Can Maronite patriarch halt drift toward new Middle East conflict?
Marck Mackinnon, Globe and Mail, November 10, 2007 BKERKE, LEBANON – Almost every hour, it seems, another motorcade of bulletproof vehicles arrives at the fortified monastery here high in the mountains above Beirut. Two days ago, it was U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman; yesterday, it was an envoy of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Before, after and in between come a steady stream of representatives from Lebanon’s myriad political factions. They all come to ask the diminutive 87-year-old man who lives behind the building’s white-stone walls the same thing: to intervene, somehow, and reverse Lebanon’s dangerous slide toward further division and perhaps civil war. With just two weeks remaining in President Emile Lahoud’s term in office, this heavily armed country is deeply divided over both who should succeed him and how that person should be chosen. Many believe that Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, the Maronite Christian patriarch, is the only man who can possibly broker a compromise that avoi
