal activities such as smuggling, which had been a low-level activity in the 1970s, became systematized as the war dragged on. The harbors of Tyr and Tripoli thus became centers for the import of vehicles (often stolen in Europe) by private operators.^[12] Militias also engaged in the export of goods that were subsidized in neighboring countries: a quarter of the gas imports, sold cheaper in Lebanon than in the Gulf oil-producing states, was smuggled into Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and even Cyprus.^[13] Further, the militia economy operated on a new scale because Syrian troops inserted themselves into Lebanese social and economic networks through their own participation in looting, taxing and reexporting gas, wood, iron, tires, and medicine. In fact, the value of merchandise that passed through Syrian hands in these various ways was estimated to be $5 million per day in 1985.^[14]

The militia economy also exhibited a different character than prewar economic arrangements because economic management was quickly perceived as an intrinsic part of the war between militias. In a country that imported more than 50 percent of its consumption goods, securing access to resources without having to rely on the mediation of an enemy, even if this enemy was the state administration, quickly became a priority. As early as 1976, Jumblatt’s Druze PSP began to engage in the all-out import of petroleum products in the improvised ports of Jieh and Khaldeh because they did not have access to the refineries of Zahrani and Tripoli, and even less to the oil storage tanks in Dora. The Lebanese Forces that took control of the Christian regions to the north of Beirut also violated the state monopoly on oil: a crony of Camille Chamoun, the head of the National Liberal Party (NLP), became the first importer of smuggled goods in these regions through the port of Dbayeh. Here and there, various people called on businessmen who were sympathizers or members of their community. The first institutionalization of a parastatal economic structure was that of the Gamma groups that emerged in 1978 around the Lebanese Forces, the armed branch of the Kata’ib led by Bachir Gemayel. The groups were constituted of tens of academics but also entrepreneurs who mastered the functioning of the banking and commercial economy and became responsible for supply and distribution activities on the territory dominated by the Christian LF militia.

This, however, was only a first step. These entrepreneurs working for their community realized, and persuaded their patrons, that even though the war was destructive it could also produce economic wealth. And so they lobbied politicians and military men to organize wartime activities that were “economically oriented,” to use Max Weber’s formula. Asked to participate in the war effort by supplying the armed forces and the civilian population in the region with necessary civil and military equipment, but subject at the same time to new and significant taxes established by the militias, entrepreneurs applied a capitalist logic to their activities: they had to profit from them. They thus became accomplices of the fighters whose interventions affected the value of their goods and services. The ferryboat ride from Jounieh to Cyprus, which represented the way out of the country for the inhabitants of the eastern region who could not reach the Khaldeh airport to the south of Beirut, offers a telling example. On the one hand, no agreement was sought with the other militias in 1986–87 to reopen a safe passage to Khaldeh, because the Lebanese Forces were at the time completing construction of an alternative airport in Halate near Jbail with the cooperation of the banker Roger Tamraz. And, on the other hand, exchanges of artillery between militias around Jounieh as ferryboats departed were invoked by the transport companies as a reason to increase the cost of the fare.

Another example is provided by the inordinately high benefits that were reaped by the private companies that supplied the Christian town of Deir el-Qamar with flour and heating oil during the prolonged siege to which it was subjected by the PSP from mid-September until Christmas of 1983. The clientelism that had prevailed before the war shifted to practices of political and military extraction of social resources and to the development of mafia-like processes that supported not only the survival of the group but tremendous capital accumulation. If we take seriously several consistent estimates, the looting of Beirut’s port allegedly generated some $1–$2 billion, as did the looting of Beirut’s city center.^[15]

In the 1980s, having secured control of the economy’s key sectors (such as petroleum imports and cement production), militia leaders invested in new activities, including communications, computers, and maritime transport. They crossed, unhindered, the boundary between the legal and criminal economy by taking up drug production and trafficking. These activities quickly led to the emergence of new economic actors who were distinct from politicians and militiamen. These new actors worked both for the militia and themselves, reexporting short-term profits made in Lebanon to Western banks, or investing in Lebanese real estate. One should nevertheless not underestimate the discreet but continuous participation of the largest fortunes from the prewar era in these new profitable ventures, nor the complex financial ties that formed between nonmilitary economic elites and the new entrepreneurs who prospered in the shadow of the militia system.

Finally, the intervention of militias produced a restructuring of Lebanon’s economic space. It fragmented this space into territories where each militia sought exclusive control of resources.^[16] This, for example, was the effect of the 1978 confrontations between the Lebanese Forces and the Maradas from Zghorta for the control of ports and cement works in the north. The division of territory that resulted from this confrontation lasted until 1990 and gave Samir Geagea, who took over leadership of the LF in 1986, a financial foundation based on the internal “customs” of Barbara on the coastal route. The desire to control resources was also the goal behind the crushing of Chamoun’s NLP militia, its annexation by the Lebanese Forces under Bachir Gemayel in 1980, and Gemayel’s takeover of the collective finances of the Lebanese Front, the coalition of Christian parties and militias.

However, the formation of quasi-statist political and economic spaces does not at all imply that each militia existed in a condition of autarky; quite the contrary. Not only was it necessary for militia economies to maintain a relation with “the outside,” but trade between them was also central to their prosperity by making it possible to avoid shortages in certain goods such as flour or gas, or by feeding internal customs, or even sustaining illicit activities such as the drug trade from the Beka‘a. Because the banking system also continued to operate within transcommunal and transterritorial networks, the breakup of the Lebanese mosaic was not a process in which boundaries between the communities became rigidified, but one that exhibited a dynamic quality that facilitated the accumulation of capital. Thus, militias were not only the agents of Lebanon’s fragmentation, they were also the managers and immediate beneficiaries of territorial divisions in ways that combined economic and military-strategic logics.^[17]

The Micro-Dynamics of the Militia Economy

Can the militia economy in Lebanon be captured in its specific dimensions? Before analyzing four of its major characteristics, I will first offer a quantitative, though necessarily cautious, overview of the scale and composition of the impact of the militias on Lebanon’s economy. The need for caution is not hard to understand, given the poor quality of the available data. Indeed, estimates of the total economic impact of the war differ considerably, ranging from $150 million to $1.5 billion per year, depending on the period in question—whether one focuses on relatively peaceful years or on those in which major battles took place—and whether calculations take only direct military costs into account or include broader economic effects as well. Even zeroing in on direct militia expenditures, however, does little to improve one’s confidence in available data. For example, Roger Dib, the Lebanese Forces’ second in command, announced in 1989 that the cost of his militia’s equipment and salaries amounted to $40 million per year.^[18] The cost in arms, ammunition, and salaries of the “liberation war” waged by General ‘Aoun from March to July 1989 is estimated to be $1 billion.

