Al-Tanzim
Al-Tanzim, Al-Tanzym or At-Tanzim was the name of a secret military society and militia set up by Christian activists in Lebanon at the early 1970s, and which came to play an important role in the Lebanese Civil War.
Emblem
The emblem of the group, a map of Lebanon with a cedar tree at the center, with the phrase "You love it, work for it" written below, was designed in 1970 during an expedition made by the Tanzim to the village of Kfarchouba in Hasbaya District, Nabatieh Governorate, in order to assist the affected population in the reconstruction effort, following an Israeli Air Force air raid in Southern Lebanon. Kfarchouba is a mainly Muslim village in Southern Lebanon and this act symbolized the Nationalist yet Secular ideals of the Tanzim.Origins
The Tanzim was first formed in 1969 by a small group of young Lebanese Army officers who contested the Cairo agreement, which led them to break away from the Kataeb Party or 'Phalange' in the late 1960s in protest for the latter's initial refusal to engage in nationwide military training and arming of the Lebanese population in order to "defend Lebanon" from the perceived "Palestinian threat". Under the leadership of Obad Zouein, the breakaway group comprised Aziz Torbey, Samir Nassif, and Fawzi Mahfouz – all were former militants of the Kataeb's youth section and veterans of the 1958 Lebanon crisis – who decided therefore to create an underground paramilitary organization to support the Lebanese Army in the defense of the Country.Shortly after its creation, the group moved to Beirut where they opened an office at the mainly Greek-Orthodox quarter of Achrafieh, and began to recruit early on civilian members outside the Army – particularly individuals such as Milad Rizkallah, who joined the Tanzim in 1970 – mostly from the upper and professional middle-classes, including former members of the Maronite League. The civilian cadres proved instrumental in providing the new Movement with a political structure and program, embodied in 1970–71 with the creation of the Tanzims political wing, which began their activities under the covert title Movement of the Cedars – MoC or Mouvement des Cedres ' in French.
Structure and organization
Since its inception, the Tanzim initially rejected the monocentric leadership structure typical of the traditional political parties in Lebanon by adopting a collegial decision-making board – the "Commanding Council" – the first ever to emerge in Lebanon. Yet, such collective leadership system did not prevent the rise of prominent figures who dominated the movement's leadership like the physician Dr. Fuad Chemali, together with his colleague Dr. Jean Fares in 1972, succeeded by the lawyer Georges Adwan in 1973.Involved since 1969 in the clandestine military training of Christian volunteers in secret camps such as Fatqa and later on Tabrieh, both located in the mountains of the Keserwan District, in collusion with the Kataeb Party, the MoC in the early 1970s began to quietly raise its own military wing, whose military headquarters was established in the predominately Maronite Dekwaneh District of East Beirut. Although by 1977 more than 15,000 young men and women had trained at the above-mentioned facilities, the movement only proceeded to recruit very few out of this total, due to three main reasons:
1- The secret nature of such training, which rendered the selection process very delicate;
2- The limited financial resources available to the group, to a point that the volunteers had to cover their own training expenses by paying minimal fees.
3- The quality of men and women the Tanzim was looking for, and this reflected a lot on the clean reputation that the group maintained throughout the war, as well as having the lowest casualty rate, despite having its militia spearheading many difficult military engagements, mostly due to their mobility along the front.
The movement enjoyed a close relationship with the Lebanese Army since the mid-1970s, which made some observers to believe that the Army's predominantly Christian High Command was somewhat directly involved in the formation of the MoC.
At the outbreak of the 1975–76 civil war, the Tanzim forces were organized into autonomous mobile groups of several dozen fighters, with each being coded as "tanzim of the region x or y". Deployed to different fronts and neighbourhoods, their mission was to be present wherever the fighting required them; hence the MoC/Tanzim was the only Christian-rightist militia that had attained such a degree of tactical mobility and discipline. Unlike the main Christian factions, the Tanzim was one of the few ideologically-committed groups – other than the Guardians of the Cedars – that never tried to establish its own fiefdom or canton, nor appears to have been involved in illegal financing activities such as drug trafficking or racketeering.
