Pope Urges Lebanon to Heal Scars of War

BEIRUT — Pope John Paul II, arriving here to a tumultuous welcome Saturday on his first visit to the Middle East, urged the survivors of Lebanon’s fratricide to heal “the scars on people’s hearts” and make their land a model of coexistence for the region.

“Don’t put up new walls in your country!” the pontiff exhorted about 20,000 young followers at a rally. “On the contrary, it is your task to build bridges between people, between families and between different religious communities.”

He hammered the same theme a month ago in the ruins of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s war, a theme he often voices as a lesson of the millennium that is drawing to a close. He chose to visit Lebanon because it is the only Arab country with a large Christian population, and the only one in which Muslims and Christians govern jointly.

But in this small, mountainous land, whose 1975-90 civil war made it a synonym for mayhem, that is a hard message to sell.

Lebanon’s Christians, who emerged from the conflict defeated, diminished and divided, have refused to reconcile themselves to Syria’s domination of their postwar government. Led by Maronite Christian bishops, they have urged John Paul to demand the withdrawal of the 35,000 Syrian troops that remain in Lebanon.

And Muslim clerics and politicians, while welcoming the pontiff, want him to condemn Israel’s occupation of a strip of southern Lebanon where troops are fighting a low-level conflict with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia. Nabih Berri, the Muslim presiding over Lebanon’s parliament, criticized the pope Saturday for not planning to visit the Israeli strip during his 32-hour visit.

Under heavy Lebanese army protection, John Paul’s glass-topped popemobile passed artillery-scarred and abandoned buildings along the Green Line that divided Beirut’s warring Christian and Muslim sectors. More than 150,000 people died in the fighting.

“That period, which has happily come to an end, is still present in everyone’s memory and has left many scars on people’s hearts,” the pope said upon his arrival. “Nonetheless, Lebanon is called to look resolutely to the future, a future freely determined by the choice of its people.”

Thousands of admirers lined his motorcade route, which passed billboards of the pope and his words: “Lebanon is more than a country; it is a message to the world.” Later he was mobbed by hundreds of youths at a rally at Our Lady of Lebanon Basilica.

But that welcome, on a mountain overlooking most of the country, was edged with a militancy that challenged his call for healing. The youths, who overflowed the soaring basilica, chanted in French, “Liberte! Liberte!”--in opposition to the Syrian overlords.

“The pacification that is stubbornly called peace has not at all healed our wounded spirits, nor is it capable of building a society free of time bombs,” declared Pierre Najm, a young man who answered the pope’s remarks.

He said it was impossible for his generation to help rebuild society under a repressive regime that “rips out fundamental liberties one by one.”