It is even more interesting to break down the military and civilian resources of the militias, which have been estimated to have amounted to approximately $2 billion per year.^[19] Half of this sum was alleged to have come from nonmilitia sources, either from patron states or from individuals or institutions belonging to the same community. By opening “embassies” in countries to which Lebanese had emigrated (in western Europe, the Americas, West Africa), militias tapped into diaspora resources that had previously been channeled into Lebanon through personal and family networks. Because the militias were the producers of economic insecurity and criminality, only they were able to guarantee emigrants access to their assets, whether in the form of bank deposits or fixed assets such as land or real estate. As for the militias’ patron states (virtually every state in the region funded one armed group or another), they spent some $700 million per year to secure the superiority of their various local allies. After the war, Israel disclosed that it had given $25 million per year in subsidies between 1976 and 1982 to the Lebanese Forces. In addition, the looting of regular armed forces, including international monitoring groups, was a primary source of weapons for all the militias. The United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) estimated that it lost nearly $500 million between 1975 and 1978 as a result of looting, including what was lost at the hands of Palestinians.^[20] Similarly, the storage facilities of the Lebanese army were looted on many occasions: between March 1976 and February 1977, when the Lebanese Arab Army units withdrew from the Lebanese Army; in 1984, when three of six operational brigades seceded after having been incited to do so by ’Amal and the PSP; and finally in October of 1989, when there was a division between two legal armies, those of Generals ‘Aoun and Lahoud.

When it comes to the economic functioning of the militias, it is more useful to identify their specific modalities rather than to assess their overall resources as distinct from the global economy that they literally cannibalized. Four specific modalities stand out. First is the capture by militias of state functions for private gain. Second is the collapse of the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of force and the privatization of public security functions. Third is the criminalization of the Lebanese economy as militias increasingly expanded their activities in the economic domain. And fourth is the role of the militias in financial speculation.

The militia economy rested above all on the capture and appropriation of state functions. While the state administration was ever less capable of collecting land and real estate taxes and trading dues, or of exacting payment for the provision of electricity and water, armed groups enjoyed two strategic advantages in undertaking such tasks: their power to intimidate and their control over territory. Even if the services offered by the militias were of inferior quality compared to those provided by the public offices and ministries, society’s dependence on them was greater. This dependence even took on totalitarian overtones when the most ordinary activities, such as going to movies or restaurants, using public transportation, traveling to other countries or, more simply, passing through a roadblock, became grounds for the exercise of control and the exaction of payment.^[21]

The dramatic proliferation of ports offers a telling example of this phenomenon. Indeed, the expansion of militia-controlled ports during the war did not simply reflect the central administration’s decline as a regulator of trade but also signaled the privatization of the country’s maritime relations. The fifteen piers or so that sprang up were not accessible to average citizens who wanted to engage in trade or travel. The use of these piers was, instead, contingent on membership in the community networks of the militias that each controlled specific port facilities. And, as in other economic domains, the interweaving of financial interests and political tactics led to paradoxical decisions in the management of these facilities. Between 1985 and 1987, for example, a few hundred Palestinian fighters were clandestinely brought into the country through the Jounieh port—then controlled by the Christian and anti-Palestinian Lebanese Forces—to return to West Beirut to participate in the war of the camps against the Shi‘ite militia, ’Amal. While the political objective of the LF in helping their enemy was to weaken their rival, it also generated a financial profit that was far from trivial.

The erosion of legal control over the militias’ economic activities unfolded in a series of steps. Militias exploited breakdowns in communication occasioned by the fighting to justify their increasing economic autonomy. They permitted what little remained of official functions to subsist for a time, but simultaneously compelled the ever less viable public administration to acknowledge and eventually legalize criminal practices that were linked to the provision of essential economic services. The import of crude oil for the Tripoli and Zahrani refineries and the import of oil derivatives for the Dora reservoir escaped state monopoly as early as 1976, when the Ministry of Energy began to tolerate the emergence of private importation. State bureaucrats tolerated, for instance, an overland import network with which the Syrian president’s brother was associated, as well as a seaborne import network that operated via Greece and Bulgaria. Still, the state oil monopoly continued to grant import licenses. More important, the Caisse des Carburants (the Fund for Fuel), whose accounting books disappeared after a battle in 1977, subsidized oil products until 1986 even while militias were collecting taxes from consumers and illegally reexporting oil to neighboring countries.^[22] To make up for the subsequent shortage of oil, the government accepted the de facto deregulation of petroleum trade, causing the number of importers to rise from five before the war to several dozen by the middle of the 1980s. Finally, during the last months of the war, the Conseil supérieur des douanes (the Higher Council of Customs) granted official status to the dozens of private oil terminals that had been established along the coast. Although this recognition allowed the government to tax fuel once again, it also legalized the transformation of a state monopoly into a nonstate oligopoly consisting of five or six holding companies of importers—a situation that has become consolidated since the end of the war.

