Lebanonwire.com | Lebanon amnesties jailed ex-militia leader Geagea

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July 18, 2005

Lebanon amnesties jailed ex-militia leader Geagea
by Nagib Khazzaka

BEIRUT, July 18 (AFP) - Lebanon's parliament on Monday voted to grant amnesty to Samir Geagea, the leader of a wartime Christian militia who has been serving a life sentence in jail since 1994.

The move paves the way for the release of the former Lebanese Forces leader as soon as the decision has been signed into law by President Emile Lahoud and published in the official gazette.

Lebanese Forces MP George Adwan rushed straight to the defence ministry prison where Geagea is held in isolation to inform the governor of parliament's decision.

Geagea, 53, is the only former warlord from the 1975-1990 civil war ever jailed for his alleged crimes.

He was cleared of a 1994 bomb attack on a church that left 11 dead but handed four death sentences, all later commuted to life imprisonment, for offences during the war, notably the 1987 killing of Sunni prime minister Rashid Karameh.

Tall, thin and balding, Geagea is nicknamed "Hakim" (doctor) thanks to his unfinished medicine studies, but his fragile appearance belies a will of steel.

His supporters say his imprisonment was part of a Syrian plot to assert complete control over Lebanon to which he was opposed, and that it is only the departure of Syrian troops that has allowed the amnesty.

The campaign for his release was stepped up in the political turmoil that followed the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February and the April pullout of Syrian troops.

The main opposition alliance put together by Hariri's son Saad saw Geagea's wife Sitrida join forces with wartime foes like Druze leader Walid Jumblatt on a platform that included a demand for her husband's release.

She won election to parliament in June from the family's northern hilltown bastion of Bsharreh as part of the victorious alliance that won an eight-seat majority in the 128-member parliament.

A majority of MPs voted in favour of the amnesty by a show of hands Monday, but the 14 representatives of the anti-Israel Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah were absent from the house.

Sitrida said she regarded parliament's decision as an expression of "wishes of the Lebanese people to definitively turn the page on the war."

Amnesty International for one has accused the authorities of mistreating her husband, a wartime Israeli ally, in his isolated Beirut prison cell.

Other pro-Syrian warlords -- both Christian and Muslim -- have taken part in post-war governments in Lebanon.

MPs also voted by a show of hands to amnesty dozens of Islamists jailed after deadly 2000 clashes with troops in the far-northern Deniyeh area and an alleged 2004 terror plot uncovered in the eastern district of Majdel Anjar.

Parliament's decisions were greeted with celebratory gunfire in the northern Sunni city of Tripoli and in Bsharreh, where champagne also flowed.

Himself a native of the Maronite hilltown, Geagea started off fighting the Palestine Liberation Organisation, whose presence sparked the civil war, and its leftist Lebanese allies in 1975.

In 1978, he led a group of commandos that assassinated MP Tony Frangie, son of former pro-Syrian president Suleiman Franjie, two years before Syrian troops entered the country.

He took command of the Lebanese Forces in 1985 after ousting his rival Elie Hobeika for signing a Damascus-approved peace deal with Jumblatt and current parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri.