Next week, an illegitimate parliament convenes, called upon by a warlord and war criminal turned politician/parliament speaker to pick one of three presidential candidates, all of which murderers and criminals. All three. This is Lebanese democracy. 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 afraid in my life as I was in that moments, watching my mother hug a concrete wall during a night of heavy shelling. The legacies of Aoun, Geagea and Gemayel 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.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 08:06:11 +0000