The case of tobacco is both less complicated and more telling, since it was the state agency itself that negotiated the terms according to which its monopoly was to be dismantled. The Régie de tabac, Lebanon’s state tobacco monopoly, which at one time imported two thirds of local consumption and oversaw the marketing of South Lebanon’s tobacco crop, was no longer able to suppress massive smuggling despite pitched battles between the Forces de sécurité intérieure (FSI, the state police) and smugglers in 1977 and again in 1983. In September 1987, the government signed an agreement with the six leading militias (the Lebanese Forces, the Progressive Socialist Party, ’Amal, the Marada Brigade, the Popular Nasserist Organization from Sidon, and the South Lebanon Army), whereby it granted them the right to sell cigarettes in their respective territories. The agreement produced an 8 percent increase in the price of tobacco, which went to the militias who had committed themselves to confiscating “contraband” cigarettes in the areas they controlled.^[23] Yet, as in the case of oil, it would be a mistake to assume that the coerced appropriation of public resources implied the formation of alternative public services. In the two most developed cases of a militia economy, the Jumblatt’s PSP in the Chouf and the Lebanese Forces, revenues were more than ten times greater than investment and social expenditures.^[24] Such predatory structures are far from the kind of state modernity discussed by Tilly, who assumes that redistribution and legitimacy are linked.

Second, the shift from the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of force to unbridled private violence gave rise to a demand for security that the militias avidly exploited. As the army and state police withdrew from the provision of security, urban populations very quickly established agreements with fighters—a practice in the tradition of the khuwa.^[25] Contrary to common representations, the main source of danger to populations other than unpredictable events such as car bombs or air raids did not come from enemy territory—since frontiers had been drawn between the militias’ respective areas of control by the fall of 1976. Instead, the danger came from within, from the routine exercise of intimidation and criminality by the very people who represented themselves as providers of security. In this environment, the private provision of public order was a booming business. Security and armored transport companies proliferated, as did firms manufacturing and selling electric and electronic material and martial arts clubs run by paramilitary men. Not incidentally, these kinds of activities also served as a safety valve against unemployment, mirroring the role of public enterprises in many countries throughout the Middle East. Some 20 percent of the salaried employees in the cement works of Chekka were “protector-guards,” according to local terminology. At the Khaldeh airport in the southern suburb of Beirut, the number of people close to ’Amal who were holding security-related jobs was estimated to be around five hundred, and it has not decreased much in the ten years since the war ended. The privatization of public order did more than generate profitable businesses that would remain in place after the end of war. It also kept social groups from constructing their collective security through shared norms or through public and enforceable rules. Instead, it promoted aggressive self-defense and the proliferation of weapons.

The third type of economic activity that the militias performed is also the most interesting because it locates militia activities at the intersection of the political and military realms, on the one hand, and sheer criminality, on the other. Indeed, militias did not simply take advantage of their physical domination in order to extract resources. They also invoked the needs of the population in the areas they controlled, and used established businesses and criminal networks to carry out their activities. Thus, by hijacking goods transported by their own regular companies, they were able to require an insurance premium on these goods while selling them to consumers at higher prices on the black market. In another case, the installation of a telephone switchboard by a militia in Zahleh that bypassed the public network’s paralyzed lines, or the installation of pipes that made it possible to “hijack” the equivalent of a twenty-ton fuel tanker per week for five years from the refinery in Tripoli.^[26] Between such activities and straightforward criminal endeavors motivated purely by profit there was a fine line. This line was swiftly crossed with the unregulated traffic in toxic waste from Italy, which has been circulating within Lebanon since 1987 with complete disregard for the humanitarian consequences. The development of drug-related activities including the production, extraction, and commercialization of hashish and heroin illustrates the distortions of an economy that fulfilled immediate financial needs by involving various social groups without, however, taking their long-term interests into account. The area used for growing hashish doubled between 1976 and 1984, and did so again in 1988. Likewise, the area where poppy fields were cultivated increased from 60 to 3,000 hectares between 1984, when poppy cultivation was introduced by Kurdish experts under the protection of the Syrian army, and 1988. As a result, drugs gave rise to a sudden and ostentatious prosperity in the Hermel and the Beka‘a and peasants abandoned the production of food crops in these areas.^[27] The severe reduction of poppy cultivation in these areas, which was imposed by Syria starting in 1990 at the request of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, produced a long-term economic crisis. Whether Christian or Muslim, many peasants from the hinterland chose to leave rather than to revert to the unprofitable cultivation of cereals or face competition from Syrian imports of vegetables and fruits. Meanwhile, neither the reconstructed Lebanese administration nor the international community was able to come up with a rescue plan.

As for drug production, transport, and commercial networks protected by militia members, their net profit was immeasurable.^[28] Drugs were, in some respects, a direct response of militias to the extraordinary financial demands of war making, yet their sale also provided for massive capital accumulation among militia leaders, riches whose full scale will never be fully known. Perhaps most important, however, the interruption of poppy production around 1990 did not cause the death of the networks feeding upon the external production zones and bank circuits of northern countries; far from it. The dismantling of the militia organizations that gave rise to and protected local drug networks was followed by their long-term integration into international drug marketing circuits.

The fourth type of economic activity that constituted the militia economy was the militias’ involvement in financial speculation. This activity actually grew out of the need to launder drug money through means other than real estate operations, but was fueled by the increasing volatility of the Lebanese pound. Until 1982, the impressive stability of the pound helped the militias purchase all kinds of goods outside the country. Following the decline of oil prices in 1984 and the depletion of the state’s foreign exchange reserves from which the militias benefited, however, this tendency was brutally reversed. The fiscal crisis was such that in 1985 the value of the Lebanese pound dropped by 30 percent per month: $1 was worth 2 £L in 1975, 50 in 1985, 500 in 1987, 1,500 in 1990 and 2,000 in 1992. Many Lebanese and others speculated on the currency’s devaluation, but militia leaders had a definite advantage at this game. They obtained fictitious bank guarantees for their loans, insisted on using short-term deposits to obtain long-term credits, and exerted pressure on the Société financière du Liban, the official body responsible for allocating liquid assets among banks, to appropriate available foreign exchange. Moreover, certain banking institutions were created solely for managing the finances of militias, including the Prosperity Bank of Lebanon, which was linked to the Lebanese Forces. The protection of profits was also facilitated by the presence of big Western banks in Lebanon.^[29]

On the whole, the relation of the militias to the Lebanese state remained ambiguous. This ambiguity dismisses the oversimplifying thesis analyzing the militias’ onslaught against the state as part of a large plot aimed at dismantling the Near Eastern states (Syria, Lebanon, and possibly Jordan) to the benefit of communitarian statelets. Such a plot, depicted as an Israeli scheme, as the ultimate goal of extremist Lebanese Christians, as well as the secret vow of the Syrian ‘Alawite minority, could never be implemented during fifteen years of war, even if several militia groups, among them the Lebanese Forces and the Druze PSP, envisioned at some stage being able to do without the Lebanese state and to create their own set of institutions, including a central bank and foreign relations department.

