Beirut to bombard Pope with paper

UP UNTIL the last minute, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese were afraid that Pope John Paul II might cancel his 32 hour visit.

The last time he planned a visit to Lebanon three years ago, a bomb killed 10 worshippers in a Catholic church. This time, the conventional wisdom of taxi drivers and street vendors, money changers and waiters was that the Israelis would do something to prevent his trip.

And yet the preparations continued. The Popemobile was flown in by an Italian military air craft and parked in the basement of Baabda presidential palace for safekeeping. Because the letter "P" is the same as "B" in Arabic, the vehicle's Italian name soon entered the Lebanese dialect as "babamobile". Yellow and white Vatican banners, twinned with the red, white and green Lebanese flag, festoon the roads the Pope will travel from Beirut Airport to Baabda and from the Nuncio's residence in the mountains at Harissa to the centre of Beirut tomorrow.

All week, Syrian and Sri Lankan street cleaners blocked traffic as they swept and washed every square inch of asphalt the Pope would see. The Christian heartland - from the museum frontline crossing of civil war memory, up the coast of Kesrouan and almost as far as Tripoli - is swathed in bunting. "Lebanon is more than a country! It's a message, say billboards showing Pope John Paul (77) super imposed on Lebanon's snowcapped mountains and a map of the country. The message is meant to be one of Muslim Christian coexistence, but there was scarcely a Vatican flag to be seen in Beirut's Muslim districts.

After surgery for a bowel tumour, a broken leg and a hip replacement, the Pope is too frail to drop to his knees and kiss the earth of Lebanon. Instead, the Beirut government has brought a basket of soil for him to bless from the southern village of Cana, where 105 Lebanese civilians were massacred in an Israeli artillery bombardment last year. The Lebanese claim that Cana was the site of Christ's first miracle, where he turned water into wine at a wedding feast.

The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) will ferry Pope John Paul from Baabda to Harissa, and from his meeting tomorrow evening with Maronite Catholic clergy back to the airport. With the wounds of the 1975-1990 civil war still fresh, the Pope's security is of paramount concern 20,000 Lebanese troops will guard him. "There is no Syrian involvement at all," a presidential spokeswoman replied acidly when asked whether the Syrians would contribute to security measures.

The Pope will be bombarded with paper: the families of 17,000 civil war "disappeared", human rights groups, the Iranian backed Hizbullah militia, exiled anti Syrian Christian politicians, the Israeli backed South Lebanese militia leader, Gen Antoine Lahd, and the lawyers of the jailed Phalangist militia leader. Samir Geagea, all published their letters to the Pope this week.

Geagea's lawyers explicitly compared Lebanon and eastern Europe. That part of Lebanon occupied by Syria, they said, "survives in a political, social and economic context tragically similar to that of your native Poland during the decades of Communist oppression." The Pope would meet a people who are lost without a shepherd, for whom this visit incarnates hope", they wrote.

Lebanese Christians, the majority of them Catholic Maronites, need a morale booster. Emigration, a low birth rate and poor leadership have decimated their ranks and their political power.

THE PROPORTION of Christians to Muslims is so sensitive that there has been no census since the 1930s, but Christians are now believed to be about one third of Lebanon's population. Pfof Kamal Salibi, a Lebanese Christian historian and director of the Royal Institute for InterFaith Studies in Amman, says the Maronites are sulking.

"They wanted to maintain their political domination of Lebanon and their monopoly over decision making," he said. Instead, they ought to mediate between Muslims and the West.

"If the Christians of the Arab: world have any role to play at present, it is to communicate their experience with Islam over 14 centuries in a manner that would be helpful," Dr Salibi said.

In his May Day message to the Lebanese people, Pope John Paul said his journey to Lebanon "will be for me a pilgrimage in your land, which is part of the region where the Redeemer walked 2,000 years ago". When he addresses more than 12,000 youths tonight, and when he says Mass for more than 200,000 people in the razed centre of Beirut tomorrow, Christians and Muslims will be waiting to see if he dares condemn Syria's domination of Lebanon.

As if bracing for that eventuality, Syria's Lebanese allies began their verbal attacks on the Pope before his arrival. Sheikh Saeed Shaaban, a fundamentalist preacher in northern Lebanon, said the Pope should apologise before coming to Lebanon because "the Pope blessed Israel and said that Christ was an Israeli".

The Druze leader, Mr Walid Jumblatt, said he hoped the Pope would "convince the Maronite Church to come out of the Middle Ages". Mr Jumblatt attacked the Vatican's "right wing leanings", adding that the Pope's visit was "illtimed" and would "increase sectarian tensions."

Paddy Agnew reports from Rome:

Iranian inspired Hizbullah terrorists intended to assassinate Pope John Paul last month, according to a report in the Milan based right wing daily, Ji Giorrale. The report says 18 terrorists of Iranian, Turkish and Bosnian origin were due to meet in Rome's Hilton Hotel last month prior to carrying out the attack near Michelangelo's colonnade in St Peter's Square.