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Civil war veteran Samir Geagea hopes the Shiite militia will be pressed into a position where it has no choice but to disarm.
There’s no love lost between Lebanese Christian leader Samir Geagea and Hezbollah.
Geagea’s escaped his fair share of probable assassination attempts by the Shiite militant group over the years, with an extraordinarily close shave in 2012 when a sniper just missed him — because he abruptly bent over to pluck a flower.
Since 1986, he has been the leader of the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing Christian political party. The 72-year-old is now a key player in Lebanon’s behind-the-scenes political moves to set a new course and haul the country out of another colossal crisis.
Following an invasion by Israel aimed at smashing Hezbollah, the civil war-era militia commander is something of an outlier among Lebanese party chiefs when it comes to what should happen next. His views are heavily influenced by his hostility to Hezbollah and the militia’s paymasters in Tehran.
While other major Lebanese party leaders hope a promise of reforms might be enough to get Israel to agree a ceasefire, Geagea doesn’t reckon that will cut it. He argues Lebanon will need to embark in earnest on a big political shake-up and take steps to ensure Hezbollah doesn’t use southern Lebanon as a launchpad for attacks, before Israel can be expected to back off.
In part, his view is shaped by his conviction that Hezbollah and Iran are one and the same.
“There is no Hezbollah and Iran — there’s just Iran,” Geagea said in an interview with POLITICO. “For Tehran, there are no borders between Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, no frontiers.”
Geagea argues Lebanon is now being presented with a prime opportunity to free itself from Tehran’s stultifying grip. That’s a potentially dangerous position. He gave the interview in the village of Maarab — in an extensive compound entered by passing three well-spaced checkpoints, with a vast steel door protecting the main entrance to the residence and party headquarters.
If Lebanon gets it right this time, he hopes “Hezbollah won’t have any choice but to disarm” and disband its forces, if parliament orders it to do so. He also believes Lebanon’s Shia “bit by bit will realize that whatever Hezbollah told them in the past was not true and that Hezbollah led them to the catastrophe they’re in.”
War’s side-effects
So does that mean Israel was doing Lebanon a favor by attacking Hezbollah?
“Being Lebanese, I cannot approve of any attack on Lebanon,” he responded to that question. But the war’s “side-effects are something else,” he conceded. “The Israelis have their priorities. This is their business. We have our business.”
The Lebanese Forces collaborated with Israel in the early 1980s during the civil war. In 2012 Geagea admitted in an interview that in retrospect that was a mistake, but added “the even greater mistake was to push the Christians in Lebanon into a corner, so that they had no choice.”
Now, Geagea is among the most determined public voices in the country pushing for Lebanon to accelerate major political reform and clip Hezbollah’s wings. Failure to do so in the past has allowed Hezbollah to drag the country into a war most Lebanese were fervently praying since last year’s Hamas attack on Israel wouldn’t hit them, he said.
This time, Lebanon must be serious about implementing United Nations Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, he argued.
That resolution requires the withdrawal of Hezbollah north of the Litani River, the disarmament of Hezbollah and other non-state armed groups, and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon. Under its terms, no armed forces other than U.N. peacekeepers and the Lebanese army should be present south of the Litani, which flows about 29 km north of the border with Israel.
Geagea wants to go further, arguing Lebanon should observe U.N. Resolution 1559, passed in 2004, requiring Lebanon to hold free and fair presidential elections.
“We have been living for the past 20, 30, 40 years without a real state in Lebanon. All the strategic decisions for Lebanon have been made outside the country,” he said. Change has to come “for our own sake, not for America’s, nor for Israel’s,” he added.
Politicians and parties should stop trying to square the circle of the old sectarian politics. “We need a clear path because it is really unacceptable for a country like Lebanon to endure more than 35 years living in a bubble of lies,” he said.
The first step is to agree a president — the presidency has been vacant for more than two years because of political wrangling and Hezbollah vetoes. Whoever is chosen must be someone who is serious about driving reform, he said. General Joseph Aoun, commander-in-chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces, was one candidate who fitted the profile, Geagea said — but he left open the possibility of other names, too.
Over the past year, Geagea has kept up a withering chorus of criticism against Hezbollah, warning it would haul Lebanon into a full-blown war with Israel thanks to its cross-border rocket attacks on Israel in solidarity with Hamas, a partner in Iran’s axis of resistance.
Mountain base
That war he predicted is now at his doorstep, even in Geagea’s mountain fastness of Maarab, overlooking the Mediterranean.
Just before the interview, as the sun set, a loud boom echoed and bounced off the mountains, prompting his aides and armed guards to glance north in the direction of the Shiite village of Maaysrah. Just days earlier, an Israeli airstrike there killed five people from the same family and wounded 14 others. But in the absence of any billowing smoke, the guards concluded the bang was a sonic boom from Israeli warplanes.
Geagea’s compound was built more than 30 years ago, during the 1975-1990 civil war. “We started building during war-time. So we took into consideration it should be solid in order to sustain shelling. So it is solid,” he says.
He suspects that the 2012 assassination bid was mounted after weeks of secret surveillance of the compound, with the plotters establishing his pattern of his comings and goings.
It was in the Maarab compound that, in 2016, Geagea struck an agreement with the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a rival Christian group. This paved the way for its leader Michel Aoun to become Lebanon’s president — ending, albeit briefly, decades of animosity between the two main Christian leaders. Their forces clashed heavily in 1990 in East Beirut.
Divide and rule?
Geagea is not the only war leader from the past scrambling to plot a course for Lebanon. In another mountain fort, in the Chouf Mountain, south-east of Beirut, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt is also trying to weave a path forward.
He, too, has called for appointing a president, but he’s publicly more cautious than Geagea and parts company with him over how to handle Hezbollah. Jumblatt is far less confrontational with the Shiite movement, fearing the Israelis are playing their old game of divide and rule and seeking to exploit divisions between Lebanon’s Shia, Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze. The Lebanese Force’s civil war-era collaboration with Israel plays an important role in overall Druze suspicion of Geagea.
Jumblatt also puts the Palestinians front and center of his thinking and told POLITICO he fears Israel is utterly resolved to erase Palestinian identity. “That has been the history of Zionism,” Jumblatt said. In contrast, Geagea didn’t mention the Palestinians or Gaza during his interview with POLITICO.
The legendary Druze leader also fears Israel may have longer-term territorial ambitions in southern Lebanon. Geagea acknowledged he didn’t have a detailed road-map in mind.
“If you have a thousand problems, you can’t try to solve them all at the same time. You have to go step by step, then try to gather momentum. This is what we are trying to do. I would be lying if I told you I know all the steps. No, but I know the direction,” he said.
He will rely on his endurance and patience — both learned from the 11 years he spent in solitary confinement. He was the only top leader from the civil war to be jailed. Others benefited from an amnesty or were protected by accepting cabinet posts but Geagea twice declined ministerial offers because of the flagrant control of the cabinet by the Syrian regime. He was eventually granted an amnesty by the first parliament to follow the Cedar Revolution and the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.
During his confinement in the basement of a military barracks he was permitted twice-weekly family visits of 15 minutes only.
He was allowed reading material but no newspapers or books on politics or current affairs, so focused on history, philosophy and religion. However, he did get copies of the Economist as the guards thought the magazine was just focused on economics.
When asked how he endured his term, he smiled.
“We, the Maronite Christians of Lebanon, have had a lot of hermits. We learned from them.”
