Posted on 07/26/2005 2:44:09 AM PDT by Wiz
BEIRUT, Lebanon - A notorious anti-Syrian Christian warlord was released Tuesday after 11 years in prison, the latest reconciliatory step in civil war-scarred Lebanon after the recent collapse of Syria's military dominance.
Samir Geagea, 53, left his Defense Ministry cell in Beirut and soldiers escorted him straight to Lebanon's international airport where he met with Lebanese Forces supporters, a senior Lebanese security officer said on condition of anonymity because the government had not officially commented on his release.
Antoinette Geagea, spokeswoman for the banned Christian Lebanese Forces militia which Geagea headed during the 1975-90 civil war, told The Associated Press that her relative was freed Tuesday morning.
An Associated Press photographer at Lebanon's international airport said he briefly saw Geagea and his wife, Setrida, in footage provided by the Lebanese Forces on a television screen.
A grinning Geagea, wearing a blue shirt and appearing skinny with slightly graying hair, was seen shaking hands and embracing applauding supporters while asking about Lebanese Forces members before the transmission was cut.
Outside, scores of his disbanded militia supporters cheered, danced and waved Lebanese flags in celebration.
Geagea was also scheduled to meet at the airport with around 300 politicians and deliver a televised speech before leaving Lebanon to an unspecified destination in Europe for a medical checkup.
On July 18, Lebanon's newly elected parliament approved a motion to pardon Geagea, who had been serving a life term since April 1994 for killing a former Lebanese prime minister and has spent most of the past 11 years in solitary confinement in an underground Defense Ministry cell with no access to news.
The motion was endorsed by pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud the next day, ensuring Geagea's freedom, but he remained in prison for security reasons until preparations for his travel were completed.
Some 100 lawmakers of the 128-member Parliament voted to pardon Geagea, apparently in the spirit of national reconciliation following Syria's April military withdrawal, ending Syria's 29-year military presence and domination of Lebanon.
Geagea was the only prominent former warlord to remain jailed for opposing Syrian dominance. Other ex-militia leaders benefited from a 1991 general amnesty for crimes committed during the civil war.
Druse, Muslim and Palestinian forces were all targeted by Geagea, who allied his men with the Israelis in the central mountain region during the Jewish state's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Geagea has been linked with some of Lebanon's most notorious civil war-era killings, including the 1987 bombing of a military helicopter that killed the pro-Syrian Prime Minister Rashid Karami and the slaying of Danny Chamoun, a prominent Christian politician.
He was arrested in 1994 and his group was outlawed after a church bombing killed 10 people. He was later acquitted of the bombing but sentenced to three life terms on several other murder counts, including the killings of Karami and Chamoun.
On Thursday, Iranian state-run television reported that Iran plans to file a lawsuit against Geagea over the kidnapping of four Iranian diplomats in Beirut in 1982.
Syrian influence over Lebanese politics had stymied past attempts to secure his pardon and the return of former Lebanese army commander Gen. Michel Aoun from 14 years of exile in France.
But Aoun returned May 7, less than two weeks after Syria withdrew its troop under U.S.-led pressure sparked by the Feb. 14 assassination of former Premier Rafik Hariri.
Funny, I don't seem to recall AP, or any MSM slimebag, refering to anyone as a Muslim warlord. Surely there are plenty around today who could fit that description.
IMHO, Geagea's only unforgivable crime in the eyes of the pro-islamist world is that he was allied with Israel.
They've been talking about "warlords", "fascists", and so forth in Lebanon for nearly 100 years.
Now, you might ask, where is the Moslem FALANGE, but I'm afraid I'd have to refer you to Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. They'd both tell you that since the Lebanese Christians already had use of the name, they had to come up with other names. "Ba'ath" is one such name, and "AlQaida" is another.
Although the Lebanese work hard at putting on a show of being in favor of democracy, the cold, hard facts of political life there are pretty rugged.
When it comes right down to it, the political history of Lebanon has been one long series of family feuds, with the Sunni, Shia, and Maronites all claiming that they should be in charge.
Funny thing is, if the Sunni and Shia could agree with one another for two minutes, they'd be in power over there, but the extreme minority Maronites have managed to hold on to some piece of the pie while claiming an inherent right to rule by dint of being descended from the Crusaders who stopped in Lebanon on their way to the Holy Land.
I read a great quote from an unnamed Christian in Lebanon in the 80's regarding the good thing they had prior to the civil war, when they managed to cooperate and make Lebanon one of the great countries of the ME.
"We ruined it. Us and the Moslems, we ruined it."
BTW, it's not just their claim of descent from the Crusaders that keeps them on top of things, it's their claim of descent from the Venetians who obtained treaty rights from the Ottomans to operate there.
The Ottomans, and their empire are gone, and even Venice is reduced to the level of a seedy old Adriatic Disneyland.
The Venetian treaty rights, however, keep on chugging !
My Dad was in Beirut in the late 60's...He told me what a beautiful city it used to be. My Dad (not really a supporter of Israel) blamed Yasser Arafat and the Palastinians for starting the Civil war. There used to be a bounty....like a $100.00/ Christian head (man,woman, child etc). A Christian warlord no doubt is one who fought back and didn't allow them to chop his head off without a fight.
Whatever happened to Col. Haddad? As I recall, he was tearing things up in the south, working with Israelis to keep hezbollah on the run.
The first journalist to use the appellation "Christian Warlords" was Jonathan C. Randal in his book "Going All the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and the war in Lebanon" (Vintage books, a division of Random House, NY, 1984). You can have a guess of what it really is from the title, using the word "Warlords" in a pejorative way. Sure there were no really Muslim warlord since the muslims in Lebanon were lead then by Yassir Arafat, and that is enough to get the whole picture.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0006E9JXE/qid=1122396825/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/104-5311658-1969526?v=glance&s=books
Is it the case that if a "newsie" hasn't used an expression until a certain date that it didn't exist before that time?
"Going All the Way" is where I got most of my background (although I had to hold my nose in places).
Salaldin told them to go home to France, which they did.
"Salaldin told them to go home to France, which they did"
If Saladin were alive today, he would have fought shoulder to shoulder with Hoshiar Zibari for the independence of the Kurdish nation against the Sunni Arabs. Saladin was a Kurd not a member of the 'great arab nation'. And he would have won!
Fascism/Nazism is like this ~ in for a dime, in for a dollar.
He wasn't a good guy, but he did respect power.
He'd been fighting side by side with Yasser Arafat.
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