What the dynamic of the militia economy shows, on the contrary, is the complexity of the relationship between the state and the militia entrepreneurs. The state, with its central administration, its national institutions, and its sovereignty, remained an asset and a stake. The militia took greater advantage from their complementarity to the state economy than in its destruction and replacement. Even while despised, weakened, and delegitimized by the militias which concurred in its destruction, it was still their common good, as witnessed during the “reconciliation meetings” of Geneva (November 1983) and Lausanne (March 1984), when the warlords summoned by their Syrian “patron” competed in “national loyalty.” Finally, by denying each other the right to secede or to take hold of state power the militias acted collectively as the warrant of the perenniality of the state.

Allocation and Legitimacy

The militia economy’s predilection for criminality worked hand in hand with the militias’ role as redistributive agents. As the war went on, militias came to play a growing role as economic patrons. Indeed, by the second half of the 1980s, one-third of Lebanon’s population received income from the militias.^[30] A comparison of various estimates indicate that one-sixth of men old enough to carry a weapon actually joined the militias at one time or another, and another sixth joined the militias’ administrative organizations. The monthly salaries paid to the militants ($65–350 in the LF, $75–150 in the Maradas in rural area, and $60 to the part-time volunteers of the PNO) were not particularly attractive compared to salaries in the public sector, especially after the rapid devaluation of the Lebanese pound after 1984.^[31] This situation partially explains the petty criminality of low-level militia members who were inclined to engage in criminal forms of resource extraction at the expense of the surrounding community.^[32]

What we might add to these figures, however, is that the rest of the population was also becoming increasingly dependent on the militias for their security and material well-being. Indeed, the militias became the main providers not only of salaries but also of material goods, health care, and education. And they were more interventionist in the performance of these functions than had been the prewar “laissez faire” state. Quite apart from the economic scale of their operations, moreover, it was the militias’ hegemonic control of collective and individual strategies in the economic realm that was important. Indeed, their economic centrality in the everyday lives of Lebanese helps explain the sense of confusion and helplessness that the Lebanese population experienced when faced with the organizational-institutional vacuum of the immediate postwar era. It also explains the intensity of the expectations they imposed on the new billionaire Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Among Lebanon’s social groups, displaced populations were the most dependent on the militias, leaving them vulnerable to various forms of exploitation. So while displaced persons were provided with welfare support by militias, and were resettled in facilities the militias had either requisitioned (in the case of the Lebanese Forces) or forcibly and illegally appropriated (in the case of ’Amal), they were also kept in precarious conditions so that militias could appeal to charitable organizations for support and exploit the presence of these displaced populations to secure political and financial advantages in any future peace negotiations. When the reconstruction projects Solidere and Elyssar were launched, in 1991 and 1995 respectively, ’Amal and Hizballah were thus able to increase the number of applicants eligible to receive government indemnities. As for the leaders of the eastern region who succeeded the Lebanese Forces, an accumulation of obstacles to the return of displaced Christians from the Chouf was at the core of their grievances against the postwar republic. It was, in turn, among the young generation of these displaced populations, cut off from their roots and animated by a spirit of revenge, that militias recruited the core group of their fighters. The reorganization of the Lebanese Forces after 1985 under Samir Geagea offers the most telling example of this recruitment pattern, since his shock troops were made up of fighters and new recruits driven out of their villages in the north, the Chouf, and the Iqlim-el-Kharroub.

And yet, having acknowledged the extraordinary range of economic activities in which militias engaged and the extent to which they were effective in fashioning militia organizations into mechanisms of predation, it must nonetheless be said that the militias by and large failed in the tasks of institutionalizing and legitimating their economic and political roles. In spite of their intention to formalize their economic status and undertake projects of social transformation that would alter Lebanon’s balance of social power, their economic activities never provided a stable regulatory framework and continued to reflect the interests of individual militia members in self-enrichment—interests they persistently advanced through tactics that were entirely at odds with their concern for legitimacy or the formation of lasting institutional structures.

Examples abound of the gap between the militias’ aspirations and the rather tawdry character of their activities. The enthusiasm manifested toward the end of the 1970s by some intellectuals in the Lebanese Forces for a collective agriculture inspired by the model of kibbutz was short-lived and was rapidly overtaken by a form of speculative agroindustry. In Hizballah, a Research and Documentation Center was founded in 1988 with a mandate to promote urban development projects for the poor southern suburbs. At the execution stage, however, private offices and unsupervised real estate projects prospered and became sources of individual profits even, and especially, for the most pious of the local shaykhs.^[33]

The development of social and medical services in all the militia regions, on the other hand, took place in the context of a growing cost of living and competition between militias or armed groups within each community. Among the Maronites, this conflict was between the LF and President Gemayel in 1984–88, and then between the LF and General ‘Aoun in 1988–89. Among the Shi‘ites, the conflict was, starting in 1987, between ’Amal and Hizballah. The provision of social services operated, therefore, as an instrument in the hands of the militias to mitigate the disaffection of populations tired of destruction and high handed methods. Hizballah illustrates this situation best. It invested in social and medical services through local branches of foundations headquartered in Iran: the Jihad el-Bina’ for housing, the Martyrs’ Foundation, the Foundation for the Wounded and a similar institution created to support orphans. Such investment was politically profitable among the populations of the Baalbek region and those of the southern suburbs of Beirut. Generally speaking, the legitimizing function of social programs, and the attraction of foreign private humanitarian aid (estimated at $10 million per year) which their adoption brought about were more important to the militias than the social objective itself.^[34]

The Territorial Illusion

After an initial period of political paralysis, followed by the collapse of the Lebanese Army and the beginnings of territorial fragmentation, the territories controlled by militias underwent a three-stage process marked by the increasing consolidation of autonomous sectarian “statelets” in the period from 1976 to 1983. These phases were characterized by the coercive unification of populations within the same communal space; the forced homogenization of those populations, causing the displacement of several hundred thousand Christians and Shi‘ite Moslems; and physical separation along sectarian lines. Through this process of territorialization of militia control, the militias sought to establish their legitimacy and authority as sovereign entities. Ultimately, this quest was no less illusory than their pursuit of social or economic legitimacy. Yet it provides further insight into how the militias hoped to parlay their military capacity into a longer-term political role in Lebanon.

