RIYAQ, Lebanon — The last of Syria's troops left Lebanon Tuesday after a bittersweet ceremony just a few miles from the border, ending a military presence that for much of the past 29 years helped Syria control Lebanon and confront Israel through proxy militias.
Some Lebanese politicians and officials in Washington expressed concern, however, that Syria might continue exercising influence here through intelligence officials and its Lebanese political allies. And Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed concern at the United Nations that Lebanese militias, including Hezbollah, had not yet been disarmed and brought under control.
As the remaining soldiers, completing a seven-week withdrawal, crossed into Syria — driven out by international pressure and Lebanese demonstrations over the past two months — politicians here also acknowledged that serious challenges now face a more independent Lebanon, not least a democracy hobbled by sectarian divisions and bitter memories of civil war. The first test of Lebanese democracy is fast approaching, with the current Cabinet expected to call for new elections before the current term of parliament ends on May 31.
On Tuesday morning, Lebanese and Syrian military officers gathered at an air base in this Bekaa Valley town about 10 miles from the Lebanon-Syria border, to bid farewell to 300 or so crisply uniformed Syrian troops and top intelligence officers, and hundreds of other troops securing roads to the border.
Military bands from both countries played anthems and military tunes as commanders exchanged medals before an audience of dignitaries and military attaches from numerous countries, including the United States, France and North Korea.
"Brothers in arms, thank you for your sacrifices," said Gen. Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese army, who bid the soldiers goodbye with an Arabic term meaning "until we meet again." "Together we shall always remain brothers in arms in the face of the Israeli enemy."
Prominently featured in the audience was Maj. Gen. Rustom Ghazali, Syria's latest top intelligence chief in Lebanon — a post from which Syria was widely believed to have held the reins of Lebanese politics for years.
Ghazali's base in the town of Anjar was abandoned Monday, and was taken over by Lebanese troops, who are now to be the pre-eminent military force in the country.
Syria first entered Lebanon in 1976, a year after the country's devastating civil war broke out, as part of an Arab peacekeeping force.
But over the years, the Syrian role took a serpentine course. The government of the late Hafez Assad, father of the current president, Bashir Assad, befriended and betrayed various factions, and for the past 15 years Syria was the dominant power.
The Syrians were first invited in by then-President Suleiman Franjieh, a Maronite Catholic, as a counterweight to Palestinian guerrillas who had allied with leftist Muslim forces.
But the Christians would later become enemies of the Syrians and, in recent years, their sharpest critics. Meanwhile, while ostensibly championing the Palestinian cause, the Syrians set compliant Shiite Muslim militiamen against Palestinian refugee camps in the 1980s. And they were blamed by most Lebanese for a number of assassinations of prominent political figures ranging from Bashir Gemayel, the Christian militia leader on the right, to Kamal Jumblatt, the Druse chieftain, on the left.
The 1982 Israeli invasion appeared likely at first to end Syrian influence. But the ground changed when Bashir Gemayel, who was Israel's ally, was blown up shortly after his election as president and his militiamen massacred Palestinians. The United States sent a peacekeeping force but it departed after 242 U.S. Marines and sailors died in a Shiite suicide bombing of their barracks. Israeli troops pulled back to a southern border region and eventually withdrew under attacks by the Shiite group Hezbollah, or Party of God.
After another half-decade of bloody fighting among Lebanon's various factions, an agreement was reached in 1989 for the war to end and for Syria to leave. But Syria delayed its departure and then solidified its power in 1990. That year, the United States and France, in effect, turned a blind eye to Syria's activities in Lebanon in exchange for a symbolic deployment of troops alongside the American-led coalition then assembling to fight Iraq in the Persian Gulf War.
By then, in the anarchic fighting, the Christian-led Lebanese army had turned against, and massacred, the Christian militia. The Syrians, in turn, attacked and crushed the Lebanese army, sending its leader Gen. Michel Aoun into exile. After that, the Lebanese civil war ended with Syria firmly in charge.
Last September, the United Nations, in Resolution 1559, called for Syria's withdrawal and for the disarming of all militias in the country. Late last year, Prime Minister Rafik Hariri resigned his post and called for Syria to comply. He was assassinated Feb. 14, setting off popular demonstrations fueled by a widespread belief that Syria was involved in the murder. The protests only increased international pressure on Syria to get out.
"Syria has now fulfilled that demand and has also complied with its portion of the 1989 Taef agreement," Gen. Ali Habib, chief of Syria's army, said Wednesday. "Syria never had any desires or ambitions in Lebanon except to preserve its unity."
Shortly after the two-hour ceremony ended, Ghazali and his officers piled into cars and drove across the border, as green buses and jeeps filled with troops followed. The last four Syrian soldiers in Lebanon, who had been holding watch at the border, jumped aboard a Syrian TV van for the crossing into Syria.
A U.N. team was given the task of verifying that the Syrians have indeed pulled out completely, with a report on the withdrawal by the special U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen to follow.
"I respect the Syrians for having left without any conflict with us," said Tanious Abu Hamad, mayor of the town of Saghbin in the Bekaa Valley, who attended Tuesday's ceremony. "But now it all comes down to us. Our problems are now our own."
The problems are numerous. Lebanon's Syrian-backed president, Emile Lahoud, remains in power in the face of widespread calls for his resignation, the security services are still modeled on Syria's and have a reputation for corruption, and trust in government institutions withered over the last decade as Syria held sway here.
The Lebanese political system remains built on sectarianism; the president must be a Christian and the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and most parties are built on sectarian lines.
At the United Nations, Annan said the reported departure of the Syrians represented "significant and noticeable progress" on meeting the withdrawal terms of the Sept. 2 Security Council resolution on Lebanon and Syria, but that there were other demands on which there had been "no progress."
In a report to the Security Council, he noted in particular that there had been no action by Lebanon on disarming militias, armed Palestinian groups and vigilantes as mandated by the resolution and that the Beirut government had not heeded the measure's calls to extend its authority to areas of Southern Lebanon vacated by Israel in May 2000 and now under the authority of the largest of the militias, Hezbollah.
He said that Hezbollah had maintained a network of mobile checkpoints, fixed positions and patrols in the area and had established new posts and observation points, with apparent government tolerance. "This position is incompatible with Security Council resolutions," Annan said.
Meanwhile, the exiled Aoun and the jailed Christian militia leader Samir Geagea are expected to return to the political scene in Lebanon, further inflaming passions here. And the future of the economy, which depends heavily on tourism and foreign investment, will remain uncertain as long as confidence in the government and the prospects for security are in question.
"We have clearly succeeded in our sovereignty revolution, but we have not yet succeeded in our democratic revolution," said Chibli Mallat, Director of the Center for the Study of the European Union and a prominent lawyer in Beirut. "The revolution only succeeds when the president resigns and when the confessionalism in politics gives way to national representation." "Confessionalism" means sectarianism in Lebanese parlance.
But on Tuesday night, the Lebanese parliament was still squabbling over a districting law just two days before a constitutional deadline for scheduling elections in time to hold them by May 29, as Prime Minister Najib Mikati had promised.
"We are all waiting for the elections as a prerequisite for defining the role of Lebanon," said an opposition legislator, Nayla Mouawad. "Don't for a minute think everything is over, the story's just begun."
Contributing: Katherine Zoepf, John Kifner, Warren Hoge.