132 Between Private and Public
who took part in the war? From the mid-1990s, several Lebanese news-
papers published interviews with former militiamen. Some of them spoke
out anonymously, while a few chose to step forward of their own initia-
tive. All parties from the war are represented in these articles, but not in
equal measures and not in similar ways. A relatively large group of former
militiamen from the Christian militias have made their memories pub-
lic, partly as a result of an ongoing debate within the Maronite Christian
community over the recent past. At the other end of the scale, the Shi‘i
parties Amal and Hizbullah have been the least exposed, which may have
to do with the relative coherence of those groups in postwar Lebanon. A
number of intellectuals involved with the Lebanese Left during the war
have written novels and memoirs, which cannot be described as testimo-
nies but have nevertheless added to a gradually better understanding of
the ideological zeal in the socialist camp and how it changed during the
war.^38 As a whole, these public representations conjure up a multivocal
narrative of the reasons for the outbreak, the different periods and the
aftermath of the war, and offer tentative answers to the difficult problem
of guilt, punishment and retribution.
The Christian debate
Former militiamen involved with the Christian Right figured prominently
in public testimonies of the war. More than any other community in
Lebanon, the Christians in general and the Maronite Christians in partic-
ular underwent a process of reorientation after the war. Divergent inter-
pretations of the last phase of the war pitted followers or quasi-apologists
of General Aoun, the Lebanese Forces (LF) or Kata’ib against those who
see the downfall of the Christian Right as a natural and well-deserved out-
come of the Christian nationalist strain that emerged before and during
the war. How people positioned themselves in the debate about the Syrian
presence in Lebanon was equally important. The most manifest example
of this conflict was the split of Kata’ib between a pro-Syrian strand under
Karim Pakradouni and an anti-Syrian strand under Amin Jumayil. The
latter strand and the many groups who were loosely affiliated with it or
shared their opinions saw a direct link between the struggle during the