Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri during a speech in September 2023. (Credit: Mohammad Yassin/L'Orient Today)
One year to the day since the launch of his initiative to hold parliamentary consultations in order to reach a consensus on the election of a new Lebanese president, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri reiterated his call to Lebanon's MPs, assuring them that the presidential election is an “internal deadline” unrelated to the war that has been raging in south Lebanon since Oct. 8.
“We assure you, in the name of the Shiite parties [Amal and Hezbollah], that the presidential election is an internal deadline that is not linked to the Israeli aggression against Gaza and southern Lebanon,” Berri said during a speech on the 46th anniversary of the disappearance of Imam Moussa Sadr, founder of Amal. Berri called for the election of a president “as soon as possible, without imposing a veto against anyone.”
The leader of the Amal movement also re-emphasized the initiative he had launched in 2023, in a speech delivered on the same occasion. “We reiterate what we proposed on Aug. 31 last year. The call for dialogue, consultation and successive parliamentary sessions to elect a president of the republic is still valid,” he said. He continued, “Come tomorrow for consultations under the vault of Parliament to elect the unifying president that Lebanon and its people deserve at this critical moment in their history."
Berri's comments came during a televised speech delivered from Ain al-Tineh, and not from Saida as is customary on the anniversary of Sadr's disappearance.
War in south Lebanon
Berri also appeared to take a dig at caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati in connection the cabinet's response to the ongoing fighting between Israel and Hezbollah on the Lebanese-Israeli border and the war in the Gaza Strip, saying, “We call on the government to leave the theatrical stage and meet the most basic needs of the displaced people in the south.”
The number of internally displaced persons in Lebanon stands at around 110,099, according to the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Berri also pledged his party's "commitment to Resolution 1701 [which put an end to the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel] and its implementation. In his view, “the only party obliged to respect it is Israel, because it has violated it more than 30,000 times by land, air and sea.”
He added that “the genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people in the West Bank is no less dangerous than what is happening in Gaza.” In his view, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is killing any attempt to stop this war, which is unprecedented in contemporary history.”
This article was originally published in French on L'Orient-Le Jour.