In the economic realm, this process of territorialization had three consequences. First, it favored the emergence and development of alternative urban and commercial centers whose economic circumstances fluctuated depending on the economic climate of the moment;^[35] some of these centers would later suffer from the postwar reemergence of Beirut as Lebanon’s financial capital. Second, the construction of internal frontiers generated revenues in several ways: the levying of custom duties, the artificial creation of local scarcities leading to skyrocketing prices and windfall profits, and even the lengthening of transportation distances (Beirut-Zghorta via Hermel, Homs, and Tripoli), that increased transport fees. As the state retreated, the partitioning of Lebanon among militias reproduced the old Ottoman divisions of military and fiscal domains (iqtâ‘), each with their borders and customs checkpoints; Bater or Monteverde for the PSP, the Awali north of Sidon for the PNO, the Qasmieh bridge for ’Amal, and Barbara for the LF. Each of these crossing points generated significant revenues for the militias that controlled them.

Beside extracting taxes, militias took advantage of price differentials and the creation of artificial monopolies. As early as the first year of the war the refineries of Zahrani and Tripoli (located in Shi‘ite and Sunni zones, respectively) were destroyed by shells fired from the Christian zones. The minister of industry and petroleum, who had close links to the Kata’ib, deemed it technically impossible to bring the refineries back into use quickly. Almost overnight, coastal storage units in the Christian regions between Beirut and Jounieh (Dora, Nahr el-Mott, Dbaye) became the country’s main supply centers for fuel, and they provisioned other regions on the basis of intermilitia agreements.^[36] Moreover, the SLA threatened several times to shell the ports of Tyr and Sidon in order to replenish its coffers, and received an allowance for abstaining from such action, thus collecting “taxes” from its enemies, ’Amal and the PNO. Finally, territorial divisions fueled real estate speculation through the expulsion of populations (for example, the Palestinians and Shi‘ites from the shanty town of the Quarantine and the Christians from the region north of and around Sidon), through the massive arrival of refugees in southern Lebanon or in the northern suburbs of Beirut, or even through the development of a new political center such as Bikfaya, President Amin Gemayel’s “capital” from 1984 to 1988.^[37]

The territorial illusion, or the militias’ quest for some status comparable to sovereignty, rested on an ideological construction concerning the importance of territory that was very much at odds with the way the militias were organized and actually operated. First, while the militias attached symbolic and even military importance to what the Lebanese Forces called the “liberated” territory, and while they also marked these territories with all the iconography of sectarian struggle, especially Hizballah, the majority of the militias had lost contact with the areas from which their fighters largely originated: the high mountains in the north and the remote villages in the Beka‘a or the south. Moreover, most militias took as their main military objective the conquest of Beirut, an economic and social space far too vast and complex to be dominated by a single militia. Similarly, a principal economic aim was to use their military apparatus to seize control of the service sector, though this, too, defied any neat spatial division.

In fact, the militias had no need for a territorial “homeland” to engage in war making, to assert their control over populations, or even to enrich themselves. All of them, including the openly anticapitalistic Hizballah, shared the desire to be part of the “Hong Kong of the Middle East,” if not to control it.

Second, the obsession with territory expressed in the militias’ discourse of communal unity was continuously undermined by internal rivalries and conflicts among militia leaders. Such conflicts were usually based on personal or regional issues rather than programmatic ones, and their stakes were in most cases economic. The ’Amal movement in South Lebanon, for example, started fragmenting after 1982. Each warlord controlled a village and aspired to monopolize the benefits of traffic between zones occupied by the Israelis, the Shi‘ite southern suburbs of Beirut, and the two ports of the region, Tyr and the illegal port of Zahrani. At the leadership level, the rift between ’Amal and Hizballah was more the result of competing interests than the product of ideological or strategic disagreements,^[38] although such factors were nevertheless significant since Hizballah’s sponsor, Iran, funded several Shi‘ite charitable foundations. In the Christian regions, this logic of economic competition produced territorial divisions and a series of fratricidal confrontations. Christians in the north, for example, set themselves apart from the majority of the community when they sided with the Syrians as early as 1978, following a succession of pitched battles for the control of the ports and the distribution of gasoline and cement. There was also a series of coups to remove Fuad Abou Nader (1985), Samir Geagea (1985), and Elias Hobeika (1986), from the leadership of the Lebanese Forces. The expulsion of Hobeika was the final stage of a fierce struggle for the control of the Sunduq al-Watani, the “national fund” that was in fact the private bank of the LF, and for the control of revenues generated by illegal ports. Following his overthrow, Hobeika retreated to Zahleh, where he and his “finance minister,” Paul Aris, continued to ransom enterprises and traders from the eastern part of Beirut. At this stage, they were no longer pursuing a political or economic project but merely using force, albeit from a distance, to extract resources.

The Militia System

The territorial divisions and economic conflicts among the six, and later the seven, major militias (Maradas, LF, PSP, PNO, SLA, ’Amal, and, after 1982, Hizballah) did not undermine the presence of a national market within which the militias were forced to cooperate in order to maximize their revenues. Even while Lebanon was divided politically and militarily into communal territories, transcommunal and interregional networks were diffused throughout the country, creating a dense web of interconnections across militia lines. As a result, despite the militias’ rhetorical commitment to economic autarky, the interdependence created by the persistence of a “national” economic space imposed a degree of collaboration on the warring forces. These connections are revealed through the timing, type, and duration of military operations in which the militias engaged.

