Geagea Slams Suleiman's Critics: We Won't Accept Any Cabinet Not Endorsing Baabda Declaration as Policy Statement
Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea on Sunday strongly defended President Michel Suleiman against his critics, rejecting the postponement of the presidential election and any cabinet that does not endorse the Baabda Declaration as its Policy Statement.
“State institutions are suffering near-complete paralysis and constitutional junctures have been postponed until further notice from Hizbullah and Syria. The chaos of arms and the series of bombings are undermining security and the economy is in a miserable situation,” Geagea lamented in a speech commemorating the “martyrs of the Lebanese Resistance” during a ceremony organized by the LF in Maarab.
“Lebanon is going through its most difficult days because an armed party has decided on behalf of the rest of the Lebanese and against their will to usurp the national decision and manipulate it as it wishes, domestically and abroad, disturbing the life of the Lebanese in their country and opening the gates of hell on them from the outside,” Geagea added.
He warned that Hizbullah's involvement in “repressing the Syrian people antagonized dozens of countries and hundreds of millions of Arabs, Muslims, Christians and the international public opinion.”
“The presidency is being marginalized after the Baabda Declaration was torpedoed and subsequently the principle of the national dialogue table,” he noted.
Geagea charged that “under Hizbullah's plan,” the Lebanese army has turned into “a mere observer of its (Hizbullah's) massive movement of fighters between Lebanon and Syria.”
“Autonomous security is being practiced today against citizens and diplomats. Who took the decision of the party's intervention in Syria and what is left of the principle of the national defense strategy?” Geagea wondered.
He noted that the “deformed” army-people-resistance formula “died at the hands of Hizbullah itself and we have buried it.”
Geagea said the country is suffering a “revised hegemony that does not resemble the Assad regime's hegemony in shape, but they have the same content, a hegemony that puts Lebanon's capabilities in the service of the requirements of the Syrian and Iranian regimes.”
“We want a strong president who would restore the strength and meaning of the republic. There cannot be a strong republic without a strong president and we want a president whom the Cedar Revolution can entrust with its principles,” the LF leader added.
“We are resisting this situation with the same ferocity we had when we resisted the previous occupations,” he went on to say.
“We will not allow the impediment of the presidential election and we will no longer accept that the presidential vote be the fruit of a regional deal or bargain,” he said.
Hitting out at Suleiman's critics, Geagea said “those who want the president of the republic to leave are the ones who must leave,” adding that “they are also seeking the election of a puppet president in the upcoming vote.”
Turning to the issue of the stalled cabinet formation process, Geagea called for a cabinet of "harmony, construction, employment, stability, prosperity and reform."
"We will no longer accept any cabinet – whether political, technocrat or neutral – that does not endorse the Baabda Declaration as its Policy Statement," Geagea stressed.
"The army-people-resistance equation has become outdated, following what happened in Qusayr and the killing of women and children in Damascus' Ghouta," he said.
Slamming the Syrian regime and Hizbullah, Geagea added: “Demanding freedom, equality and justice would make you a Takfiri in the eyes of the dictatorial regimes -- whether you are Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Christian -- but if you cheer and clap for the dictator, he will consider you to be secular, patriotic, progressive and nonsectarian, whether you support al-Qaida or Hizbullah.”
He noted that “extremists and Takfiris do not belong to the Arab Spring at all, because their ideological scheme existed decades before the dawn of the Arab Spring and because this scheme does not acknowledge Arabism in the first place.”
“The dictatorial regimes want us to choose between two options: Religious Takfirism or a dictatorial, secular Takfirism, but we are against both,” Geagea emphasized.
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