Al-Tanzim

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The Al-Tanzim or Al-Tanzym (Arabic for “The Organization”) was the name of an ultra-nationalist secret military society and militia that emerged in Lebanon in the early 1970s, set up by right-wing Christian activists within the Lebanese Army, and which played an important role in the Lebanese Civil War.


Al-Tanzim logo
Al-Tanzim logo

The emblem of the group (a map of Lebanon with a cedar at the center, with the phrase "You love it, work for it" written below) was designed in 1970 during an expedition made by the Tanzim to the southern village of Kfar Chouba, in order to assist the affected population in the reconstruction effort, following an Israeli air raid on the south of the Country.


Contents

[edit] History

The Tanzim was first formed in 1969 at Tabrieh near Becharry in the Kesrouan region of northern Lebanon by a small group of disaffected young Christian junior officers who constested the Cairo agreement. The founding group comprised Obad Zouein, Aziz Torbey, Samir Nassif, and Fawzi Mahfouz (also known as Abu Roy), who were also former militants of the Phalangist Party’s youth section, and veterans of the 1958 Lebanon crisis. Under the leadership of Abu Roy, the group broke away from the Phalange in the late 1960s in protest for the latter’s initial refusal to engage in nation-wide military training and arming of the Lebanese population in order to ‘defend Lebanon’ from the perceived ‘Palestinian threat’. Shortly after its foundation, the group moved to Beirut where they established its Headquarters at the Christian quarter of Achrafieh, and began to recruit early on civilian members outside the Army - particularly individuals such as Milad Rizkallah, who joined the Tanzim in 1970 - mostly from the upper and professional middle-classes, including former members of the Maronite League. The civilian cadres proved instrumental in providing the new Movement with a political structure and program, embodied in 1970-71 with the creation of the Tanzim’s political wing. Operating under the covert title Movement of the Cedars - MoC (Harakat al-Arz) or Mouvement des Cedres (MdC), the Tanzim initially rejected the monocentric leadership structure typical of the traditional political parties in Lebanon by adopting a collegial decision-making board - the “Commanding Council” - the first ever to emerge in Lebanon. Yet, such collective leadership system did not prevent the rise of preeminent individuals like the physician Dr. Fuad Chemali to the movement’s presidency in 1972, later succeeded by the lawyer Georges Adwan in 1973.


[edit] Political beliefs

Since its membership included individuals with any political affiliation (Kataeb, Ahrar, etc ...) or none whatsoever, the MoC/Tanzim claimed that what united them was their integrity and their common belief in the liberty and sovereignty of Lebanon as a country for all Lebanese. In pratice, it was a predominately Maronite and Phoenicianist-oriented organization, being violently anti-communist, staunchly pro-western, and very hostile towards Pan-Arabism, characteristics which reflected on its program and politics. In the early 1970s the movement adhered to an extremist Lebanonist ideology similar to that of the Guardians of the Cedars(GoC), with whom they developed a close political partnership. Not only the Tanzim shared with the latter the same radical views regarding the Palestinian presence – and later Syria’s role - in Lebanon, but also went has far as adopting the “Lebanese language” written in the GoC’s Latin script for their own official documents.


[edit] The Tanzim in the 1975-76 Civil War

Involved since 1969 in the clandestine military training of Christian volunteers in secret camps such as Fatqa and later on Tabrieh in collusion with the Phalange, the MoC in the early 1970s began to raise quietly its own military wing, and although by 1977 more than 15,000 young men and women had trained at the above mentioned facilities (the majority of them joined the ranks of the other Christian militias), the Movement only proceeded to recruit very few out of this total, due to three main reasons:

1- The secret nature of such training, which rendered the selection process very delicate;

2- The limited financial resources available to the group, to a point that the volunteers had to cover their own training expenses by paying minimal fees.

3- The quality of men and women the Tanzim was looking for, and this reflected a lot on the clean reputation that the group maintained throughout the war, as well as having the lowest casualty rate, despite having its militia spearheading many difficult military engagements, mostly due to their mobility along the front.

Initially backed by the Lebanese Army, the MoC/Tanzim also received covert funding and weapons from Jordan and Israel, most of it being channelled via the Phalangists. The discipline and organizational abilities displayed by the MoC at the opening months of the 1975-76 civil war allowed the Movement to engage actively in the foundation of the Lebanese Front, and its 200-strong Tanzim militia, led jointly by Fawzi Mahfouz and Obad Zouein, saw the heaviest street fighting ever in east Beirut, including the sieges of Karantina and Tel al-Zaatar. Following the collapse of the Lebanese Army in January 1976, the Tanzim volunteered ostensibly to defend and protect more than half a dozen army barracks located in the Christian districts of east Beirut, including the Defense Ministry and Army HQ at Yarze. This action led to the establishment of a solid relationship between the Tanzim and the Lebanese Army, which misled some people to believe that the Army’s top Christian leadership was somewhat directly involved in the formation of the MoC. Moreover, the Movement saw this as an opportunity to expand its own military forces by incorporating defectors from the regular Army, along with taking away some equipment from its depots. Hence by March 1976 the Tanzim had transformed itself into a highly mobile elite fighting force, whose ranks swelled to 1,500 armed men and women backed by a small fleet of all-terrain vehicles and some transport trucks fitted with heavy machine-guns, Anti-Aircraft autocannons, and recoilless rifles. During that same month, they were committed in the battles for the Mount Lebanon region against the Lebanese National Movement/Common Forces being frequently employed as a ‘rapid reaction force’ to fill gaps at the front, notably at Tayyouneh-Lourdes, Kahaleh, Sin el Fil, Achrafieh and Ayoun es-Simane to name but a few, sustaining heavy casualties in the process. Integrated into the Lebanese Forces in 1977, Tanzim’s militiamen later again played a key role in the eviction of the Syrian army out from the Christian-controlled east Beirut in February 1978, where they manned the Fayadieh-Yarze sector of the Green Line. It was during these days that the name "Tanzim" was given to the MoC militia, since its fighters were deployed to different fronts and neighbourhoods, with each being coded as "tanzim of the region x or y" (the organized group of region x or y). Their only duty was to be present wherever the front needed them; hence the MoC/Tanzim was the only Christian militia at the outbreak of the 1975-76 war that had attained such a degree of tactical mobility and discipline.


