Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea endorsed the candidacy of Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun for the presidency of Lebanon. This move came as a surprise to most observers for two reasons:

1. Samir Geagea was a candidate for the presidency himself
2. Samir Geagea and Michel Aoun were on opposing sides during the Lebanese Civil War

News website Now Lebanon wrote that “the move comes after Future Movement leader Saad Hariri [son of a former prime minister] moved to support Marada chief Suleiman Franjieh [grandson of a previous president]”, portraying Geagea’s decision as an almost expected reaction to Hariri’s and describing it as a “political bombshell”.

But not everyone was surprised by Geagea’s decision. ‘Moulahazat’ blogger Ramez Dagher wrote a long post analyzing what he called ‘the Christian wedding’ from a strategic point of view. In fact, Dagher wrote an article called “when warlords become presidential candidates” nearly two years ago saying that “the candidates [for the presidency] are of the civil war era, their programs are of the civil war era, the parties are of the civil war era, the lawmakers are of the civil war era, the absence of parliamentary elections is of the civil war era, and even our former overlord to the East is in a civil war.” In other words, for those of us who have grown cynical towards Lebanese politics, that one former warlord decided to endorse another former warlord didn’t really come as a shock.

As for the reaction of the public, it’s hard to say. Despite an anonymous minister claiming in an interview with Al Monitor that “more than 85% of the Christian public opinion is now with Michel Aoun”, the news of Geagea’s endorsement of Aoun proved to be controversial to say the least. With memes, tweets, songs and jokes, the Lebanese internet exploded with disbelief, outrage, or just plain old sarcasm.

The point of this post is to simply document memories. The Lebanese Civil War was a complex 15-year-long series of events and no one article can properly encompass its complexity. Since Samir Geagea and Michel Aoun are currently making the news in Lebanon, we have focused our efforts on the Lebanese who talked about these two men’s actions during the war. There will be other stories, stories of the disappeared and of current warlords-turned-politicians, of the fallen and the survivors.

Maya Mikdashi: We were just lucky!

The first story is by Jadaliyya co-editor Maya Mikdashi, who wrote in an article entitled “Let us now praise murderous men” about the trauma caused not only by Geagea and Aoun, but by other leading politicians currently in the Lebanese government.

Here’s an extract:

Reading and watching Geagea give press statements on his candidacy, I remember the space of terror he used to occupy for myself and my friends in Tariq al-Jadidah. I remember watching mortars explode from a window with a view of the northern coast with my grade school classmates during the Aoun-Geagea war. I remember a year spent in a mountainous Beirut suburb, away from school and from an apartment untenably close to “the Green Line.” Today, I try to imagine what a Palestinian in Lebanon thinks when she sees Geagea on TV confidently lay out why he should be president. Does her heartbreak as one by one, journalists fail to ask Geagea about his involvement in war time massacres? Has her heart been broken too many times in Lebanon, and does she simply change the channel? No one asks Geagea, or his rival Gemeyyel, about their wartime alliances with Israel, or their complicity in the siege of West Beirut, or their wars with rival Maronite leaders that left thousands dead and maimed.

I remember listening to the news with my family on the way to school the day that Gemeyyel left Beirut for Paris—It was a happy day. Years earlier, my five-year-old self had found an unexploded ordinance on our balcony in Tariq al-Jadidah. Amin Gemeyyel was President and he had ordered the army to shell the area. Many refused the order and deserted. I like to think that the unexploded ordinance on our balcony was the result of a soldier consciously removing explosive materials from mortal shells, knowing that his act would save the lives of residents. In reality, however, we have no idea why that shell did not explode. We were just lucky.

We were lucky again when the Lebanese army shelled our neighborhood during Aoun’s “War of Liberation” against the Syrian army, a war which apparently required the Lebanese army to shell heavily congested civilian areas in West Beirut. One particularly terrifying night, as my family was clustered in our foyer where we had been sleeping for days, my mother spread her arms across a wall and kissed it. This is the first memory I have of my parents as ordinary people; fragile, afraid, vulnerable. I have never been as profoundly shaken in my life as I was in that moment, watching my mother hug a concrete wall during a night of heavy shelling.

The legacies of Aoun, Geagea and Gemeyyel are the hundreds of thousands of killed and wounded during the Lebanese civil war. Their legacies are massacres and sieges and mortars and snipers and kidnapping and millions of dollars stolen and embezzled from citizens and the treasury. They are not alone with this legacy: leaders of rival political units and “different sides” should also be defined by their wartime crimes.

Wadad Halwani: They reconciled at our expense

The second story is by Wadad Halwani, whose husband, a member of the Communist Action Organization, was kidnapped in 1982. Halwani is now the chairperson of the “Families of the Disappeared and Abducted Committee”. In an interview with Lebanese Francophone newspaper L’Orient Le Jour, she explained why she keeps on fighting for the cause of the disappeared: “I have a new responsibility today, which is to look out for some 17,000 officially reported abducted persons,” adding that she will never give up until her mission is completed.