Name of the Father; Walid Jumblatt now leads a unified opposition to Syria.

Byline: Tom Masland

Five days after the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, thousands of people still stand vigil at his candle-bedecked grave site in Martyr's Square in downtown Beirut. One man is more than an ordinary onlooker. Walid Jumblatt stirs the crowd when he emerges from his silver Mercedes. The weight of spearheading opposition to Syria's ruthless domination of Lebanon now falls squarely on Jumblatt's slight shoulders. "Walid!" someone shouts, and scores of people mob him. "Syrian whores out," they chant as he wades through the throng.

At huge personal risk, Jumblatt is going for broke. Once a key ally of Syria, the 56-year-old leader of Lebanon's Druse minority is now its chief adversary. More important, Jumblatt is the point man for a budding "people power" movement that wants to break Syria's stranglehold on the country. For that to happen, the movement will have to confront Syria's dreaded intelligence machine and its Lebanese proxies. That Muslims and Christians, in addition to the Druse, are rallying around Jumblatt is a signal development in a historically divided nation. Lebanon's Christian, Muslim and Druse parties fought each other to a standstill in the 1970s and 1980s, but last week their flags were waved in unity. Jumblatt must harness this new solidarity and try to win crucial parliamentary elections due by May. "Will we survive, or not?" Jumblatt asks. "I don't know."

Nobody knows the risks better. In 1977, two years into Lebanon's 15-year civil war, gunmen killed Jumblatt's father, Kamal. He had bucked Syria, and his son now openly accuses Baathists of the murder. At 28, he inherited leadership of the Druse minority, followers of an offshoot of Islam. Many Lebanese doubted that the motorcycle-riding hell-raiser was up to the job. But Jumblatt rallied a formidable militia arm of his father's Progressive Socialist Party and brutally eliminated Christian enclaves from the territory known simply as the Mountain.

With tacit U.S. approval, Syrian troops quelled the Muslim-Christian fighting. In 1989, the warring parties formally made peace under a Syrian-brokered treaty. Under the deal, the Christian minority lost its political domination in favor of a 50-50 parliamentary split between Christians and Muslims. The agreement calls for a negotiated end to sectarianism and full Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. However, Syria has manipulated the electoral system to maintain proxy control of Parliament, and refuses to withdraw its last 15,000 troops until Israel gives up a tiny disputed territory on the Lebanese border.

For years Jumblatt played the Syrian ...