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[edit] Al-Tanzim
Meaning “The Organization” (Al-Tanzim) in Arabic, this was the name of a secret military society within the Lebanese Army, founded in 1969 at Tabrieh near Becharry by a group of disaffected young Christian junior officers - 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. Under the leadership of Abu Roy, they 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’. Although primarily a military organization, they also began to recruit early on civilian members outside the Army, mostly from the upper and professional middle-classes, including former members of the Maronite League. The civilian cadres proved instrumental in providing the movement with a political structure and program, embodied in 1970-71 with the creation in of the Tanzim’s political wing, the Movement of the Cedars (Harakat al-Arz), with the physician Dr. Fuad Chemali chosen as its first president, later succeded by the lawyer Georges Adwan. In 1973, the Party changed its title to Lebanese Resistance Movement - LRM (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyyah) or Mouvement de Resistance Libanais (MRL) and made public its manifesto. In spite of their early close association with the Phalangist Party, the LRM-Tanzim adhered to the extremist ‘Lebanonist’ ideology of the Guardians of the Cedars, even adopting the ‘Lebanese language’ written in the GoC’s Latin script for their own official documents. By the early 1970s, the LRM had raised a 200 men-strong militia, simply known by the movement’s early name, “Tanzim”, with the Phalangists providing weapons and training. During the 1975-76 war, the LRM helped founding the Lebanese Front and its militia saw the heaviest street fighting ever in east Beirut, including the sieges of Karantina and Tell el-Za’atar. Following the collapse of the Lebanese Army in early 1976, the Tanzim seized the opportunity to expand his forces by incorporating Army defectors, along with taking some heavy equipment looted from Army depots. The LRM military forces, whose ranks swelled to 1,500 armed men and women backed by a few light tanks, armoured cars, and APCs, were also commited in the battles for the Mount Lebanon region in March 1976, notably at Tayyouneh-Lourdes, Kahaleh and Ayoun es-Simane, sustaining heaving casualties; they later again played a key role in east Beirut in driving the Syrian army out of the Christian-controlled sector of the city in February 1978, where they manned the Fayadieh-Yarzeh sector of the ‘Green Line’. However, Georges Adwan´s earlier tacit endorsement of Syria’s military intervention in June 1976 caused a violent split in the ranks of the LRM and Tanzim, with fellow party’ members accusing him and his supporters of adopting an increasing pro-Syrian stance. This resulted in the ousting of Adwan from the LRM presidency in late 1976 by a coup orchestrated by Fawzi Mahfouz and Obad Zouein, leaders of the anti-Syrian faction. Eventually, the movement’s presidency was subsequently taken by Mahfouz, with Zouein being appointed its chief secretary. In 1977 the organization’s military wing was absorbed into the Lebanese Forces, though the LRM remained politically autonomous, pursuing its activites in the cadre of the Lebanese Front. In the late 1980s the Party took part in the foundation of the pro-Auonist BCCN, with members of the Directorate Committee of the Tanzim Roger Azzam and Pierre Raffoul rising to the leadership of the new movement. Their opposition to the Syrian-sponsored Taef agreement led them to actively support Auon’s ill-fated ‘Liberation War’ in 1989-90, which forced the movement to go underground for some time and threw most its leaders into exile. Yet many former Tanzim members that remained in Lebanon continued to carry out their militancy within the BCCN until its dissolution in the wake of the 2005 ‘Cedar Revolution’, playing an active part in the demonstrations demanding Syria’s withdrawal. Both the LRM – which virtually ceased its activities by the mid-1990s – and the Tanzim militia no longer exist.
