Lebanon missed the chance for reconciliation after civil war: deputy PM

Fifty years after the outbreak of Lebanon's civil war, Deputy Prime Minister Tarek Mitri says the country remains haunted by unresolved legacies, deep-rooted sectarianism, and the absence of genuine reconciliation.

As Lebanon marked the anniversary of the start of the civil war on Sunday, Mitri, speaking exclusively to The New Arab's Arabic-language edition Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, reflected on the war’s enduring impact on both the nation and his personal trajectory.

He warned that while a return to full-scale conflict is unlikely, "Lebanon continues to wage its small civil wars in other ways".

The 15-year conflict, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, left an estimated 150,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands more displaced. Despite the scale of the war, no formal reconciliation process or transitional justice mechanism was established, and a blanket amnesty law shielded perpetrators from accountability.

Mitri criticises this law, saying it "erased the memory of the war without addressing its root causes".

He adds that many of the factions that fought in the war later rebranded as political parties and continue to dominate Lebanon's sectarian political landscape, making reform especially difficult.

"The same sectarian forces that fought the war are the ones who governed the country afterward. They had no interest in changing anything meaningful," Mitri said.

To this day, Lebanon lacks a unified narrative of the war, which is largely absent from school textbooks, leaving younger generations without a shared understanding of the country’s darkest chapter.

For Mitri, the Taif Agreement that formally ended the war in 1989 offered a dual vision: one recognising Lebanon's sectarian makeup, and another aspiring toward citizenship-based governance.

"The agreement proposed a bicameral system, with a parliament free of sectarian quotas and a senate representing the sects. But this transformative potential was never realised," he says.

The failure to initiate a national reconciliation process or transitional justice, he adds, has left deep scars. "Most Lebanese chose to forget, thinking that moving on was safer. But forgetting without reckoning is artificial - when crises return, so does the worst of our memory."

Mitri acknowledges that the war changed him profoundly. "I lost friends and relatives - victims, not combatants. I was kidnapped several times, received countless threats, and still, people attribute to me things I never said or did. Perhaps I learned to be more moderate, but I’ve always stood against sectarianism."

Asked whether the Lebanese civil war could erupt again, Mitri is cautiously optimistic.

"The younger generation is less sectarian, more individualistic, and more engaged as citizens. They are not a generation that will go to war," he says. However, he notes that no one actor today has the resources or political will to launch a large-scale conflict. "The war taught us costly lessons."

Still, tensions remain. On Hezbollah’s weapons, Mitri says the group’s arsenal continues to polarise Lebanese society.

"The divide persists between those who see the weapons as a source of strength and others who reject the existence of an armed organisation outside the state’s authority," he says. However, he notes that Hezbollah's influence has waned, particularly after the 2006 war with Israel and shifting political dynamics.

On the question of national identity, Mitri avoids the language of failure but concedes that a unifying identity has remained elusive.

"Some Lebanese still place sectarian or regional identities above the national one. There were moments of unity - like during the July War or the March 14 movement - but they were short-lived. Politics quickly drove people back into their old loyalties."

Mitri concludes that Lebanon remains caught between past and future.

"There’s a duality in every Lebanese," he reflects. "One part wants to move forward, build a better future, and embrace freedom and human rights. The other part clings to old fears, old divisions. Our memory of war doesn’t die - it sleeps, and sometimes, in times of crisis, it wakes up in its ugliest form."