Q 1. What is True Leadership and what it isn't?
Since Lebanon's independence in 1943, Lebanon has witnessed both the rise and fall of different leaders from all walks of life and all religious backgrounds. Some of the leaders were worshipped, others were hated. But the main question keeps recurring: What is True Leadership and what it isn't? We thought that the following could serve as an inspiration to all Lebanese concerned as to the true meaning of Leadership.
1. Leadership is not self-serving: authentic leadership does not use and abuse people for personal aggrandizement.
2. Leadership in building a personality cult -- giving too much power to one individual – is detrimental to the leader and his followers. Worship God only, not people. Build collective leadership, not personality.
3. Leadership is not media-made: the number of times you appear on television, in the printed media and on radio is not important. Authentic leadership comes from the people and serves the people selflessly.
4. Leadership is not a position: almost anyone can be elected, selected, anointed, self-appointed, promoted, or succeed to a leadership position. Position does not make you a leader. How you function determines your leadership effectiveness.
5. Leadership is not ordering and pushing around: unless you are in the armed forces, ordering people around will get you nowhere as a leader.
6. Leadership is not a 100-yard dash: effective leadership trains its followers for a marathon. Leadership is truly a long distance relay race, in which the baton is passed from generation to generation.
7. Leadership is not being indispensable: effective leadership is being dispensable. The mark of a true leader is demonstrated by the fact that the show must and can go on without him or her.
8. Leadership is not always having to be in the limelight: leadership behind the scenes is far more effective. The more you share center stage, or allow others to take center stage, the more leadership experiences more people will accumulate.
9. Leadership is not being indecisive: be strong and make well-thought-out decisions. Don't vacillate once you have made your decisions.
10. Leadership is not about blaming others: leadership is first and foremost being responsible for the decisions you make or fail to make.
Unlike other organizations dealing with Lebanon, the USCFL is not affiliated with any political faction in Lebanon or abroad and is funded solely by its membership. It is by far the most independent Lebanon-related NGO.
The USCFL is not reluctant to take "politically incorrect" positions which serve the long-term political, economic and security interests of Lebanon. We are not a rubber stamp for the current regime in Lebanon or any other country.
We are the Internet's most authoritative source of information about Lebanon, the Syrian-installed regime in our homeland , human rights and the economic challenges facing Lebanon in the next century.
We believe that only through furthering American interests in the region can true democracy be restored to Lebanon. Lebanon's fragile political system is too delicate to survive regional challenges without American involvement.
Q 3. How big is the USCFL and who are your main backers?
The USCFL is the largest American lobbying organizaton on behalf of Lebanon in the world with 13,000 members.
As mentioned earlier, and unlike other organizations dealing with Lebanon, the USCFL is not affiliated with any political faction in Lebanon or abroad and is funded solely by its membership.
The USCFL is not a social club, a religious association or a right/left wing political grouping. We are all in here for one thing & one thing only: "Shaping the intellectual, business and political climate in which U.S foreign policy is made by bringing key issues to the attention of the institutions and policymakers that are capable of exercising political, economic, military or spiritual leverage to bring abuses in our homeland to an end and hold those responsible to account".
Q 4. Who are the Lebanese and what is their history?
The native peoples of today's Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine are Semites who lived for thousands of years, competing among themselves, building homelands, and defending them from outside as well as inside conquests. Among these native peoples were the Assyro-Chaldeans and Aramaeans in Syro-Mesopotamia, the Phoenicians, Canaanites, Hebrews and others in Lebanon and ancient Israel. The region was predominantly inhabited by Syriac speaking peoples and the Lebanese; whether Druze, Christians, Muslims and even Jews lived in harmony and peace under the leadership of Druze Emir Fakhredinne until the Arab Islamic conquest.After the military defeat of Byzantium and Persia, the two superpowers of the time, at the hands of the Arabs, the native populations were given three options. Either to submit to Islam and arabize, or to become Dhimmi, a second class citizen. A third option was the equivalent of ethnic cleansing. Large segments of the Syro-Mesopotamian, particularly the Syriac-speaking peoples, were arabised, Islamized or displaced from their original birthplace. Many among them lived as Dhimmis in the Arab dominated urban centers or in the country side. However a group of Christian Syriac-speaking people, the Maronites, were able to form a homeland in Mount Lebanon starting from the 7th century. The Maronites founded an independent entity called the Marada states. They resisted the various Arab Muslim dynasties for seven centuries and kept most of their homeland free from occupation. But a series of internal crisis and civil wars weakened the Marada states leading hence to their defeat at the hands of the Mamelukes in 1305.