List of MOC/Tanzim Commanders
- Fuad Chemali
- Jean Fares
- Georges Adwan
- Nagib Zouein
- Obad Zouein
- Aziz Torbey
- Samir Nassif
- Fawzi Mahfouz
- Milad Rizkallah
- Roger Azzam
- Pierre Raffoul
Political beliefs
coexistence with the Lebanese Muslim population, characteristics which reflected on its program and politics. In the early 1970s, the movement adhered to an extreme Lebanonist ideology akin to that of the Guardians of the Cedars, with whom they developed a close political partnership. Not only the Tanzim shared with the latter the same radical views regarding the Palestinian presence – and later Syria's role – in Lebanon, but also went as far as adopting the Lebanese language written in the GoC's Latin script for their own official documents.
Fierce and disciplined fighters, they were involved in the January–August 1976 sieges and respective battles of Dbayeh, Karantina and Tel al-Zaatar refugee camps in East Beirut, allied with the Army of Free Lebanon, Tigers Militia, Kataeb Regulatory Forces, Guardians of the Cedars, Lebanese Youth Movement and the Tyous Team of Commandos.
The Tanzim in the Lebanese Civil War
Early expansion phase 1975–76
Tanzim militiamen made their first public appearance in May 1973 at Beirut during the Bourj el-Barajneh clashes, when the Lebanese Army High Command indirectly called them to assist regular troops in preventing PLO guerrillas from entering Army-controlled areas. It was not until the 1975–76 civil war however, that the MoC/Tanzim was faced with a situation where it had to carry out its own military operations to plug the gaps in the front.The discipline and organizational abilities displayed by the MoC at the opening months of the civil war, allowed the movement to engage in the formation of the Christian rightist parties and militias alliance that eventually would become in January 1976 the Lebanese Front. Conversely, its 200-strong Tanzim militia, led jointly by Fawzi Mahfouz and Obad Zouein, saw the heaviest street fighting ever in East Beirut, including the Battle of the Hotels and the sieges of Karantina and Tel al-Zaatar. At the later battle they reportedly contributed with 200 militiamen, allegedly Lebanese Army soldiers in disguise.
The Tanzim helped the Lebanese Army in January 1976, by volunteering ostensibly to defend and protect more than half a dozen army barracks located in the Christian districts of East Beirut, including the Defense Ministry and Army HQ complex at Yarze. Moreover, the movement saw this as an opportunity to expand its own military forces by attempting to incorporate defectors from the regular Army and seize weapons, equipment and vehicles from its barracks. Hence by March 1976 the Tanzim ranks swelled to 1,500 armed men and women backed by a small fleet of all-terrain vehicles or technicals and some transport trucks fitted with heavy machine-guns, recoilless rifles and Anti-Aircraft autocannons.
During that same month, they were heavily committed in the battles for the Mount Lebanon region, East Beirut, the Matn District and the Aley District against the Lebanese National Movement/Joint Forces' and Lebanese Arab Army's "Spring offensive", being frequently employed as a "fire brigade" to fill gaps at the front, notably at Achrafieh, Tayyouneh-Lourdes, Kahale, Sin el Fil, and Ayoun es-Simane to name but a few, sustaining heavy casualties in the process. Integrated into the Lebanese Forces in 1977, Tanzim's militiamen later again played a key role in the eviction of the Syrian Army out from the Christian-controlled East Beirut in February 1978 during the Hundred Days' War, where they manned the Fayadieh-Yarze sector of the Green Line.
Reversals and re-organization 1976–79
, and its tacit endorsement by Georges Adwan, however, caused the movement to factionalize, splitting into a pro-Syrian element headed by Adwan himself and a radical anti-Syrian majority gathered around Mahfouz and Zouein. An attempted coup orchestrated by Adwan, in which the latter tried to take over the Tanzim Dekwaneh's military HQ resulted in a deep rift within the organization. Both Mahfouz and Zouein, which opposed Adwan's position and behaviour, played a crucial role in preventing further internal bloodshed among the group member's by regaining control of the movement, and ousting Adwan from the MoC/Tanzim leadership board in late that year.Eventually, the movement's representation in the Lebanese Forces' Command Council was subsequently bestowed by Bachir Gemayel upon Mahfouz, with Zouein being appointed the new Tanzims secretary-general, and in 1977 the new leadership prudently allowed the Tanzim military wing to be absorbed into the Lebanese Forces. Although their numbers dwindled in the late 1970s, the MoC remained politically autonomous and managed to retain its position as one of the four partners in the Lebanese Front. In 1979 the movement finally went on public as a political party by declaring its manifesto at the inauguration ceremony of the Tabrieh cedar memorial in honor of its 135 martyrs, presenting itself under the title Tanzim: Lebanese Resistance Movement – LRM or Tanzim: Mouvement de Resistance Libanais in French.