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Rahi: Lebanon’s Constitution Written to be Implemented, not to be Cause of Tension

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi. Reuters file photo
Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi. Reuters file photo
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Rahi: Lebanon’s Constitution Written to be Implemented, not to be Cause of Tension

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi. Reuters file photo
Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi. Reuters file photo

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi stressed Sunday that the Lebanese Constitution was written to be respected by officials and not to become a source of tension.

“The Constitution has been created to be implemented and not to be a cause of dispute,” he said during Sunday’s mass service in Bkirki.

It was also written “to be a source of agreement and not a source of disagreement.”

His statement came in light of a recent political dispute between President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri on the President’s role in forming the new government.

Aoun says the President has a constitutional right to approve the names of the proposed ministers before signing its decree, while Hariri accuses the President of rejecting, without any explanation, the lineups he has been presenting him.

Rahi reminded politicians of "Article D" of the Constitution, saying the people are the source of authority and sovereignty and therefore, shall exercise these powers through the constitutional institutions.

“Don’t you fear God, the people and the court of conscience and history? How can unyielding political positions - that are destructive for the state as an entity and constitutional institutions - persist and under what national conscience and under what justification?”

The Patriarch also criticized Lebanese politicians for not forming a new government amidst daily social, economic, financial and living crises.

“Why don’t you form a cabinet while the financial and economic crisis has reached its peak, the economy is collapsing and agricultural products are damaged? Why don’t you form a government while the people are standing at the doors of banks begging for their money and they don’t find it?” he asked.

Rahi’s rhetoric against political figures came amid ongoing bickering between different factions on the cabinet formation.

On Sunday, head of the Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc MP Bahia Hariri defended the PM-designate for sparing no efforts to form a new government of technocrats capable of stopping the economic collapse.

In return, Cesar Abi Khalil, an MP with the Free Patriotic Movement, led by Aoun’s son-in-law lawmaker Gebran Bassil, said the President would not resign.

He also accused Hariri of “being indifferent towards the cabinet formation process” and of “presenting to the President a government lineup that does not respect the Constitution.”

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Shining Light on Austin Tice who Went Missing in Syria

A banner for journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared while reporting in Syria in 2012, hangs outside the National Press Club building in Washington, US, May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File phot
A banner for journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared while reporting in Syria in 2012, hangs outside the National Press Club building in Washington, US, May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File phot
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Shining Light on Austin Tice who Went Missing in Syria

A banner for journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared while reporting in Syria in 2012, hangs outside the National Press Club building in Washington, US, May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File phot
A banner for journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared while reporting in Syria in 2012, hangs outside the National Press Club building in Washington, US, May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File phot

In recent months, American officials have raised the fate of Austin Tice in talks with Syria’s new leadership, led by its interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

The American citizen vanished in 2012 in a Damascus suburb.

According to Britain’s The Economist, the American side still insists that Tice may be alive and says there is no evidence of his death.

The magazine has spoken with an Assad-regime insider and gained one of the first authoritative public accounts of the abduction and an insight into one of the former Syrian regime’s darkest secrets.

The source is Safwan Bahloul, a high-ranking general in then Syrian president Bashar Assad’s security state. He has chosen to speak out and share details of Tice’s ordeal. He confirms that Tice was held not by opposition groups, but rather by the Syrian state, with Assad’s full knowledge, and was held for some time in a compound of the former president’s most trusted aide. The general also reveals his own culpability.

In the summer of 2012, Bassam al-Hassan, a shadowy adviser in Assad’s inner circle, learned that Tice was in the suburbs of Damascus. He set in motion a plan to seize him, according to General Bahloul. A freelance journalist contributing to the Washington Post, Tice was preparing to take a break in Lebanon after a grueling period reporting in opposition-held Syria. He sought a fixer to try to cross the border, and it turned out the fixer was working for Hassan, the general claims.

After he was captured, Tice was held in a garage inside Hassan’s compound, not far from the presidential palace, says the general. The site lay outside the regime’s formal prison system—off the books and under direct control of Assad loyalists. Was Assad aware of the abduction? “He knew, absolutely, he was happy with the capture,” the general says.

Bahloul was ordered to interrogate Tice. The journalist “had a satellite communications device...an iPhone and another small phone. I started going through his phone book, you know, trying to have a clue who he is.”

Bahloul confirms that Tice managed to escape his cell for 24 hours (this was originally reported by Reuters). The general himself was suspected of aiding the escape attempt (something he denies), though he was later cleared.

“He rubbed his body with the soap in order to lubricate his chest when getting through the window, and he used the towel...There was broken glass, cemented broken glass on top of a fence. So, he put it upon it, and then he climbed it and threw himself to the other side,” said the general. Tice was recaptured.

Bahloul has settled his affairs with Syria’s new rulers and is one of a handful of senior officers not to have fled the country. He says he did not see Tice again after his fourth and final interrogation. The last confirmed information on the reporter was a video uploaded to YouTube in September 2012 in which he is seen blindfolded and surrounded by masked men shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

American officials believe the video was staged to make it look like Tice had been captured by militants and not the regime. The video was masterminded by Hassan and shot in the countryside north of Damascus, says Bahloul.

In December, as the Assad regime crumbled, thousands of desperate prisoners were broken out of Syria’s sprawling torture-and-detention network after Assad fled to Moscow, raising hopes that Tice might be among them. He was not.

Today the Trump administration and Tice’s family continue to ask questions. One possibility is that he is alive and still in Syria, perhaps hidden somewhere in the remote farmland of the country’s Alawite coastal heartland, parts of which remain outside the control of Sharaa’s security forces. Another is that he was spirited out of the country to Iran, or Hezbollah-controlled parts of Lebanon. Or he may have been abandoned in a hidden prison, or killed amid the chaos of the revolution, another victim of Assad’s reign of terror. One man may have the answer: Hassan, the shadowy adviser, who is believed to have fled to Iran and may now be in Beirut.