The Maronites, joined by other Christians from the region, succeeded in recapturing their autonomy in 1840. After the massacres of 1860, European intervention granted additional autonomous status to the Christians of Mount Lebanon in 1860. During WWI, the third of the Christians perished, another third emigrated. Under French rule, the Lebanese Christians chose Greater Lebanon as a modern state. Lebanese nationalism was the end product of centuries of struggle for freedom.
In 1943, a national pact between Christian and Muslim leaders undermined the ethnic nationalism of the Christians. Until 1975, Lebanon enjoyed a financial success, while ethnic tensions remained unsolved. Lebanon was divided between a pro-Arab, mostly Islamic camp, which supported the Palestinians, and a Lebanese nationalist, Christian inspired camp, opposed to the dilution of the country's historic identity. The war of 1975-1990 destroyed the country, causing generalized massacres against civilians, particularly the Christian populations of the Shuf, Aley and the south. In October 1990, the Syrian army invaded the central free enclave of the Christians, ousted their government, disbanded their resistance, and imposed an Arab identity on the entire country.
Since 1990, the Lebanese Christians were submitted to a systematic campaign aiming at their political and cultural dismantling. Christian youth are constantly arrested, their media denied freedom, their leaders harassed, and their identity denied. The West has abandoned their national and communal claim, while many other groups were granted basic rights in the region. While Christians in the center are under occupation, and Christians in the south are submitted to terror attacks, only Lebanese Christians in the diaspora are potentially capable of acting on behalf of their besieged community.
Q 5. What was life like in Lebanon before Israel got involved and expelled the PLO?
When Israel captured Beirut, they found that captured Christian soldiers were brought to Muslim hospitals where they were literally drained of their blood for transfusions to wounded Muslim PLO terrorists. One village chief made the mistake of defying Arafat. His 16 year old daughter was kidnapped and delivered to her father's doorstep in a sack, with her breasts cut off. The PLO adopted the Roman practice of tearing a man apart by using horses pulling his limbs in four directions. Arafat's men were more modern, using fours cars to dismember a man.
- Emanuel A. Winston
Middle East
analyst & commentator
- Patrick Sills, British journalist
London Observer, 15 January 1976
"And I remember something which still frightens me. An entire family had been killed, the Can'an family, four children all dead, and the mother, the father and the grandfather. The mother was still hugging one of the children. And she was pregnant. The eyes of the children were gone and their limbs were cut off. No legs and no arms. It was awful....We buried them ...under the shells of PLO."
As J. Becker wrote, even before witnessing the atrocities, Father Labaky called Arafat and asked his aide to stop the shelling, saying, "I can assure you, as a religious leader, that we do not want the war; we do not believe in violence," He received a brutal reply, "Father, don't worry. We don't want to harm you. If we are destroying you, it is for strategic reasons."
- Free Lebanon
source: American Lebanese League, 1982
- Jullian Becker, in The PLO
Q6: Why do you blame Arafat for the Lebanon War? Wasn't Israel the aggressor, and Arafat the hero who defeated Israel?
"Watching scenes of the Beirut evacuation this weekend, I was struck by how it is possible for the cameras to magnify a lie. These Palestinian troops left town as if they'd just won a great victory. Arafat, they praised as a conquering hero. In fact, they are leaving town in defeat. And in fact, Arafat led them to this cul-de-sac where they made their last stand behind the skirts of women and among the playgrounds of children. The only victory they won was to give General Sharon an excuse for total war and so to bring upon Israel the condemnation of world opinion and to many Jews, a tormented conscience. But the world was condemning Israel even before Beirut, and will for time to come. And the anguish of Jews at the suffering caused by their own war machine comes from the bitter experience of having learned that those who die by the sword must live by the sword. Carnage, indeed, and no one's hand too clean. But it could have been otherwise if Arafat and his allies accepted the reality of Israel, if they had not established within Lebanon a terrorist state sworn to Israel's destruction, and if Arab governments had not found it useful to nurture the PLO in the bloody illusion that Israel can one day be pushed into the sea. Argue as you might about the events leading up to the establishment of Israel. Weep as you must for the Palestinian refugees. But a fact is a fact, and Israel is a fact. Yet, the guerrillas leaving Beirut this week are vowing to fight on until victory. Well, there will be no peace in the Middle East until the Arabs stop asking their young men to die for a lie."- Bill Moyers, CBS Evening News [from Roger David Carasso]
Q7: While the world was shouting about Israel's temporary occupation of a sliver of land in southern Lebanon, why didn't we hear about the remaining 90% of Lebanon being ravaged by Syria?