Cooperation between militias started as early as the autumn of 1975, when the souks and port of Beirut were being sacked. At that time it took the form of various mechanisms of compensation and supervision between regions, mechanisms which depended, ultimately, on personal trust. Occasionally, this cooperation was also broadened and institutionalized, as in the case of natural gas, whose import was entrusted to a single dealer. The £L 2,000 or $3 paid by consumers for each gas container in 1988 included a £L 360 tax that was not collected by the Ministry of Finance but was, rather, distributed among the militias according to negotiated agreements.^[39] Narcotics trade provided a second example of cooperation between militias, this time organized around multiple, cross-militia economic networks, which negotiated specific divisions of labor. For purposes of drug trafficking, ’Amal was associated with the PSP; Hizballah was associated with the ‘Alawite militia of Tripoli and the LF, or with individual members of the Kata’ib party and even with officers of the Israeli Golani brigade in the occupied south. Each militia performed its share of the operation and took its share of the profits. Likewise, in the aborted project to construct the new Halate airport near Jbail in 1987, the LF received the support of Walid Jumblatt, then minister of public works as well as the LF’s sworn enemy since their confrontation in the Chouf war. Together, the different militias created a profit network at the expense of their population, thereby rendering obsolete the state principles of res publica such as equity and rationality.

Toward a Typology of Militia Economies

The interwoven character of the militia economy system that crisscrossed the Lebanese “territories” and produced organized networks of militias did not, however, diminish organizational differences among the militias. Besides their conflicting ideologies and political projects, the militias also differed in the methods they used for carrying out the various tasks involved in building the economy in the zones under their control: acquiring resources, particularly external resources, exploiting the state apparatus as an economic tool and source of wealth, accumulating capital, cooperating with entrepreneurs and, finally, formulating explicitly or implicitly an ethos that would complete their political doctrine in the economic sphere. In order to analyze and understand the diversity of the militias’ economy-building strategies while taking into consideration the main two phases of their evolution (1975–82 and 1983–90), we can identify four ideal types corresponding to the four main militias dominating the Lebanese arena.

The Lebanese Forces: Between Business and Corporatism

From September 1976 until 1983 the economy of the Christian regions under the control of the Lebanese Forces (East Beirut, the North Metn, and Kisrwan) was characterized by the persistence of prewar economic structures and types of activity, and enjoyed a certain prosperity. Except for confrontations with the Syrian army in July and October 1978, the Lebanese Forces sustained a measure of order. The Christian zone enjoyed relative security and benefited from the relocation of a number of enterprises and from the arrival of Christians fleeing West Beirut.

The various military groups constituting the Lebanese Forces profited from land speculation. They also benefited from the wartime enrichment of various types of entrepreneurs such as carriers, importers, and middlemen, by levying protection taxes on economic activities and smuggled imports.^[40] Foreign support, which was for the most part military and to a lesser extent humanitarian, remained marginal.^[41] The transfer of activities abroad in Cyprus or Europe, on the other hand, as well as subsidies from the Christian Lebanese diaspora, helped to maintain a reasonable standard of living. The LF’s main resources came from the levying of external customs and taxes ($60 million per year), from the organization of transport and internal customs ($15 million), and from the activities of the fifth dock in Beirut’s port ($15–25 million). Together, these resources provided some $300 million annually.^[42]

In the 1980s, several factors, including the impoverishment of wage earners following the collapse of the Lebanese Pound, the arrival of more than one hundred thousand displaced persons in the Christian zone, and the intensification of the struggle for power, led the LF’s military leadership to tighten its control over the economy by multiplying parastatal institutions, increasing taxes, and establishing relief and social services, especially for the “displaced” population. The economic apparatus which the LF established under the name of Sunduq al-Watani was by far the most developed and up-to-date financial organization created by a militia. No civil activity, whether lawful or unlawful, could escape the control of the LF, which proved far more efficient than the state had been in collecting taxes. The scope of their takeover of the economy in the Christian regions is evidenced by the long list of enterprises belonging to the holding company they founded in 1989, and which encompassed virtually all fields of activity.^[43] The militia was thus showing signs of a move toward authoritarian corporatism.

The last period of the war, starting in 1988, was characterized by a sharp shift in the balance of power between armed forces and businessmen. Taking advantage of the militia’s lack of legal standing, economic actors emancipated themselves from military and territorial logics. Businessmen did this in part by exploiting intercommunal networks and playing on internal rivalries within the Christian regions.^[44] They also undertook to reprivatize and civilianize properties that the militia had registered in its name.^[45] While it was powerful, when it was holding a besieged population under its control, the Lebanese Forces had created exceptional and favorable conditions for accumulation that would allow enterprises and individuals to outlive the militia after the war. But its domination of economic activity nonetheless eroded as the war came to a close.

The Druze PSP: The Autonomous Principality

During the first phase of the war, the Druze regions of the Chouf, Aley, and the upper Metn, as well as the mixed bordering regions such as Iqlim el-Kharroub, were controlled by the PSP, Walid Jumblatt’s Druze militia. The PSP was at the time one of the many militias that made up the National Movement. While the militia claimed to abide by the law, it was making the most of its militant position, smuggling gas at Jiyeh, obtaining supplies of ammunition from the PLO and Syria, and receiving financial aid from Libya.

