Lebanon Begins to Heal From Its ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ : Mideast: Christians, Druze are setting aside decades of religious violence and are trying to live together again.

KFARKATRA, Lebanon — They say these stately mountains sleeping above Beirut, sliced bare in places by fighting and graced in others with stands of old cedars, are the barometer of the nation. When Mt. Lebanon and the Shouf region fare well, it is said, so fares Lebanon.

Some of the worst slaughters in Lebanon’s civil war happened in the quiet villages that straddle these hills. Whole villages stand intact but nearly empty, filled with houses that no one lives in anymore.

Damour, for instance, a lovely Christian Maronite hamlet dating to the Crusades, was depopulated when it blocked the path of Palestinian and leftist forces fighting their way up from Sidon in 1976; its houses are standing but the people who lived in them are mostly gone. A hand-painted message on the wall of a house leaves the signature of the last ones to pass through here: “The Forces of the Slaughterhouse.”

As world headlines lament the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon stands as a grim, largely forgotten reminder that all this has happened before.

And now, almost two decades after a civil war unleashed some of the worst religious violence in the Middle East’s history, Lebanon is learning to heal the wounds of ethnic cleansing, to smooth over the turbulence of these mountains and spawn a new concept of national identity.

“This is a lesson,” said Youssef Younes, who is leading the return of Maronite Christians displaced by ethnic cleansing to the village of Kfarkatra in the Shouf Mountains. “It is a lesson for us to teach our sons to be Lebanese first . . . to look at themselves in terms not of their religion but in terms of their national identity.”

This $500-million experiment in repatriation in Lebanon comes as a reassuring counterpoint to the violence in Bosnia, where Serbs, Croats and Muslims are trying to drive one another from villages, at the cost of lives and of national identity.

Lebanon’s villages saw these same violent scenes throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The Shouf mountain villages offer an eerie echo of current scenes in Bosnia, with Christian homes and churches dynamited in the midst of Druze villages; Beirut, for years, was cordoned into Muslim and Christian sectors.

Now, the shell-pocked road on the dividing line between Christian East and Muslim West Beirut is open. Bustling commerce links both sides of the city. Muslims travel to fashionable discotheques and seaside restaurants in the east for the evening; Christians drive to government offices and shopping centers in the west.

And for the first time this year, thousands of Christian families displaced in the Shouf Mountains when fighting broke out between Christians and Druze in 1982 are returning to their homes under a program headed by the former Druze warlord largely responsible for the ethnic cleansing.

“I don’t call it ‘ethnic cleansing,’ I call it ‘religious cleansing,’ and yes, I am partly responsible,” Walid Jumblatt, a former Druze militiaman and now minister of the displaced, said in a recent interview. “I helped create the problem, now what can I do except help them to go back? I only hope now the Christians and the church are able to understand the lessons of history, that we have to sit one day and try to separate politics from religion and achieve one-man, one-vote in Lebanon.”

Officials estimate that there are 600,000 displaced in Lebanon--the worst legacy of the war that ended only three years ago.

Besides the Christians driven from the Shouf, there are displaced Druze in the Shouf, Christians who fled West Beirut, Muslims who fled East Beirut, Shiite Muslims who fled fighting in the south and other Muslims displaced by fighting in the north near Tripoli.

Beirut itself is an unhappy hodgepodge of families squatting in abandoned apartments, in makeshift tenements, blown-up office buildings and under the occasional stairwell, all driven from their homes elsewhere in the country.

The former American Embassy on the seaside, blown up by a terrorist bomb in 1983, is now home to a dozen families who fled their homes elsewhere, mostly Muslims driven out of Christian East Beirut.

“We have been here nine years. Really, I am afraid for my family, because the foundation after the explosion is not good,” said Mohammed Arab, 27, a clothing salesman who had to leave his home in East Beirut in 1975. Now, the family lives in two small former embassy offices, the blown-up hallway outside open to the sea air.

Arab cannot return to his home in East Beirut because it is inhabited by a Christian family, who in turn were driven out by Muslims from their home in Damour.

“As we are refugees, also they are refugees like us. How can I be angry at them?” Arab asked. “The fighting between Muslims and Christians here, each had to show the other who is stronger. It is like what is happening in Bosnia, except here it is over, and all of us lost.”

Kfarkatra, in the heart of the Shouf Mountains, is the first village in which residents divided by war are being reunited.

It was possible to begin here, say Christian legislators and officials from the Ministry of Displaced, because there were no massacres or atrocities as in other villages.

In other spots, departing Druze left bodies in the streets; women were taken from cars and gang raped; men were thrown into underground chambers where their naked bodies were covered with boiling water; corpses were found with tongues cut out.

There were some wounds to be healed here, however. About 16 Christians were kidnaped from their homes, and they disappeared during the fighting. They are presumed to have been murdered. The church was destroyed. More than a dozen Christian houses were dynamited.

