Al-Tanzim

Al-Tanzim, Al-Tanzym or At-Tanzim (Arabic: حركة المقاومة اللبنانية - التنظيم, lit. 'Lebanese Resistance Movement - The Organization') 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.

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 (IAF) 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.

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 (also known as 'Abu Roy') – 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 Tanzim's political wing, which began their activities under the covert title Movement of the Cedars – MoC (Arabic: حركة الارز | Harakat al-Arz) or Mouvement des Cedres (MdC) in French.

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" (Arabic: مجلس القيادة | Al-Majlis al-Kiyadi) – 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 majority of them joined the ranks of the other Christian militias), 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.