BEIRUT - Lebanon, where the first round of four-stage parliamentary elections kicked off on Sunday, lived through a devastating 1975-1990 civil war.
Following is a factfile on Lebanon:

GEOGRAPHY: 10,452 square kilometres (4,036 square miles) with a western coastline on the Mediterranean and bordered in the north and east by Syria and by Israel to the south.
POPULATION: 3.5 million, including around 400,000 Palestinian refugees. The last census dates back to 1932. According to the Lebanese Council of International Affairs, around 20 million people of Lebanese origin are to be found around the world.
CAPITAL: Beirut.
LANGUAGES: Arabic (official). French and English are also spoken.
RELIGIONS: Lebanon can count no fewer than 18 different religious communities, 12 of them Christian, five Muslim or Islam-rooted, such as Shiites, Sunnis and the Druze, and a tiny Jewish community.
Around 37 percent are Christian and the rest Muslim.
The largest Catholic Christian community belong to the Maronite church, while the others are: Greek-Melkite, Armenian, Syrian, Roman, Chaldean and Coptic. The non-Catholic faiths practised are Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Syrian Orthodox, Assyrian, Protestant and Coptic.
The biggest single community is Shiite Muslim, while the other Islamic divisions, Sunni, Druze and Alawite or Nusayri are also present.
Lebanon is the only predominantly Arab country to have a Christian president. Under the constitution, the head of state is a Maronite, the parliament speaker a Shiite, and the prime minister's post is reserved for the Sunnis.

RECENT HISTORY: Ruled by a League of Nations mandate under French administration in 1920, Lebanon became independent in 1943. In April 1975, civil war broke out setting Muslims and left-wing groups, backed by the Palestinian resistance, against Christian militias, parties and anti-Palestinian interests who were fighting to keep the status quo under which power was shared between Muslims and Christians.
The Syrian army intervened in Lebanon in June 1976 with an Arab League mandate to serve as a buffer between the warring factions. Israel intervened in south Lebanon in March 1978 and invaded right up to Beirut in 1982, forcing the Palestine Liberation Organisation, its leader Yasser Arafat and the Syrian army to pull out of the capital.
Israel withdrew from most of the country in June 1985 but still occupied a "security zone" along the border in southern Lebanon. The pullback sparked fierce sectarian fighting which lasted until the end of the civil war in October 1990.
The peace was brokered in 1989 in the Saudi resort of Taef and the agreement bears the name of that town.
At the end of the fighting, General Michel Aoun, head of a Christian military government who waged a "war of liberation" against the Syrians, was forced into exile in France.
Israel finally withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000.
Last September, the United Nations adopted Resolution 1559, calling for a total withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon, clearly aimed at Syria which had carried out a number of redeployments to bring down its troop deployment to 14,000 soldiers from a high of some 40,000 during the civil war.
The assassination of five-time prime minister Rafiq Hariri in a February 14, 2005 bomb blast in Beirut increased international pressure for a Syrian pullout, which was completed on April 26. Aoun returned from exile on May 7.

GOVERNMENT: A parliamentary republic presided over by Emile Lahoud since 1998. In September 2004, at the behest of Syria, an "exceptional" constitutional amendment was passed, granting Lahoud, a close ally of Damascus, a three-year extension.
The powers of the president were restricted by constitutional reforms in September 1990, handing a greater say in the running of the country to the government and the prime minister, and giving Muslims and Christians an equal share of seats in the 128-member parlieament.
In October 2004, Omar Karameh became premier and formed a new 30-member cabinet after Hariri resigned in protest at the dominant role of Damascus in his country. Karameh resigned amid huge street protests over Hariri's murder. After a two-month political crisis, Nagib Miqati formed a transitional government to lead the country to the elections.

ECONOMY:
Currency: Lebanese pound
GDP per capita: 4,040 US dollars (World Bank 2003)
Growth in 2004: 5 percent
Inflation in 2004: 4 percent
Exports in 2004: 1.747 billion US dollars (a 14.6 percent increase on 2003)
Public debt at end of 2004: 34.6 billion dollars

MILITARY: 72,000 men (IISS 2004-5)
- The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) of nearly 2,000 peacekeepers has been stationed in the south since 1978.

05/29/2005 12:25 GMT