Listen To The Article
Caretaker Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdallah Bou Habib stated that “Lebanon will abstain from voting on a draft resolution to establish an independent body sponsored by the international community, tasked with clarifying the fate of the missing and forcibly disappeared individuals in Syria.”
Bou Habib further indicated in an interview with LBCI that “most Arab countries will also abstain from voting.”
Human Rights Watch and over a hundred other Syrian and international human rights organizations said today that the United Nations member countries should vote to establish a humanitarian body tasked with providing Syrians with long-overdue answers regarding their loved ones who went missing during the 12-year war that ravaged the country.
During a call, the head of the Change Movement, lawyer Elie Mahfoud, decried Bou Habib’s statement, saying that “it is the typical dialect his masters adapted,” [namely the Free Patriotic Movement]. “After all, it was Michel Aoun who said we have no prisoners in Syria and to get off Syria’s back,” Mahfoud said in reference to former President Michel Aoun.
On another note, Strong Republic parliamentary bloc MP Antoine Habshi told This is Beirut that “the international independent committee established for the sole purpose of following up on the issue of the forcefully kidnapped and disappeared in Syria should be lauded and welcomed by every Lebanese citizen, especially the Lebanese government.”
“But since we are living in very dire times, we are coming across people endorsing such speech and forsaking themselves from their sense of belonging,” Habshi added.
“Not to vote on this decision is a sort of betrayal, because Lebanon has kidnapped and forcefully disappeared citizens in Syria, whose destiny remains unknown. It is also a betrayal against soldiers of the Lebanese Army who have been detained in Syria,” the LF MP stated.
Habshi went on to send a message to Bou Habib, calling on him to represent only Lebanon and not a regional power, and above all, not to commit a “great treason.”
Habshi concluded that it is not fair after all that we have been through that “Charles Malek’s Lebanon, the man who took part in drafting the Human Rights Bill, takes sides with tyrants.”
In a call with Raymond Soueidan, a liberated prisoner from the Assad regime prisons who was held captive from 1993–98, he criticized Bou Habib, saying that “he is Syria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.”
Several questions remain unanswered.
What about the Lebanese who disappeared during this period?
What about the disappeared and detained Lebanese that have been in the Syrian regime’s dungeons since the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War?
Is this sugar-coated decision being taken only because Syria has just been allowed back at the Arab League’s table?
Read more
