Al-Rahi Says Proposed Int'l Conference Not against Sovereignty
Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday clarified the objectives of the U.N.-sponsored international conference he has called for to help Lebanon overcome its multiple crises.
“The President and the PM-designate are not required to give their constitutional jurisdiction to form the government; they are rather asked to engage in dialogue and cooperate without concealed backgrounds or reservations,” al-Rahi said in his Sunday Mass sermon.
“Keenness on jurisdictions does not prevent flexibility in stances and it does not prevent an understanding. But, unfortunately, we are noticing that the process of forming a new government is getting more complicated instead of resolving,” the patriarch added.
He explained that he has called for the international conference “for this reason” and in order to “rescue Lebanon.”
“We are not willing to allow the exemplary homeland which we built together… to fall in the face of obscurantism or to surrender in the face of cross-Levant projects that contradict with the essence of the Lebanese existence,” al-Rahi said.
“Throughout our history, we have committed ourselves to giving the priority to civilized, political and diplomatic solutions, not military ones,” he added.
He pointed out that such a conference would not “usurp the Lebanese decision, sovereignty and independence, which are currently nonexistent.”
“It would rather seize them from their usurpers and return them to the state, legitimacy and the people -- to Lebanon,” al-Rahi went on to say.
He added that the conference would put an end to “foreign interferences that are preventing the crystallization of a free and unifying national decision.”
“It would enshrine the state of Lebanon and guarantee is positive neutrality and it would be up to the U.N. to find the legal method to perform its duty towards the state of Lebanon which is facing an existential threat,” al-Rahi said.
Source: Naharnet
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