Word: gemayel
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What makes Lebanon's current predicament more hopeless than ever is the disintegration of the presidency. Somehow the office had survived previous crises nominally intact as the main symbol of Lebanese nationhood. But when President Amin Gemayel's six-year term expired in September, factional disputes prevented parliament from electing a successor. As his final act, Gemayel named General Michel Aoun, 53, commander of the mainly Christian Lebanese Army, to head an interim government. Muslim groups rejected Aoun and set up their own government headed by Gemayel's last Prime Minister, Selim Hoss...
...ABOUT GOLF? Amin Gemayel is a man in search of a purpose. After his six- year term as President of Lebanon ended in September, Gemayel left the country because of pressure from the Phalangist militia once controlled by his murdered brother Bashir. Gemayel is now staying in Paris, where he receives visitors in a friend's well-guarded luxury apartment. A wealthy man, Gemayel talks vaguely of moving to the U.S. and taking English-language courses at Harvard...
...think it was a vast misreading of what Lebanon is really like. They drifted gradually into a very controversial position as the great supporter of the government of Lebanon. Well, to most people in Lebanon, the government is just another faction, and furthermore not a very powerful faction. Amin Gemayel's authority seemed to stop at the gates of the Baabda palace...
...midnight Thursday, Gemayel's six-year presidential term expired. With Lebanon's fractious Christians and Muslims unable to agree on a candidate to succeed him, Gemayel asked a fellow Christian, army commander Michel Aoun, to head a transitional government of six military officers. The maneuver failed, however, because the three Muslim appointees refused to participate...
...During Gemayel's tumultuous tenure, the presidency has been reduced to little more than a symbol of Lebanese sovereignty. Nonetheless, most Lebanese would rather preserve the symbol than suffer a relapse into violence and anarchy. As tension mounted last week, gunmen once again fired mortars and machine guns across the "green line" separating Christian and Muslim Beirut. Renewed fighting between the rival Shi'ite Muslim organizations -- Amal, supported by Syria, and the Islamic fundamentalist Hizballah, backed by Iran -- is also a prospect. Last week three Amal militia commanders were killed in an ambush south of Beirut, presumably by Hizballah gunmen...