As the rod gets hotter for the supporters of Michel Aoun, so does the falsification of history, accusations and digging up the past with a different twist.

Be it on many of the forums I visit daily in my quest for information, or in conversations, I hear many statements that cause me to be amazed at the degree of political amnesia some of my compatriots suffer, at their lack of political and historical knowledge, at the extent some of them will even go to falsify history, twisting and bending it at will, just to show aoun as the knight in shining armor he is not.

What really prompted me to write this was a post I read a couple of hours ago on one of the forums where the poster had listed a series of allegations and accusations he claimed the LF were responsible for doing, and he was using this list to justify his unbound hatred for Dr. Samir Geagea, the leader of the LF.

The list is long and tedious, I have tried to summarize it and, for each allegation, provide an explanation or just the plain truth. Here goes:

• Ehden’s massacre: although this unfortunate event has been wrongly pinned onto Samir Geagea, many of those making the accusations leave out a couple of important points:

• Geagea was hit as he was scouting the western side of Ehden. He was driven from Ehden to Hotel Dieu by the Later Hani Neeme Rahme. Along the way, they were ambushed in Torza by the marada and DSG was even hit further in the leg and in the arm by bullets as their car was sprayed.
• The commanding officer left in charge of the operation was Elie Hobeika. However, I have never heard any aounist accuse Mr Hobeika of anything.
• Geagea was informed of the fate of Toni Franjiyi and his family after he woke up in hospital (having lost a lot of blood, he had passed out and had to receive blood transfusions – O Positive to be precise )
• The Ehden massacre was staged and most probably carried out by Syrian troops in order to further divide the Christian based Lebanese Front.

So to accuse Geagea of this massacre is either plain ignorance or a clear intention to bad mouth the person and spoil his reputation.

• The Safra Massacre: When the Safra massacre was conducted (Monday, July 7, 1980), Geagea was not the commander of the Lebanese Forces. Moreover, the Safra massacre as many choose to call it was an operation agreed upon by both Bachir Gemayel and Camille Chamoun (both their souls RIP) in order to clean out enemy agents that had infiltrated the Ahrar Tigers. Again, this was used and publicized by the Syrians to attemot to create a gap between the Kataeb, the Ahrar and the Lebanese Forces.

• The Hobeika-Geagea war or as it is best known the Second Intifada which took place in January 1986. This was a movement carried out by Dr Geagea along with many other LFers against Elie Hobeika who had by then signed the Tripatriate Agreement with Syria, Amal Movement and the PSP. This agreement was felt by many Christians, to gift wrap the entire country and present it to Syria as a bonus. It was also a movement Hobeika was conducting to shortcut Amine Gemayel with hopes of attaigning the presidency.

• The Ilgha War or as Aoun calls it the war of weapons unification was not started by the Lebanese Forces. It was a concept raised by Aoun who felt that militias were no longer to be tolerated in the country. A noble thought had it not been for the bad timing, especially that Aoun had just come out of a loosing war of liberation against the Syrians and the LF had helped him majorly in that war. The ultimate irony of fate would come when  seventeen years later, Aoun would go out of his way to provide political coverage for the weapons of another militia, Hezbollah. I guess the three thousand people that lost their lives in that moment of folly are not to be considered.

• Sandouk Watani: another of the symptoms of long and short term political amnesia. For the sake of history, it should be said that the period between 1986 and 1988 was deemed by most Lebanese as the golden era of the Free Region as the area under the control of the LF came to be known. The LF, under Dr Samir Geagea, introduced many many reforms aimed at bettering the life of the people of the region. Those reforms were on all aspects and levels of life from social, to medical, to educational.

To fund all those reforms, it was necessary to establish some sort of a tax. This tax was marketed by many of the enemies of the LF as some kind of racket money whereas it was solely for the funding of needed services like open heart surgeries, scholarships for students to study abroad, and the most daring concept of all, the twinning of families in need with families abroad: as such, more than five thousand Lebanese families in need  were paired with better off families residing abroad to help them cope with the economic hardships brought upon by the war that ravaged the country for ten years.

To this day, we have yet to see similar introductions by any of the governments that came from 1988 onwards, including Aouns interim government.

• The Christian Massacres of Eastern Saida: this is the best of the best, and a fine example of the total cross-wire cabling inside the typical aounist head: Back at the time, Aoun was the commander of the Lebanese Army (he had replaced General Tannous Chahine mysteriously asked to step down at the period when the Lebanese Government was getting closer and closer to Damascus. General Chahine was very close to the Lebanese Forces) and he was asked by the LF to send the army to protect the civilians from the vaccum that would be caused by the departure of the Israeli army. Aoun did not send the army till it was quite late, and when he did, it was men he pulled from Tripoli with very tight connections to the radical Islamic groups. Those men, instead of protecting the population, clashed with the Lebanese Forces and proceeded to systematically attacked and killed people thus causing a major exodus from the area.

It is unfortunate that many people have an avertion to reading history and to researching and analyzing facts…

As DSG used to say, “Politics is a science, just like Mathematics and Physics…its unfortunate that here in Lebanon we go into politics as some kind of pass-time or because we inherited a stance from our parents.”