Tigers Militia


The Tigers militia, also known as the NLP Tigers or PNL "Lionceaux" in French and Tigers of the Liberals was the military wing of the National Liberal Party during the 1975-78 phase of the Lebanese Civil War. Established in the late 1960s, the NLP militia was the second major faction within the Lebanese nationalist Christian Lebanese Front coalition under the leadership of Dany Chamoun, son of the NLP's president Camille Chamoun, from 1976 until 1980, when it was forcefully incorporated into the Lebanese Forces.

Origins

The NLP militia was first raised in October 1968 by the former President of Lebanon Camille Chamoun at his home town of Es-Saadiyat, in the predominantly Maronite region of Mount Lebanon. Chamoun was an important za'im, or political boss, being the patriarch of the prominent political Chamoun family. He held a number of important political positions in Lebanon, most importantly as Head of State, but he served also as minister of defense, minister of the interior, and minister of finance. While president, he established the National Liberal Party in 1958, and ten years later, he founded the Tigers militia, intended to be the military wing of the party, originally under the title Brigade of the Lebanese Tigers – BLT or Brigade des Lionceaux Libanais in French, allegedly taken from his middle name, Nimr – meaning "Tiger" in Arabic. Initially just 500-men strong, the BLT was organized, trained, and led by the "defence secretary" of the NLP, Naim Berdkan; after his death in action in January 1976, he was succeeded by Dany Chamoun, Camille Chamoun's younger son.
Initially located in the NLP party offices' at Sodeco Square in the Nasra neighbourhood of the Achrafieh quarter in Beirut, the Tigers' military HQ was relocated in 1978 to Safra, a boat marina and tourist beach resort located 25 km north of the Lebanese capital in the Keserwan District, where it remained until the militia's dissolution.

Structure and organization

Under the command of Dany Chamoun, the Tigers had become by 1978 the second largest force in the Christian Lebanese Front, and although the Chamouns never achieved with their own militia the same level of organizational efficiency displayed by the rival Phalange' Kataeb Regulatory Forces militia, they were nonetheless capable of aligning 3,500 men and women, though other sources list a total of 4,000, which included civilian recruits and deserters from the Lebanese Army. However, some unconfirmed sources advance an even higher number, about 15,000. Their 500 full-time fighters and 3,000 part-time reservists were organized into armoured, 'commando', infantry, artillery, signals, medical, logistics and military police branches. The Tigers' own chain of command was predominantly Maronite, though the rank-and-file were drawn from the 150,000 Maronite, Greek-Orthodox, Druze and Shi'ite militants of the NLP and trained in-country at clandestine facilities; first set up by the NLP in 1966 these training centres were located at Naas in the Matn District, Es-Saadiyat in the Iqlim al-Kharrub coastal enclave south of Beirut and at Adma in the northern mountainous Keserwan District. Upon the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in April 1975, the government of Israel secretly assisted the NLP Tigers with training and materiel aid, and from 1976 onwards, the israelis provided US$50 million-worth of weaponry and equipment per year to the Tigers and other Christian militias, after several clandestine contacts were made between Dany Chamoun and the Mossad.
NLP militia units operated mainly in East Beirut, the Byblos, Matn and Keserwan Districts and Tripoli, but also had a presence at Zahlé in the Beqaa Valley, at the south in the Iqlim al-Kharrub, the Aley District and the Jabal Amel, where their local militants – after merging with other Christian, Shia Muslim and Druze militias – played a key part in the formation on 21 October 1976 of the Israeli-backed informal "Army for the Defense of South Lebanon" or ADSL, later to become known as the "Free Lebanese Army", the predecessor of the South Lebanon Army.

Illegal activities and controversy

Financing for the NLP Tigers' came at first from both Chamoun's personal fortune and from protection rackets collected in the areas under their control, though they also received outside support. Conservative Arab countries such as Jordan provided covert funding, weapons, munitions, training and other non-lethal assistance. Most of it entered towards the illegal ports of Tabarja and Dbayeh, both located north of Beirut in the Keserwan District, set up in early 1976 and administered by Joseph Abboud, former personal chauffeur and hunting partner of Camille Chamoun, who ran drug-smuggling and arms contraband activities on the behalf of the NLP until October 1980, when the Lebanese Forces brought the ports under their control. The NLP and its military wing did edit their own official newspaper, "The Battles", but they never set up a radio or television service.
Ruthless fighters with a reputation of aggressiveness, often initiating hostilities with the opposition side, aggravated by their lack of discipline and restraint, the Tigers were also involved in several other acts of sectarian violence. On December 16, 1975, despite a ceasefire established the previous day, the NLP militia forcibly displaced all the 450 residents of Sebnay, a Muslim village southeast of Beirut, in the predominantly Maronite neighborhood of Hadath, Baabda District.
On January 18, 1976, the NLP Tigers participated alongside the Army of Free Lebanon, Al-Tanzim, Kataeb Regulatory Forces, Lebanese Youth Movement and the Guardians of the Cedars in the massacres of the Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Muslim residents of the Karantina and Al-Masklah refugee camps and adjoining slums in east Beirut, and later on June 28, Dany Chamoun led its men in the final assault on the Tel el-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp, which resulted in a significant loss of life and the forceful displacement of its Palestinian residents when the camp fell. In the aftermath of the Karantina massacre, Dany Chamoun gave on April 22 that year a televised interview to Thames Television in which he denied that it was a "ruthless operation", instead referring to it as a "concise military operation" aimed at reclaiming private property.

