National Dialogue Suspended after FPM Vows to Boycott Meetings
Speaker Nabih Berri refrained from setting a date for a new national dialogue session after the Free Patriotic Movement vowed during Monday's meeting that it would boycott the all-party talks, media reports said.
FPM chief Jebran Bassil “threatened to boycott dialogue during the session, stressing that the FPM cannot tolerate the situation anymore,” the reports said.
“When you only recognize the existence of others through words, dialogue becomes useless,” Bassil himself told reporters after the session.
“During the session, we raised the issue of respecting the National Pact, because when we lose the National Pact we would be losing the country,” the FPM chief said.
Berri hit back at Bassil in the meeting, saying: “It is not you who will score a point against me by suspending dialogue, I will suspend it.”
“No one is more keener than me (on the country) and we are also suffering,” Berri added, according to media reports.
Berri also called on the FPM's ministers to return to cabinet sessions “in order to prevent governmental vacuum amid the absence of the Christian component.”
The session was held in the absence of FPM founder MP Michel Aoun, Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat and Syrian Social National Party chief Ali Qansou.
Aoun was represented by Bassil while Jumblat was represented by former minister Ghazi Aridi.
“The dialogue session ended with a suspension of dialogue, which is an outcome that we do not want and do not accept,” Aridi told reporters after the session.
“Despite everything that happened, we voiced stances during the session and all efforts and contacts must be focused on addressing what happened,” he added.
“Despite everything that happened today, we must seek the activation of the work of the government and parliament and the election of a president,” Aridi went on to say.
Reports had expected the meeting to focus on a suggestion to create a senate and an administrative decentralization law after conflicting political parties failed previously to reach a breakthrough with regard to the presidential impasse or an agreement on a new electoral law.
On the eve of the dialogue, Berri told his visitors that the interlocutors would submit the names they propose for a commission that will be tasked with devising a parliamentary election law and creating a Senate and that he would task Deputy Speaker Farid Makari to head it, al-Joumhouria newspaper said.
The daily added that Kataeb Party leader MP Sami Gemeyal will not designate his representatives to the Senate committee or to the committee on abolishing political sectarianism. He will instead carry a constitutional study developed by Kataeb lawyers showing the infeasibility of the aforementioned points before the election of a president and the holding of parliamentary polls.
The FPM's latest boycott of the cabinet was linked to the thorny issued of military appointments.
The movement has recently warned that the country might be plunged into a “political system crisis” if the other parties do not heed the FPM's demands regarding Muslim-Christian “partnership.”
Source: Naharnet
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