A radical change occurred in 1983. After the Israeli withdrawal and the defeat of the LF in the Chouf, the PSP discarded the trappings of legality—notwithstanding Walid Jumblatt’s participation in the national conferences of Geneva and Lausanne and his continuous presence as a cabinet minister in Lebanese governments. The militia established the “Mountain administration,” the PSP’s public service operation, which gave Jumblatt and a few of his close associates control over the region’s main economic activities: ports, cement works, a power station, and the maintenance of public infrastructure. The economic logic of the PSP was thus clearly more predatory than productive. Its main resources came from taxes levied at the domestic customs houses of Jiyeh, Bater, and Monteverde. Civil servants, while still on the payroll of the state, fell under the authority of the PSP. The militia was thus simultaneously complementing and substituting for the state, with the result that the region emerged from the war as the best controlled and the best kept in the country. With a civil budget of approximately $200 million, the Mountain administration was a privileged instrument of communal control.^[46]

In some respects, the Mountain administration exhibited an apparent historic continuity with the Druze principality of the seventeenth century. Indeed, Jumblatt controlled relations between the Druze community and other Lebanese communities and shared with the leaders of ’Amal the monopoly on hydrocarbon products importation and distribution in the south through the oil company COGECO. On a personal level, Walid Jumblatt symbolized the symbiosis of the charismatic leader, the warlord, and the businessman exercising personal control over a clientalist form of redistribution. After the war he retained his role, despite the resumption in Druze areas of a state of legality, and his mediation remained decisive in every economic and political decision concerning the Chouf. As minister of displaced populations in Rafiq Hariri’s government (1992–98), he handled a budget of several hundred million dollars, more than two-thirds of which came from foreign aid. This position greatly facilitated his control over the Druze.

’Amal, the State, and Diaspora Networks

The budget of ’Amal, the largest Shi‘ite militia, was less than the PSP’s and only half that of the LF, even though the territories and population under its control were much greater (in 1984 ’Amal’s leader claimed to have one million Shi‘ite followers).^[47] ’Amal was, moreover, a loose organization built upon a variety of local self-defense groups controlling small territories such as villages or individual streets in the southern suburbs of Beirut as well as in southern Lebanon. Yet, the weakness of ’Amal’s chain of command and military organization does not in and of itself account for the type of economy that was developed in the areas it controlled. Two other factors must be considered. The first is that since the 1950s and thus long before the war, the Shi‘ite population of Lebanon had been deeply concerned about securing its position in the state bureaucracy and economy. This reinforced the militia’s capacity to infiltrate the bureaucracy and public services, and to appropriate the revenues from the Zahrani refinery or the customs of Khaldeh airport. Its political power enabled the militia to keep the revenues it derived from the state and even to increase them, in spite of its open insubordination—Shi‘ite soldiers of the Sixth Brigade, for example, continued to be paid by the government even after they rebelled in 1984. Linking the government and the militia, Nabih Berry, minister of the southern region after 1980, and Mohammed Beydoun, president of the Council for the South, ordered public (and even private) infrastructure works in the regions dominated by ’Amal, at the expense of the state. They also supervised the distribution of public funds to displaced Shi‘ites and to victims of Israeli attacks. Beside facilitating the misappropriation of public funds, its links to the state enabled ’Amal to place a large number of its followers in the regular armed forces and, following the demobilization of April-June 1991, in the civil service.^[48]

The second critical factor is that ’Amal collaborated with networks of diaspora Shi‘ite investors eager to bring prosperity to their villages of origin in southern Lebanon, and just as eager to shield themselves from political tensions in their countries of emigration, particularly in West Africa. Responding to such concerns, ’Amal took over the role formerly performed by the traditional Shi‘ite bourgeoisie of Beirut, such as the Beydouns and the ‘Awdis, of capturing diaspora investment flows. These included real estate investments at Ras Beirut and Rue Verdun as well the industrial investments of the newly recommunalized bourgeoisie that was collaborating with Iraqi Shi‘ite or Syrian entrepreneurs such as Ahmad Shalabi, who controlled Petra Bank in Amman, and Sa’ib Nahhas, a Syrian representative of Peugeot and Volvo and the owner of a luxury hotel chain. The most visible representative of these “African Shi‘ite” associates of ’Amal was the Sierra Leone billionaire Jamil Sa‘id, a rice and diamond wholesaler who mined sand off the beaches of Tyr and sold gasoline smuggled from Zahrani throughout all of southern Lebanon.^[49]

After the war, however, the economic power of ’Amal eroded as a result of three factors. First, senior party officers neglected the movement as they became more interested in their positions within the state: Berry became speaker of the Lebanese parliament; Beydoun was made minister, and so on. Second, new, private Shi‘ite banks took over from ’Amal the ability to capture the capital flows originating within the Shi‘ite diaspora. Last, and perhaps most significant, Hizballah supplanted ’Amal within the main Shi‘ite stronghold, namely, the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Hizballah and the Islamic Welfare State

Besides its leading role in the resistance effort against Israeli occupation in the south, and the clever adaptation of its religious doctrine to popular culture in the regions under its control, Hizballah owed the rapid growth of its legitimacy within Shi‘ite areas to the expansion of its charitable, medical, and educational activities. Unlike ’Amal, whose strategy rested on its relationship to the state, Hizballah undertook to distance itself from the state as a way to enhance both its organizational autonomy and its popular legitimacy as an independent alternative to ’Amal. To solidify its popular appeal, Hizballah established local branches of numerous Iranian foundations created during the Iran-Iraq War to provide aid to various groups of the injured (orphans and the wounded) and for reconstruction, or for the support of social services such as the Imam al-‘Uzma hospital and many professional schools founded after 1987 in deprived areas such as the Beka‘a and Beirut’s southern suburbs. Known for relative integrity of its leaders, and for paying its fighters salaries that were three times higher than those of other militias, Hizballah had little difficulty establishing its hegemony in a region where the state had been totally absent since 1983.

With what resources did Hizballah operate? Various Iranian subsidies, even if they diminished in the postrevolution period following Khomeini’s death, constituted a decisive factor of Hizballah’s influence. One should not underestimate either the party’s participation in the development of poppy farming in the Hermel and Baalbek, or in the preparation and the marketing of drugs in a region where Hizballah became the dominant force, with the full knowledge and agreement of the Syrian army. In addition, the party was locked in a sharp struggle with Shaykh Fadhlallah and his important Mabarrât Foundation, as well as with the Shi‘ite Higher Council, directed by Shaykh Chams ed-Din, to collect and secure control over the money produced as a result of zakât and khoms—the alms that hundreds of thousands of Shi‘ite believers are obligated to give. The diaspora, in particular, was the target of rival appeals from missionaries dispatched from Beirut by these three competing religious authorities.

