The ties that bind
So FPM leader and MP, Michel Aoun flew into Tehran on Sunday to, in his own words, “establish friendship” with a nation he also declared, at a press conference on Monday with Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, had never supported one Lebanese group against another.
We’ll put the latter piece of stand-up comedy down to jet lag and focus on his first statement, made at Beirut airport before he boarded the plane to Tehran. Someone should have told the former army commander that the ties that bind – and we don’t mean in the good sense – were established between Iran and Lebanon nearly a quarter of a century ago, courtesy of Hezbollah.
It is a well-documented friendship. Aoun’s main ally in the March 8 bloc receives its doctrinal inspiration, martial means and military ethos from Tehran. Iran allegedly pumps at least $50 million dollars a month into Lebanon, and after the 2006 summer war, got out its oil-drenched check book to stump up further reparations for damage its local proxy had incurred in its disastrous one month battle with Israel. In fact, it is no exaggeration to posit that Iran sees Lebanon, through the prism of Hezbollah, as nothing short of a satellite state. So in terms of friendship that box appears to be ticked.
So why is the former army commander going to Iran, especially as he has spent the past two years trying to convince his followers that his MOU with Hezbollah was signed purely on the basis of cementing national unity? It is no secret that even those within his inner circle in the FPM are concerned about the direction, both geographical and political, their leader is taking them. The Iran trip comes on the heels of internal dissention over Aoun’s son-in-law, Telecommunications Minister and MP Gebran Bassil’s riding roughshod within the party.
Maybe one should look at Aoun’s robust defense of Hezbollah in the past six months – his backing of the attempted coup, his tour of the south, his refusal to condemn the murder of a Lebanese army pilot and his hounding of French language daily, L’ Orient Le Jour, when it dared to question whether the shooting was an accident – for a clue as to why it appears that Aoun’s role in Lebanese politics as been reduced to do Hezbollah’s, and by extension Iran’s, bidding.
Finally, as Aoun sits with the theocratic rulers of Iran, the Christian leader should be advised about a little-noticed draft law that passed the first of two votes in the Iranian Parliament over the summer. The legislation mandates the death penalty for anyone who converts from Islam and appears poised to become a justification for persecuting Christians and Baha’is. Tehran has executed Muslims for converting to Christianity in the past, and, with conversion becoming increasingly common in the Islamic Republic, this legislation – which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lobbied for – flies in the face of not only international human rights, but also Lebanon’s spirit of religious tolerance. As a self-described representative of the Christian community in Lebanon, Aoun should be worried about sitting at the same table as those who would hang a man for his religious beliefs. He should choose his friends more carefully.