Aoun to Lebanese … It is imperative for me to bid you farewell

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THE speech of the Lebanese President Michel Aoun is not different from those of other Arab leaders whose citizens revolted against them, starting from Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to the last of them, Omar Al-Bashir.

With this, Aoun has expressed detachment from the reality, not realizing that the furious public sea will not be calm until all his accounts are investigated. This was deduced from the response of the protesters, immediately after he completed the speech, chanting “Ox, revolution is revolution” and “All of them means all of them”.

The people of Lebanon did not take to streets disrupting their jobs or their studies in universities and other learning institutions for tourism purpose or to play games, but for their rightful demands. This is non-negotiable, after about 30 years of a government that allowed everything for the personal interests of the factional leaders.

The people we are watching on the TV screens are demanding free education, healthcare, job opportunities, and rescue from hunger that is domesticated in many regions. The corrupt people have consumed everything, so it is not about the political compromise or parliamentary seat for a party or bloc.

President Aoun talked about war against corruption, forgetting that people are raising accusing fingers at his political bloc and its allies in the government as corrupt elements protected by Hezbollah to ensure firm grip on the Lebanese decision in the region. However, this has reached a dead end today.

The Lebanese people no longer weigh the pledges or speeches made by the officials, especially when they heard from their president a week after the protests. It is a supplement of the statements earlier made by Hassan Nasrallah, Gibran Basel and Sa’ad Al-Hariri. He didn’t say anything new to indicate honest intention to resolve the fateful crisis that threatens Lebanon, which the President and his Cabinet were not aware of.

The statement made by the Lebanese President was meant for the past, and it is not in tandem with the present day. Rather it seems as if he is not aware that half of the Lebanese population has been on the street for eight days, so the best thing that can be said about it is that it belongs to another era. This is in the same form that an ally of his political bloc Hassan Nasrallah talks from his Dhahiyah tunnels hideout about the divine victories.

The Lebanese President’s speech was a valedictory address … farewell for the current sectarian political system that divided the people of Lebanon. It seemed as though he was repeating the song of Feyrouz with his voice “It is imperative for me to bid you farewell”. However, the most unfortunate thing is to respond to such a civilized revolution from the people of Lebanon with that kind of obstinacy and detachment from the reality.

This is the basis of fear, that the political ruling class have deliberately deviated the popular protest from its course by attempting to create division and transform it into a violent protest as a prelude to executing their threat that any alteration to the sectarian balance currently in the government will lead to a civil war.

However, staking on the people of Lebanon, who dumped sectarian sentiment to ensure success of the revolution towards the birth of a new Lebanon, which will depict the civilization that we continue to see in the squares from the far North to the far South and from the lowland to the mountains, cannot disrupt their aspirations.

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah

Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

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