Lebanonwire.com | Lebanon's Geagea on single-minded campaign to free jailed husband

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June 15, 2005

Lebanon's Geagea on single-minded campaign to free jailed husband
by Norma Abdelkarim

ZOUK MOSBEH, Lebanon - Sitrida Geagea is campaigning relentlessly ahead of Lebanon's last round of elections with one aim in mind, the release of her husband Samir Geagea, the jailed leader of a wartime Christian militia.

Decked out in designer labels from head to toe, Sitrida, 37, is one of the few women running in the male-dominated elections, which wrap up on Sunday in northern Lebanon.

"We want the doctor's release, first and foremost, this is our main slogan after 11 years, one month and 23 days of detention," she told AFP, using the nickname given to Geagea by his supporters.

Samir Geagea, who quit his medical studies to fight with the Lebanese Forces Christian militia, is the only warlord to have been sentenced to jail following Lebanon's 15-year civil war.

Most of his time behind bars has been spent in underground isolation in the defense ministry in east Beirut but calls have been mounting for his release.

Sitrida insisted that a Lebanese Forces alliance with former wartime foe, the prominent Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, and Saad Hariri, the son of slain former premier Rafiq Hariri, will promote national reconciliation.

"It is not an electoral alliance but a strategic one to plan for tomorrow's Lebanon, coexistence and national unity," she said.

Sitrida is running for a seat in the 128-member parliament in the June 19 vote in her husband's stronghold of Besharee in northern Lebanon, the final round in Lebanon's four-stage election.

It is the first parliamentary election since Syria withdrew its troops and security agents in late April after a 29-year military presence in the face of local and international pressure following Hariri's February assassination.

Christian Maronite patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir has argued that Geagea, 52, was put behind bars because of his refusal to participate in pro-Syrian governments in Lebanon after the war.

A 1991 amnesty law cleared all warlords of crimes perpetrated during the conflict, among them Geagea. But he was accused of masterminding a bombing in a Beirut church that killed 11 people in 1994 and judges ruled that the attack was a subsequent offense and that the amnesty law no longer applied.

Geagea was sentenced to death for war crimes but the penalty was later commuted to life although he was found innocent over the church attack.

Over the past few years, Sitrida has been allowed to visit her husband three times a week, always bringing him gardenias whose fragrance Samir adores.

In her home in Zouk Mosbeh, north of Beirut, campaign activists are busy preparing election posters.

"Vote for freedom and the truth," reads one. ""Free Samir Geagea and unveil the truth about Rafiq Hariri's murderers," says another.

"She had two choices: either face her predicament or give up. She chose to fight when nothing had prepared her for this battle," said one of Sitrida's friends.

Born to a well-off family in Ghana in 1967, Sitrida returned to Lebanon for her studies at the Lebanese-American University where she graduated in political sciences.

She met her future husband in 1987 at the house of her uncle Gibran Toq, a lawmaker she is ironically running against on Sunday, and they married in 1991.