[edit] Reversals and re-organization: 1976-79

Syria’s military intervention in June 1976, and its tacit endorsement by Georges Adwan (who cumulated the MoC presidency post with that of secretary-general of the Lebanese Front), however, caused the Movement to factionalize, splitting into a pro-Syrian element headed by Adwan himself and a radical anti-Syrian majority gathered around Fawzi Mahfouz and Obad Zouein. A violent rift in the ranks of the MoC and the Tanzim militia quickly ensued, resulting in armed factional in-fighting on which the Adwanite and Mahfouz/Zouein factions’ clashed for control of the Movement, until a coup orchestrated by the latter finally ousted Adwan from the MoC presidency in late that year. Eventually, the movement’s representation in the Lebanese Forces' Command Council was subsequently bestowed by Bachir Gemayel upon Mahfouz, with Zouein being appointed the new Lebanese Front's secretary-general, and in 1977 the new leadership prudently allowed the Tanzim military wing to be absorbed into the Lebanese Forces. The MoC remained politically autonomous though, and in 1979 the Movement finally went on public as a political party by declaring its manifesto at the inauguration ceremony of the Tabrieh cedar memorial (Ghabet el-Chahid) in honor of its 135 martyrs, presenting itself under the title Tanzim: Lebanese Resistance Movement – (T) LRM (Tanzim: Harakat al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyyah) or Tanzim: Mouvement de Resistance Libanais (T-MRL).


[edit] The later years

With the political demise of the Lebanese Front in the late 1980s, the LRM began to take part in the foundation of the Bureau Central de Coordination Nationale – BCCN, an umbrella organization regrouping several small political groupings and associations that rallied in support for General Michel Aoun’s interim government, with members of the Tanzim’s Commanding Council Roger Azzam and Pierre Raffoul rising to the leadership of the new force. Their vocal opposition to the Syrian-sponsored Taif agreement led them to actively support Aoun’s ill-fated War of Liberation in 1989-90, which forced the movement to go underground for some time and threw most its leaders into exile. Despite this, many former Tanzim members chose to remain in Lebanon and continued to carry out their militancy within the BCCN throughout the 1990s, later helping in the establishment of the Free Patriotic Movement – FPM, a wider anti-Syrian Christian political colligation led by the exiled Aoun. During the March 2005 Cedar Revolution, the BCCN-FPM alliance played once more an active part in the demonstrations that brought an end to the Syrian military presence in Lebanon. Upon the return of Gen. Auon from exile in April that year, the FPM was established as the official Aounist political party, an act that deprived the BCCN of its main raison d'être. Inevitably, the movement factionalized, and within a few months it announced publically its own dissolution. Both the LRM – which virtually ceased its activities by the mid-1990s – and the Tanzim militia no longer exist.


[edit] The ‘Tanzim Party’

The so-called ‘Tanzim Party’ (Hizb al-Tanzim) or ‘Parti du Tanzim’ as its name implies, was a splinter faction of the Tanzim/LRM, founded and led by Georges Adwan shortly after been ousted from that organization leadership in late 1976. Backed by Syria and about 500-1000 men-strong, the group operated in the Muslim-held sector of west Beirut; during the “one hundred days war” in February 1978, the ‘Tanzim Party’ militiamen fought alongside Syrian Army units against the Christian Lebanese Forces at the Fayadieh-Yarze sector of the Green Line, where they clashed with their former party’ comrades of the MoC/Tanzim militia. Gradually pushed to the sidelines, the ‘Tanzim Party’ ceased its activities around the mid-1980s. Its former leader Georges Adwan was able to survive politically though, and in 1989-1990 he even tried unsuccessfully to prevent the clash between Gen. Michel Aoun’s Army and the Lebanese Forces led by Samir Geagea. After the war, Adwan joined Geagea’s LF Party, which allowed him to be elected in 2005 to the Lebanese Parliament as that party’s deputy for the Shouf district. The ‘Tanzim Party’ is no longer active.


[edit] See also


[edit] References

  • Denise Ammoun, Histoire du Liban contemporain : Tome 2 1943-1990, Fayard, Paris 2005. (ISBN 978-2213615219) (in French).
  • Jean Sarkis, Histoire de la guerre du Liban, Presses Universitaires de France - PUF, Paris 1993. (ISBN 978-2130458012) (in French).
  • Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: the PLO in Lebanon, Boulder: Westview Press, 1990.
  • Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, London: Oxford University Press,(3rd ed. 2001). (ISBN 0192801309)
  • Roger J. Azzam, Liban, L'instruction d'un crime - 30 ans de guerre, Cheminements, Paris 2005. (ISBN 978-2844783684) (in French).


[edit] External links