Shias were politically underrepresented, based on the National Pact of 1943, which vested legislative and executive as well as military positions in rough proportion to the demographic size of the country's eighteen recognized sectarian groupings. In 1946, the Christian Maronites and the Sunni Muslims occupied 40 and 27 percent respectively, of the highest civilian posts. In contrast, the Shia occupied 3.2 percent. By the 1980s, Shias had become Lebanon's largest single confessional community with almost 1,400,000 people, surpassing the Maronite and Sunni populations, which were each estimated at nearly 800,000 a piece (Hamzeh, 2004: 13) The Shiites believed that their representation was not commensurate with their numerical size. Economically the broader Shia community in Lebanon was very poor. Almost 85 percent lived in the rural region of South Lebanon and in one area of the Beqaa Valley, and subsisted on what they earned, mostly from selling tobacco to the state monopoly or growing vegetables. They were also exposed to the military fighting between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). To escape these conditions, many Shias migrated to the slums of eastern Beirut and shantytowns in the suburbs south of Beirut. Hamzeh writes that "hese two areas, known as the "belt of misery," became the breeding ground of Shia militancy in the 1980s. (Hamzeh, 2004: 14) Even in the 1960s and 70s, the charismatic leader Imam Musa al-Sadr began to activate the politically quiescent Shias of Lebanon.