South Lebanon Votes Under Heavy Guard

BEIRUT —  Citizens in southern Lebanon voted Sunday in the last round of the country’s first legislative elections in 20 years, flocking to the polls in substantial numbers as an estimated 10,000 troops and police guarded polling stations and transportation routes.

Authorities estimated that up to 70% of eligible Muslim voters cast ballots.

The election has been held in three stages, with different regions of the country voting on successive Sundays. Christian voters in the south boycotted the balloting as they had earlier in the east and north. The Christians object to the large and influential Syrian military presence in Lebanon.

Voters chose from a field of 131 candidates for 23 southern seats in the 128-seat National Assembly. Results will be announced later this week.

Feared violence between supporters of the two strongest Shiite Muslim groups in the south--the pro-Iranian Hezbollah (Party of God) and Syrian-supported Amal (Hope)--was averted when the two groups formed a tactical alliance and came up with coalition candidates.

In the mid-1980s, the two fought savage battles as each tried to gain domination over the Shiite community, the largest religious grouping in Lebanon.

No Syrian troops were among the security forces deployed in the south Sunday, the result of a longstanding agreement between Syria and Israel to avoid a possible confrontation.

As many as a quarter of the eligible voters--Lebanese citizens living in an Israeli-created buffer zone north of the Israeli frontier--were unable to vote because Israel’s client militia, the South Lebanon Army, closed all points of exit from the zone until today.

But many natives of the zone who now live outside the area voted at makeshift polling centers set up by the government near the exit points. Lebanese laws require citizens to return to their places of birth to vote.

Election-day perks included free gasoline for voters heading south from Beirut.

Water, however, was a stronger vote-getter for Amal chief Nabih Berri, who built a water system that now benefits 52 villages in the south. “Hezbollah does things for its own people,” said a resident of Deir Kifah, one of the villages, “but Berri’s project is for everyone.”

Hezbollah’s strength in south Lebanon springs from its resistance operations against Israel rather than from the kind of extensive social and infrastructure projects that earned it six parliamentary seats in earlier election rounds in eastern and northern Lebanon.

With the new Parliament destined to be partly pro-Syrian and partly anti-Israel, Damascus-backed Lebanese President Elias Hrawi’s government is in for a headache. Lebanon’s role in the Middle East peace talks could be influenced by a strong anti-Israel bloc in Parliament.

The outgoing Assembly was elected in 1972. Civil war among the country’s several Muslim and Christian factions broke out two years later, and the Assembly extended its mandate throughout the 15 1/2 years that the fighting lasted.