Towards the end of the 1970s, however, rivalries within the Lebanese Front coalition strained the relationship between the NLP Tigers' and their erstwhile Christian allies, leading them to violent confrontation with the Phalangists and the Guardians of the Cedars. The Tigers' even battled these two factions in May 1979 for control of the Furn esh Shebbak and Ain El Remmaneh districts in Beirut, and for the town of Akoura in the Byblos District.

List of NLP Tigers commanders

  • Naim Berdkan
  • Dany Chamoun
  • Dory Chamoun

    NLP Tigers junior commanders

  • Freddy Nasrallah
  • Bob Azzam
  • Dr. Naji Hayek
  • Georges Araj
  • Elias El-Hannouche
  • Nouhad Chelhot
  • Jean Eid
  • Nabil Nassif
  • Toufic Nehme
  • Tony Chamoun

    Other NLP Tigers personnel

  • Rudolf Polikovic – Head of the fifth division, and the official spokesperson to foreign media of the NLP Tigers Militia.

    The Tigers in the Lebanese civil war

Early expansion phase 1975–1977

Upon the outbreak of the civil war in April 1975, the NLP Tigers immediately engaged the leftist Lebanese National Movement militias and their Palestinian PLO allies, being heavily committed in several battles in and outside the Beirut area. In October 1975, they supported their Phalangist allies of the Kataeb Regulatory Forces militia against the Al-Mourabitoun and the Nasserite Correctionist Movement for the control of the Hotels district in centre Beirut.
In January 1976 the collapse of the Lebanese Armed Forces enabled the Tigers to take over Army barracks and depots located at Achrafieh, Ain El Remmaneh, Hadath, Baabda, and Hazmiyeh districts of East Beirut, seizing heavy weapons and enrolling defectors into their ranks. The Tigers later joined in March that year the allied Christian Lebanese Front militias in the defense of the Mount Lebanon region and the Aley District against the combined LNM-PLO-Lebanese Arab Army 'Spring Offensive'. During the Hundred Days' War in February 1978 the Tigers, backed by the Tyous Team of Commandos, put a spirited defence of the Achrafieh and Fayadieh districts in support of the Army of Free Lebanon against the Syrian Army.

Reversals and decline 1978–1980

The Tigers' involvement in these campaigns, however, cost them the loss of the Iqlim al-Kharrub to the LNM-PLO alliance supported by Palestine Liberation Army units on 20–22 January 1976, which they failed to defend despite being backed by ISF units and Lebanese Army troops. The fall of this important stronghold was a severe blow to the NLP and the Tigers, depriving them of their main recruiting area along with their local training infrastructure, chiefly the Es-Saadiyat camp, and the port towns of Damour and Jiyeh.
Relations between the NLP political board and the Tigers' military command soured after the former, headed by Camille Chamoun, supported Syria's military intervention in June that year whereas the latter, now led by Camille's son Dany Chamoun, opposed it. Fearing that its own party's militia was getting out of his control, Camille tacitly allowed its Kataeb rivals to absorb the Tigers' into the Lebanese Forces under Bachir Gemayel. Resentful of the growing power of his young adversary Bachir Gemayel, Dany Chamoun made clear that he objected the former's own domination of the LF Command Council and refused to allow the incorporation of the NLP Tigers into the LF structure, an act that led to a Phalangist assault of his militia's headquarters in Safra on July 7, 1980, which resulted in a massacre that claimed up to 500 lives, including civilians and 80 of Dany's men.
While their leader Dany was rushed to exile, first to Syria and then to Paris, France, after handing over the command of the Tigers to his elder brother Dory Chamoun, the militia was officially disbanded on Camille's orders in late August. Soon afterwards, the Phalangists seized nearly all of the Tigers' positions in and outside East Beirut, including the vital Naas and Adma training camps. The remaining 3,000 or so demoralised militiamen either surrendered their weapons to the Lebanese Army or the Lebanese Forces and returned home or found themselves being consolidated by the end of October of that year into the Damouri Brigade within the LF.