- David Epperly, The American Lebanese Institute, before The US Senate Foreign Budget Committee, March 4, 1999
- Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Washington Post, 29 October 1990
- George Zoghby, National Alliance of Lebanese Americans, before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, March 31, 1998
From 1975 to 1984, the 750,000 inhabitants of East-Beirut and its vicinity (some 200 square kms) have contended with 67 kilos of explosives per person, namely 50 million kilos for the entire targeted region. A comparison with the Second World War: each German contended, between 1939 and 1945, with 5 kilos of explosives. In any case, while Germany paid for Hitler's paranoia, Lebanon, on its part, has never committed aggression against any one. Damascus feeds its imperial ambitions and has always dreamt of becoming a "Great Syria" in which Lebanon would be no more than one of the docile provinces. And yet, this means nothing: The annexationist dream is turning into reality under the silent complicity of nations considered civilized. Later, these same nations will say: "We didn't see anything, we didn't hear anything, thank you little Jesus".
Is it because the Lebanese do not have oil resources and because in Lebanon there are Christians who wear a cross around their neck that they must be sacrificed on the great altar of Realpolitik?
The Western hostages were exploited by the Syrians as a means of blackmail. International terrorism is still exported from Lebanon under their aegis: Abou Nidal, Ahmed Jibril, Amal and Hezbollah; the drug traffic, the growing of poppies and other illicit traffics are all under the Syrians' patronage. The poppies are cultivated in the Bekaa valley, heroine is refined in the laboratories they control and is exported through the seaports they rule and the Beirut airport they control.
There were western hostages in Lebanon solely because the Syrians wanted it. Many hostages were kidnapped 50 or 100 meters from the Syrian barracks, "fled" their kidnappers and came upon the Syrians after a 5 minute walk, or were liberated by the Syrians following some James Bond scene.
Assad owes his conquest of Lebanon to his patience, to the State terrorism he has every leisure to practice, and to international hypocrisy. President Hafez el Assad and his brother Rifaat have, in order to stay in power, constructed a system whose motor functions on violence. Deprived of this fuel, the system stops.
The Syrian leaders and the entire regime live in a state of permanent siege. The dictator had a palace-fortress built for him on the summit of Damascus, when he will be able to shell the city, even it its entirety rebels against him.
Syria has no tribunals, only prisons and tombs.
We cannot forget as well the Palestinian terrorism in Lebanon, and we refuse to accept this curious logic which states that the Palestinians must be excused for destroying Lebanon under the pretext that their "own country" was "taken" by the Israelis.
The plot of the nations who believe that by sacrificing the integrity of Lebanon they will be able to solve the problems of the region according to their own interests, this plot seems to have reached even those capitals regarded as incarnating the defense of the free world's values.
It cannot be accepted that the peace in the Middle East will be done with Assad and, who knows, maybe Hitler's heir will receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Hasn't a war criminal like Arafat received this same prize?
Peace must be achieved, but without Assad and without all those war criminals who surround him and who are preparing themselves as his successors. They must be arrested and judged for their crimes against humanity.
Three hundred thousand Lebanese dead because of Syria, twenty five thousand Lebanese handicapped because of Syria, half a million Lebanese in exile because of Syria. Was it necessary for Assad to use gas chambers so that his crimes against Lebanon might be called "war crimes"?
To those who tell us that the Syrians are in Lebanon in order to maintain peace between the Lebanese, we will answer that the Nazis were in France in order to maintain peace among the French.
To those who tell us that fighting the Syrians is extremism, we will answer that the French Resistance against the Nazis was no more than a farce.
To those who tell us that agreeing to work with the Syrians is moderation and sound common sense, we will answer that Maréchal Pétain of 1943 and all the collaborators were national heroes and not traitors.
To those who tell us that peace in Lebanon will be achieved by forgetting the past, we will answer that judging the Nazis and their French collaborators was a historical error.
To those who tell us that the Palestinians must be allowed to stay in Lebanon until a solution is found for them, we will answer "Since you love them so, why don't you take them to your home?"
The Lebanese Resistance believes firmly that only justice and the law will win. It believes in stability and in peace for the region of the Middle East. But it must be clear that this peace must be achieved without Hafez el Assad and without all the war criminals who surround him.
- - from SYRIA, THE PALESTINIANS AND THEIR LEBANESE ALLIES: TERRORISM AND WAR CRIMES
...This is the kind of "human rights" culture that started descending on Lebanon from the day the country was forced to become a launching ground for a military confrontation with Israel that was not its own, culminating with the infamous "Cairo Agreement" signed in 1969 under heavy Syrian pressure. This agreement created a virtual state within a state for the Palestinian armed organizations on Lebanese territory. In 1976 the Syrian Army marched into Lebanon under the banner of curbing the Palestinians and preventing them from taking over the country. But the Syrians did not dissuade the PLO from continuing the confrontation with Israel that eventually provoked the Israeli Army into invading Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982. The second Israeli incursion resulted in kicking the Palestinians out of Lebanon and sending the PLO leadership into Tunisian exile, but not the Syrians who stayed on. They first played dead then they resumed active interference in Lebanese affairs.
