Monday, April 02, 2007

BZUMMAR: Lebanese Forces (LF) leader   Samir Geagea said on Sunday that the only solution to Lebanon’s political crisis was to elect a new president and disarm all militias. "The position of president has been vacant and totally inefficient for the past 15 years and some armed groups in Lebanon have extensive external connections and were militarily a lot more powerful than the government, which is totally unacceptable," Geagea told a delegation of Casino du Liban employees who came to visit him at his residence in Bzummar.

A day earlier, Geagea said he was taken aback by the paralysis afflicting Parliament and, he said, the presidency.

"Nowhere in the world but in Lebanon does the president work on destroying his country and where the Parliament has locked its doors and abandoned its responsibilities," Geagea said during the LF’s annual dinner at the Regency Palace Hotel in Adma.

He accused President Emile Lahoud of working on "limiting the responsibilities of the army and the Internal Security Forces" while "supporting and encouraging other armed groups," in reference to Hizbullah

Geagea also recommended that the government "stop paying the salaries of legislators who are not reporting for duty at the Parliament."

"The job of MPs is to serve the Lebanese and since a number of MPs are not doing so they better be reprimanded," he said.

Geagea said that the political situation in Lebanon "has become a true mockery," where a number of leaders were working "day and night" to destroy the country.

"However," he said, "despite all this the Lebanese succeeded on March 14, 2005, in setting their country free from crushing Syrian hegemony, and there will be other winds of change similar to the March 14 one as long as the Lebanese feel that their country is threatened."

Geagea advised "all those groups calling for true partnership" to go back to the "true essence of the Constitution."

"As the Constitution clearly states," he said, "partnership is accomplished within constitutional institutions."

Geagea said he had always wondered why various opposition groups "overlooked" constitutional texts.

"I found out that the main explanation for them not reading the Constitution is the fact that they had a goal in mind to ruin Lebanon’s economy, education, and culture," he said.

Geagea said that the opposition’s goal was only to obtain a blocking minority in any potential unity government, "not to establish true democracy or partnership as their many slogans seem to express, but to restore Syrian interference in Lebanese domestic issues."

"The rhetoric adopted by the opposition is loaded with contradictions," he said. "While they always express their approval to have an international court to try suspects in the murder of former Premiere Rafik Hariri, they adopt all kinds of tricks and strategies to hinder its establishment."

Geagea also accused the opposition of working on fashioning the make-up of the tribunal "according to Syrian norms."

"They want to have the tribunal responsible to put on trial individuals and not regimes, as if … Hariri was in conflict with any normal Syrian citizen, and not the Syrian regime as a whole," he said. 

Geagea urged opposition members participating in the fourth-month-old sit-in Downtown to leave "because the majority of the Lebanese are against your moves."

"In the past, we had to liberate only one part of Lebanon, the Shebaa Farms," he added. "Nowadays we also want to deliver Riyadh al-Solh Square from its invaders."