Hussain Abdul-Hussain
Daily Star staff

Despite the vast number of books and articles about the 15-year long Lebanese civil war, few biographies have been written about the country’s presidents.
Suleiman Franjieh: Testimonies and Memories is a new biography of the fifth president of Lebanon, president from 1970-1976, written by George Farshakh, a journalist and one of the late president’s associates. Bissan House published the book in mid-2002.
Farshakh describes his book as a “testimony, not a biography,” and this means it can be confusing for readers not familiar with the war or politics in the pre-war years, as it does not explain the background of the war.
He provides a quick chronology of the life of Suleiman Franjieh in the book’s introduction, and toward the end of the book, he introduces himself as a journalist who worked for Tele Liban and Al-Jarida newspaper.
Farshakh begins his book with the Ehden massacre of 1978, when an armed group stormed the northern village and killed around 30 people including Suleiman’s son, the late Zghorta MP Tony Franjieh, his wife Vera and his daughter Jihan. Tony Franjieh is the father of the current Minister of Health and Zghorta MP Suleiman Franjieh. The Ehden massacre was allegedly committed by the Lebanese Forces, at the time the military arm of the Phalange Party.
The author relates the president’s reaction to the news of the massacre, who patriotically proclaimed that his son had been sacrificed “for Lebanon!”
Farshakh assumes that the Ehden massacre was the turning point in relations between president Franjieh and the Lebanese Front, a wartime alliance composed of Maronite leaders Pierre Gemayel, Camille Chamoun and for a while Franjieh himself, and between the front and Syria. According to the author, the account of the massacre in the Phalange Party newspaper, Al-Aamal, is contradictory. He also claims that by killing Tony Franjieh, the Christian right isolated itself inside its own narrow political enclave, which they started calling “Christian society.”
The author also tries to give Franjieh a share of the credit for the national resistance to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, writing that “he (Franjieh) often repeated that the northern community will fight the Israelis bravely if the Israelis decide to invade northern Lebanon.”
Farshakh’s account of the civil war is patchy, and told from the point of view of a Lebanese living in Zghorta and Ehden. He recounts how the Marada, Franjieh’s militia, first established their television station, the Unified and Free Lebanon Television, after occupying Tele Liban’s relay station in the north, claiming that the station was an expression of Franjieh’s outrage against the election of Bashir Gemayel in 1982, and only became a Marada mouthpiece later. Farshakh writes that he was assigned to run this station.
Farshakh recounts various episodes from Franjieh’s past, and concludes by saying the Franjieh family has always sought the interest of the country and that Suleiman and his descendants can never be labeled as anything but patriotic and faithful Christians.