A Tale of Two Villages

Christian and Druze, united by geography, divided by hate

Some of the bloodiest fighting in the hills above Beirut has taken place between two neighboring villages, one Christian, one Druze. Like a Middle East version of the Hatfields and McCoys, the inhabitants of each town see their neighbors as mortal enemies, even though they live only a few hundred yards apart. TIME Correspondent Roberto Suro visited the two Aley-region villages just before the latest clashes erupted. His report:

On the narrow, winding road to the Druze village of Aytat, cars are frantically waved to a stop by a crouching militiaman. He yells to his colleagues hidden in the trees that a vehicle is about to brave the 50-yard stretch exposed to Christian snipers, and they prepare to lay down covering fire if necessary. Then the militiaman shouts, "One, two, three, go!" The traveler slams the gas pedal to the floor. Sometimes the car makes it to the other side unscathed, sometimes not.

In the neighboring Christian village of Suq al Gharb, motorists suffer similar perils. At one intersection a sign warns passersby: DANGER. SNIPERS. STAY TO THE RIGHT. The sign is obsolete; even the right side of the road is hazardous now. Druze fighters in Aytat are constantly finding new fields of fire. "As soon as you think you know where it is safe to walk, they find another way to shoot at you," complains Munira Nassar, a housewife. One of her neighbors was wounded while hanging out laundry from a kitchen window.

As seen from Beirut, Suq al Gharb and Aytat look like a single town strung across a ridge rising 2,900 feet above the capital's southern suburbs. Yet lines of trenches mark the boundaries between the two villages, and the residents are divided by chasms of suspicion and bitterness. "They are terrified of us, and we are terrified of them," Nassar says. "We are so afraid of each other that it will be difficult for us to be friends again."

In Lebanon's endless litany of sectarian violence, no feud has proved more bitter than that between Christians and Druze. The primary battlefield in their long-running confrontation is the Chouf, where both groups sought refuge from Sunni Muslim persecutors 1,000 years ago. Before Lebanon deteriorated into outright civil war in 1975, Aytat and Suq al Gharb lived in peace as summer resorts. Wealthy Arabs were drawn to the towns' cool mountain air scented by thick stands of parasol pines. Since the fighting resumed in earnest last October, the villages have become ghost towns. Gardens are overgrown, grape arbors drop their fruit into rotting piles. The newer four-and five-story apartment buildings are dotted with jagged black holes, evidence of frequent artillery exchanges. Virtually all the windows in both towns have been shattered by explosions, and prudent homeowners have replaced them with double layers of sandbags.

No one in either village can recall exactly when the latest troubles began, but each side blames the other for striking the first blow. The first skirmishes were provoked last summer by kidnapings and assaults that may have been the result of family feuds. By October, Aytat and Suq al Gharb were virtually at war with each other.

As fighting flared and subsided repeatedly through the winter and spring, the Israelis prevented either side from rearming or taking new ground. The Druze surrounded Suq al Gharb on three sides, but the Christians controlled the only road between Aytat and Aley, the largest Druze-held town, which in turn was encircled by Christians. After the Druze overran the Christian town of Bhamdun last week, the Lebanese army moved in to protect Suq al Gharb. The army has braved steady artillery fire all week long in order to block a Druze advance toward Beirut's southern suburbs.

Just as they resemble each other physically, the villages are defended by militias that use strikingly similar rhetoric. Both argue that they are merely defending their homes and that the enemy is the aggressor. Both insist that there is nothing religious about their fight but that the other side is intent on imposing its will on the whole of Lebanon. The Christian Phalangists came to the Chouf under Israeli army protection; the Druze operate from secure bases behind Syrian lines. Nonetheless, each side blames the other for drawing foreign powers into the conflict.

In the Verdun-like trenches that divide the two villages, young men who used to play together now exchange obscenities across a narrow no man's land. Walid, a Druze fighter in Aytat, must crawl through a series of trenches to reach his home, from which he takes potshots at Suq al Gharb out of a carefully sandbagged upper-story window. Walid says of his six-year-old daughter, who has neatly twined pigtails and the only clean clothes in the house: "I will teach her to hate the Phalangists and how to kill them." Oscar, a Phalangist commander in Suq al Gharb, has kept members of his family and some of his pets at his headquarters. He scoops up his eight-year-old son, who has just finished playing with a plastic six-shooter. Says the father: "My boy is already learning how to kill his enemies."

Father Fambe Polycarpu, 70, sits on his balcony and watches the fighting through an antique pair of opera glasses. Hearing a burst of machine-gun fire, the Greek Catholic priest enjoys trying to identify the source simply by the sound. Father Polycarpu does not worry about the snipers so long as he is within the confines of the seminary of St. George, on the edge of Suq al Gharb. His church, built in 1750, was hit by a rocket one day last month while he was preparing the altar for the Feast of the Assumption. The whole of the red tile roof was blown away, but, miraculously perhaps, the vaulted ceiling underneath was undamaged. Other Christians too believe the seminary is protected, and its novices' cells are full of families taking refuge. "The fighting has created hatred in the heart," says the priest. "It will be very hard to overcome these feelings." Yet he harbors a peculiar optimism. "The antipathy is very old, but we have lived in peace before. The hatred revives every 20 years or so. There is fighting, and then the hatred becomes dormant again. It will come to a stop some day as it has before." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.