Reactions over the statements made by Lebanese Information Minister George Kordahi continued on Wednesday as several political and religious figures criticized the authorities’ dealing with the crisis with the Gulf and the minister’s refusal to resign.
In this context, the Council of Maronite Bishops called for the need to mend the relations with the Gulf States and address the crisis, denouncing the government’s failure to convene.
Prime Minister Najib Mikati has not convened a cabinet meeting since Oct. 12, pending a solution to a standoff over an investigation into last year’s Beirut port explosion that has paralyzed government for over two weeks. The leakage of a video showing Kordahi making statements against Saudi Arabia came to compound the rift inside the Lebanese government.
During its regular meeting on Wednesday, headed by Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rai, the Council of Maronite Bishops said: “The country’s tragic circumstances required the formation of a government free of politicization, whose main task would be to respond to the international conditions established for Lebanon’s assistance, especially the implementation of reforms on every level.”
The bishops called on “state officials to expedite the restoration of relations with the Gulf States, address the cause of the crisis, and secure the return of the export and import movement.”
Media and communication official in the Lebanese Forces party, Charles Jabbour, criticized the Lebanese authority’s approach to the crisis with the Gulf, stressing that the first step that Lebanon was supposed to take, at least as a goodwill gesture, was the resignation of Kordahi.
In remarks to Asharq Al-Awsat, Jabbour said: “The political team in Lebanon is either premeditating a crisis to isolate the country from its main external lung, or it does not deserve being in this environment.”
He continued: “Dealing with this crisis has once again shown that the ruling team is not qualified to be in the position it assumed.”
The Kataeb Party, for its part, said that the crisis with the countries of the Gulf was the result of “concessions and bargains made by the system, which ended with total surrender to the will of Hezbollah, by the election of its ally to the presidency… and the control of the parliamentary majority through a tailored election law…”
In a statement issued following the meeting of its political bureau on Wednesday, the party said: “Hezbollah, after taking control of the political decision in the country, began implementing its agenda by isolating it from the world, keeping it away from its friends and changing its historical identity, with the aim of using it as a bargaining chip.”