This Syrian "culture" triumphed with the total Syrian take-over of Lebanon on October 13, 1990, when Syrian soldiers marched into the ruins of the Lebanese presidential palace at Baabda. Since that fateful day Lebanon has been run as a fully owned subsidiary of the Syrian regime. The pictures of Mr. Assad and his two sons greet passengers at the Beirut International Airport much as they do at the Damascus Airport. Every government decision of any significance, including all major appointments, must first be cleared in Damascus. Not only the Lebanese Government, but also the Lebanese economy, fell effectively under the same Syrian management that reduced Syria to a police state, ruined its economy and impoverished its people.
...One of the greatest ironies, if not farces, of modern diplomacy is what we have been told by reliable sources for the last few years, that the Israeli Government, before and after the assassination of Mr. Rabin and even under Mr. Netanyahu, repeatedly expressed serious interest in withdrawing from Lebanon. We are also told by the same sources that the Syrian Government has not been agreeable to such withdrawal, however unconditional, for fear of separating the "twin" negotiating tracks with Israel -- the Syrian-Lebanese! Most Lebanese believe the Syrian position to be motivated not only by the wish to maintain Lebanon as a bargaining chip, a hostage, in the endless negotiations-cum-confrontation with Israel, but also by its evident preference for maintaining the status quo. Lebanon is such a valuable prize, and an Israeli withdrawal may ring the bells for a Syrian withdrawal long overdue under the Taif terms. So far the Syrian position on the Taif mandated withdrawal is simple: it is willing to withdraw if and when it is so requested by the Lebanese Government. One of the ministers perhaps expressed the views of his loyalist colleagues in the Cabinet by publicly threatening to throw himself before the first Syrian tank that begins such withdrawal!
- Muhammad Mugraby, in a talk delivered at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, November 6, 1997
- from "Syria / Lebanon: An Alliance Beyond The Law", Human Rights Watch report, May 1997, quoting a prominent Moslem Shiite lawyer
Lebanon has a constructive role to play in the Middle East peace process. It can only do so when it is free, sovereign and governed by a truly representative government. Only the Lebanese people, free from occupation, can provide genuine peace and security to all of their neighbors. Lebanon must be allowed to reclaim its right to negotiate peace with Israel free from the destructive influence of Syria. Lebanon is obviously no longer an independent country. More than forty thousand Syrian troops control ninety percent of its territory, and Syrian installed officials occupy all positions of authority within Lebanon's government, parliament and military. The country's domestic and foreign policies now reflect Syrian objectives, not Lebanese needs. The Lebanese are not the real players on the political scene. No decision can be taken without authorization from Damascus.
...There seems to be no attempt to address the basic issue of Syrian occupation of Lebanon or even Syria's supposed scheduled withdrawal from the country. While official US policy remains fixated on supporting the full implementation of the so-called Taif agreement, the clauses in that document pertaining to Syrian re-deployment to the Bekaa Valley, as they have been interpreted by the State Department, are all but being ignored. Numerous major international and local human rights organizations have repeatedly documented and published findings concerning systematic violations of the rights of innocent Lebanese civilians by Syria and its underlings. These incidents, too numerous to mention here, including murder, rape, torture and illegal detention, belie the facade which has been created for the outside world and provide a hint of the real inner-workings of the Syrian police state.
- Daniel Nassif, Council of Lebanese American Organizations (CLAO), the principle umbrella organization representing the vast majority of American Lebanese, before the United States House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, June 25, 1997
In an article published by the Middle East Quarterly (December 1997), Dr. Habib Malek, a founding member of the Foundation for Human and Humanitarian Rights in Lebanon, declared that one cannot compare the Syrian control of 90% of the land with Israel's occupation of only 10%. The Lebanese American University Professor wrote that the "Israeli government exercises no control over Beirut government while Syrian leaders effectively dictate its policies and actions." He added, "the Israelis of all points of view officially and repeatedly state they have no intention of remaining in Lebanon but wish to withdraw from every square centimeter of Lebanese soil (in return for security guarantees and a full fledged peace treaty)." Malek wrote that "no such statement of withdrawal have ever emanated from the Syrian side. On the contrary Damascus has made innumerable claims to Lebanon and uses such terms as brotherly relations between two statelets. These differences, added Malek, mean that any talk of foreign occupation of Lebanon refers principally to the Syrian occupation." Malek enumerated the massive violations of human rights by the Syrians in Lebanon. "Syrian occupied Lebanon does not present a pretty picture," he said.
© Copyright 1997-2004 United States Committee For A Free Lebanon. All rights reserved.
USCFL Home
Golden Circle
Membership
Mission Statement Current Views
US Testimonies
Intelligence Special
Reports Activities Action Alerts
Selected Links
Selected Readings
Guestbook
FAQs How to Contact Us
Search