Photo by: AFP

Lebanese are faced with difficult choices and deep cleavages as they commemorate on Sunday the outbreak of a war in 1975 that devastated their country for 15 years, and from which they have never fully recovered. Little remains today of the Green Line that divided Beirut into primarily Muslim and Christian halves during the war, but there is a new psychological front reflecting a schism between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, with Christians on either side of the divide. "Sunni hates Shiite and Shiite hates Sunni, because blood has spilled between them now," says Khalil Sawan, 65, who is Sunni and owns a cafe in Beirut.

Divisions between supporters of the government, backed by the West and most Arab states, and the Hezbollah-led opposition supported by Syria and Iran, have led to street clashes over the past three months that have left seven dead.

A complex arrangement rules the separation of powers to reflect the three main confessions in Lebanon -- Sunnis, Shiites and Maronite Christians. Under it, the Maronite community provides the country's president, the Sunnis its prime minister and the Shiites its speaker of parliament. This gentleman's agreement was reached more than half a century ago when the demographics of Lebanon were strikingly different: Christians were a majority but are now a minority, while Sunnis outnumbered Shiites ... but no longer. The Shiites, with Hezbollah at the forefront, want a new arrangement and are supported by retired General Michel Aoun, a Maronite.

Things look dramatically different today than in the days of the war, when young gunmen zoomed through the streets in pickups and sandbags and bunkers were a common sight among bullet-pocked highrises, chunks of their facade blown away by shelling. "Before you knew who the enemy was," says Roger Shayeb, 51, a former member of Phalange, a Christian party. "Now your uncle, your father could be the enemy, if you're from different political parties."