Kfarkatra’s story was much like that of the rest of the Shouf, where Christians and Druze have alternately lived together and come to blows since the middle of the 19th Century.

There had been relative harmony until the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when Israel helped install its allied Christian Falangist militia in the Shouf Mountains; later that year, the Israelis abruptly pulled out, leaving the Falangists and the resentful Druze, aided by the Syrians, to slaughter each other.

The Druze rapidly prevailed and began driving Christians out of about 60 villages in the Shouf.

In Kfarkatra, where about three-fourths of the residents were Christians whose families had lived together with the Druze for hundreds of years, there was no real outbreak of fighting. But when reports of massacres in nearby villages led to the wave of kidnapings in Kfarkatra, Druze militia in the village went to Christian neighbors and advised them to flee.

“We can no longer protect you,” Druze militiaman Barakat Barakat, a longtime Kfarkatra resident, recalled telling his neighbors.

The same thing happened in villages all over the Shouf. Druze families took over houses vacated by Christians. Homes belonging to former Christian militiamen were blown up. Churches were destroyed.

But part of the litany of healing has been the repeated claim that local Druze were not responsible for damage to Christian property in Kfarkatra--it all was committed, say the Druze in the village, by Druze outsiders.

The Christians have tried to believe this, because they must.

“We don’t know who destroyed the houses. We don’t know who kidnaped the people. It could have been somebody from a different village,” said Malek Monzer, a Christian grocer who recently returned to his home.

“When the negotiations took place for our return, the Druze reminded us that many had killed the Druze and destroyed their villages before they came here and committed these acts. The Druze in this village, whenever you see them, they all say, ‘It wasn’t us.’ ”

To start the reconciliation, former warlord Jumblatt last spring called together the Druze and told them that the war was over. The Christians, he said, were to be welcomed home.

In part, say political leaders on both sides, it was a reflection of necessity. The Shouf Mountains without the Christians, who were among the area’s foremost business leaders and teachers, were slipping into economic ruin.

“Maronites and Druze have been killing each other since 1840, yet they cannot survive except together,” said Najib abu Haidar, a spokesman for the Christian displaced. “They complement each other in the mountains to the extent that one cannot exist except with the other.”

Christian and Druze leaders were called to Jumblatt’s palace at Beit Eddine in the Shouf for a meeting; the first return occurred in Kfarkatra in July.

“When a decision was taken by . . . Jumblatt for all the refugees to return, a huge celebration was made here, a festival, on July 3,” said Barakat, the local Druze militia leader in Kfarkatra. “Everybody was represented. We stood in lines, women on one side, men on the other. And when they arrived, we shook hands and hugged.”

Christians were allowed to look at their houses and later were given the keys to return. The return has been complicated because many Druze families squatting in Christian homes had nowhere to go. Most of the money initially allocated to Jumblatt’s Ministry of Displaced, in fact, was paid to Druze families to entice them to leave Christian homes, leaving little or no money for returning Christian families to repair residences.

“When I came back, they gave me the key. Well, I didn’t need the key. There were no locks on the doors. When I saw it, I cried. I just cried. There were no words to say what I saw,” said Salah Munther, who resents that money was given to Druze who were in his house when he has received none to repair it.

“They told me, ‘Go to your house.’ OK, I will go to my house. But when I go to my house, there are no windows, the ceiling is leaking and there is no furniture. Why should I come?”

The Ministry of Displaced says it has evacuated 16,000 homes, preparing them for the return of their original inhabitants. The next round of financial aid will go to help families whose homes were damaged; they will receive an average of $7,000 each. Those whose homes were destroyed will get $12,000 on average.

Christian legislators from the Shouf say it will take $450 million to $550 million to reverse ethnic cleansing in the mountains. With the money, they say, the other problems will take care of themselves.

“If we receive $500 million in one year, it will be a forgiven and forgotten problem,” said Marwan abu Fadl, a Greek Orthodox Parliament deputy. “Of course, there won’t be invitations to each others’ homes and fiestas. You can forget about this. But the psychological fear has disappeared already. Of course in those areas where there have been great massacres, we have to make great reconciliation: ‘Kiss him, kiss him. Forget the past, forget the past.’ But it can be done. In time.”

In Beirut, the process has been sure but slow. There are no widespread moves to shuttle back and forth between Muslim and Christian sectors, despite the evolving commerce. Probably, many Beirutis say, there never will be.

“Even now, the people I work with, even the educated ones, whenever an issue comes up where people disagree, immediately they are not people with different opinions. They are Shiite or Sunni or Christian,” said a young Christian woman who works for Muslim-controlled Lebanese Television.

“In everyday life, people are getting easily mixed up now. I go to West Beirut, they come to East Beirut,” she said. “But living is another question. I would never live in West Beirut, if they gave me a place. I can go to work there, I can go to restaurants there, I can talk to them. But that’s it. I wouldn’t sleep there. There’s no feeling of security.”