Born in adversity and preoccupied with armed struggle, Hizballah had to deal with an economy of destitution and assistance during the war. Yet the party demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt to the challenges of the post-Ta‘if period. To begin with, Hizballah was perceived as outdoing the government in various operations of popular assistance in Shi‘ite areas. These included a dangerous mountain rescue during a snowstorm in the spring of 1992, rapid reconstruction following the shellings that accompanied Israel’s July 1993 operation, and the distribution of water to the entire southern suburbs of Beirut. With twelve members elected in the 1992 parliamentary elections, the party asserted itself as Rafiq Hariri’s unavoidable interlocutor in the development and execution of the Elyssar project in 1995, whose goal was to rehabilitate the southern suburbs. Although Hizballah continued to hesitate between the tempting strategy of deepening its autonomous control over the areas it dominated, on the one hand, and a strategy of collaboration that could bring it recognition at the highest level, on the other, many of Hizballah’s leaders chose the latter approach. In this instance too, however, collaboration often took an economic form that secured significant benefits for the participants. Hizballah leaders established engineering design and private construction firms, for example, some of which became involved in shady real estate deals in a suburb of Beirut that was expected to become an area of urban renewal and tourism. The party of God demonstrated, if proof was at all necessary, that in Lebanon the conversion of a fundamentalist militia member into an ultraliberal businessman was not merely a hypothetical possibility.^[50]

Entering the Postwar Economy

This typology, though perhaps overly rigid in the distinctions it draws between modes of militia operations, can nonetheless serve as a starting point for identifying the trajectories of actors irrespective of their communal differences, and for disentangling the shifting patterns of economic activities that rose and fell under both the pressure and the protection of various militias. In short, it can help to understand the functioning of a system restructured by a culture of war in an ultraliberal economic environment.

In the years following the war, continuity was secured by the presence on the economic scene of firms that had been launched through the illegal accumulation of capital. Far from being marginalized when their militia partners were disarmed or even, in some cases, ostracized, wartime entrepreneurs had no difficulty finding new protectors among senior Syrian officers stationed in Lebanon. Nor was it difficult for them to share in the joint public-private consortium headed by Rafiq Hariri. Even those who voiced their hostility toward the Second Republic and the pervasive presence of armed Syrian forces in Lebanon took part in the speculative transactions that accompanied “reconstruction” by purchasing Solidere shares and Lebanese Eurobonds. Despite the amnesty law’s provisions regarding economic and financial offenses committed during the war, no action was taken against the perpetrators because the needs of “reconstruction” were great and diaspora resources, together with international aid, were far from sufficient to meet them. While the Lebanese political system was restored with few modifications and the Second Republic inherited many of the flaws of the First, the war forced open financial and economic domains to new actors and new practices.^[51] The relationship between political and economic arenas also underwent a significant shift. Before the war, that relationship was patrimonial and characterized by political patrons presiding over economic redistribution. After the war, the practices of the militias enabled the financiers and the big businessmen to establish themselves as protectors and sponsors of a weak state and a declining public sector.

What was the place of militia members themselves in the postwar Lebanese scene? They had to convert their military power into economic power by taking advantage of the demobilization and amnesty laws. The compromise solution reached in Ta‘if allowed them to make a transition toward full participation in the political system. Having become ministers, parliamentarians, and top-ranked civil servants, they established their influence over economic matters in general and over the vast project of national reconstruction in particular. Their control over public and private foreign aid gave them exceptional leverage to broaden their clientele and thus to renew their legitimacy. Existing specialized agencies like the Reconstruction and Development Council, the Fund of the Displaced, and the Council of the South provided new sources of redistribution and patronage for former militia leaders.

The most tangible effect of the militias’ economic practices is precisely to have reduced the notion of public good and to have crippled the legal and financial instruments of a state whose autonomy had already been curtailed by ultraliberalism. After the war, one-third of the population lived below the poverty line as a direct consequence of wartime destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure and the ongoing currency crisis.^[52] In spite of this, the government refused to tax financial profits, terminated the remaining subsidies on essential commodities (such as flour) in July of 1995, and gave up the state’s monopoly in strategic sectors, such as communications and the importation of petroleum products. Since the government did not consider itself accountable to citizens and lacked political independence, it was nothing more than the representative of financial interests and militias who now had an opportunity to pursue their military objectives by other economic means. This is how Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, who participated in the war by financing successively or simultaneously each of the protagonists, became the symbolic figure of the postwar private entrepreneur who took over from the militia leaders and contributed to the marginalization of the state while financing huge reconstruction works, including a national telephone grid, road network, electric power grid, and the rebuilding of Beirut’s city center, in which he was the most important investor.

To conclude, while the civil conflict in Lebanon did not generate a war economy in the classical sense of the word, it did facilitate the birth and development of certain specific characteristics that have not disappeared with the return of peace—far from it. The new role played by the former militia leaders and the importance of militia resources (such as physical violence and illegal fortunes) in the postwar political and economic reconstruction showed that the civil war was not a parenthesis but contributed to the shaping of lasting new social activities and identities.

Moreover, the endurance of militia activities after the war found legitimacy and support in the globalization process and the existence of a “bifurcated” world, to quote James Rosenau. First, a variety of nonstate actors operating along transnational networks dominated the reconstruction economy. According to a postmodern logic, many of their activities and hierarchies remained out of state control and regulation policies.

Second, the Lebanese administration had to take into account the segmentation of the national territory by the militia powers during the war. While the decentralization provided by the Ta‘if Accord intended to take this reality into account and contribute to restoring local security and confidence in public services, it could hardly prevent the deepening of communal specificities and regional inequalities.

Finally, beyond the dramatic years of 1975–90, the Lebanese civil war has thus to be considered in light of the modern history of the Near East. For many of the logics at work during the war both revealed and exacerbated the weaknesses of the Lebanese state.

Notes