BEIRUT: Joseph Aoun, Lebanon’s army chief who was elected president on Thursday, is a political neophyte whose position as head of one of the country’s most respected institutions helped end a two-year deadlock.
Widely seen as the preferred pick of army backer the United States, he is perceived as being best placed to maintain a fragile ceasefire and pull the country out of financial collapse.
After being sworn in at parliament, Aoun said “a new phase in Lebanon’s history” was beginning.
Analysts said Aoun, who turns 61 on Friday and is considered a man of “personal integrity,” was the right candidate to finally replace Michel Aoun — no relation — whose term as president ended in October 2022, without a successor until now.
A dozen previous attempts to choose a president failed amid tensions between Hezbollah and its opponents, who have accused the Shiite group of seeking to impose its preferred candidate.
Aoun has since 2017 headed the army, an institution that serves as a rare source of unity in a country riven by sectarian and political divides.
He has navigated it through a blistering financial crisis that has drastically slashed the salaries of its 80,000 soldiers, forcing him to accept international aid.
Since late November, he oversaw the gradual mobilization of the armed forces in south Lebanon after a ceasefire ended more than a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.
Under the truce, the Lebanese army has been deploying progressively alongside UN peacekeepers in the south as Israeli forces withdraw, a process they have to finish by January 26.
Speaking on Thursday, Aoun said the state would have “a monopoly” on arms.
The general with broad shoulders and a shaved head has stepped up talks with visiting foreign dignitaries since becoming army chief.
The man of few words was able to count on his good relations across the divided Lebanese political class to see him elected.
Aoun “has a reputation of personal integrity,” said Karim Bitar, an international relations expert at Beirut’s Saint-Joseph University.
He came to prominence after leading the army in a battle to drive out Daesh from a mountainous area along the Syrian border.
“Within the Lebanese army, he is perceived as someone who is dedicated... who has the national interest at heart, and who has been trying to consolidate this institution, which is the last non-sectarian institution still on its feet in the country,” Bitar told AFP.
Aoun was set to retire in January last year, but has had his mandate extended twice — most recently in November.
Mohanad Hage Ali, from the Carnegie Middle East Center, noted that “being the head of US-backed Lebanese Armed Forces, Joseph Aoun has ties to the United States.”
“While he maintained relations with everyone, Hezbollah-affiliated media often criticized him” for those US ties, he told AFP.
Washington is the main financial backer of Lebanon’s army, which also receives support from other countries including Qatar.
An international conference in Paris last month raised $200 million to support the armed forces.
The military has been hit hard by Lebanon’s economic crisis, and at one point in 2020 it said it had cut out meat from the meals offered to on-duty soldiers due to rising food prices.
Aoun, who speaks Arabic, English and French, hails from Lebanon’s Christian community and has two children.
By convention, the presidency goes to a Maronite Christian, the premiership is reserved for a Sunni Muslim and the post of parliament speaker goes to a Shiite Muslim.
Aoun is Lebanon’s fifth army commander to become president, and the fourth in a row.
Military chiefs, by convention, are also Maronites.
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun, respected army chief
https://arab.news/mgdtm
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun, respected army chief
- Aoun has since 2017 headed the army, an institution that serves as a rare source of unity in Lebanon
- The man of few words was able to count on his good relations across the divided Lebanese political class to see him elected
Leila Shahid, the face of Palestinians in Europe, dies in France
- Shahid was born in Lebanon in 1949 to an affluent family originally from Jerusalem
- In 1989, she became the first woman to serve as a PLO representative abroad, posted to Ireland
PARIS: Leila Shahid, who died Wednesday at the age of 76, was for more than twenty years the face and voice in Europe for the Palestinians.
Posted in Paris from 1993 to 2006, Shahid had also served as a representative to Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark and later the EU from 2006 to 2015.
Faced with the war in the Gaza Strip, sparked by Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, she consistently called on the international community to work for a ceasefire.
But in an interview with France Inter two days after the October 7 attack, she called herself “pessimistic” about the Palestinian future and warned against Israeli annexation of “what remains of the Palestinian territories.”
Known for her distinctive voice and rolled Rs, Shahid was born in Lebanon in 1949 to an affluent family originally from Jerusalem and grew up steeped in a lineage marked by politics and displacement.
Her family had been expelled from British-mandate Palestine for “nationalist activity.”
Her great-grandfather, who served as mayor of Jerusalem from 1904 to 1909, was among the many relatives to shape her worldview.
But the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, in which Israel defeated several of its Arab neighbors and captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Gaza, most of Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, was a turning point.
“The defeat of 1967 was a major awakening for me,” she told AFP in 1993.
At 18, Shahid abandoned what she later described as a “protected” bourgeois youth in Beirut and went on to join the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Two years later, she met Yasser Arafat at a student congress in Jordan, forging an enduring loyalty to the Palestinian leader.
From 1969 to 1974, she worked in Palestinian refugee camps, particularly Shatila, where she witnessed first-hand the struggle against the Lebanese army for social self-governance.
“Those were the best years of my life,” she later said.
After earning a master’s degree in anthropology from the American University of Beirut, she began a doctoral thesis on the social structure of Palestinian refugee camps, which took her to the EPHE research institute in Paris.
- ‘Perpetual heartbreak’ -
However, the siege of the Tel Al-Zaatar camp by Lebanese Phalangists in 1976 drew Shahid back to politics.
Elected president of the Union of Palestinian Students in France, she worked closely with Azzedine Kalak, the PLO’s representative in Paris, and developed a close friendship with French author Jean Genet.
She then spent about 10 years in Morocco after her 1977 marriage to Moroccan writer and academic Mohamed Berrada.
But she found herself back in France after the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli rule in 1987.
Upon her return, she worked with Elias Sanbar and other exiled Palestinian intellectuals while also cultivating ties with Israeli peace activists.
In 1989, Shahid became the first woman to serve as a PLO representative abroad, posted to Ireland.
It was, she told AFP in 1993, a “recognition of the role women have played in the Palestinian cause for 40 years.”
She described living in “a perpetual heartbreak between my belonging to my people, the need to fight alongside them in my own way, and the desire for a normal and peaceful life.”
Shahid died at her home in southern France after several years of severe illness, according to Le Monde, with police treating suicide as the most likely cause.
