الاتحاد الكاثوليكي العالمي للصحافة- لبنان اوسيب – لبنان
August 8th, 2001
The World Forum of Professionals in the Secular and Religious Media in Lebanon condemned the detentions campaigns considering that they pose lots of questions about the Lebanese political regime and the future of Lebanon and the freedom in it. The statement of the Forum included the following:
1. The detentions which occurred are against the Lebanese laws and attack public freedoms, mainly the freedom of opinion and expression and the freedom of political action. In a period when Lebanon loses its economical, social and political components for getting out of its problems, nothing remains but the freedom that some try to limit.
2. These detentions pose lots of great questions about the mechanism of the political regime action in Lebanon and about the real decision figures in it, especially that voices from the government criticize and feel what happened strange.
3. As long as expressing the opinion and demonstrations occur without any violence, what is the pretext of the current repression? Whereas demonstrations with batons and knives, full of violence and threat to national security occurred, the State did not use violence nor repression.
4. These security military acts let the Lebanese youth feel that he is oppressed in his nation, and this leads him to depression and emigration for he expected from the State to communicate with him not to attack him.
5. This campaign asserts the Lebanese reality which is that officials are in a side and the people in the other side. These officials are far away from the people’s needs, problems and issues.
6. The detentions which occurred remind of the dictatorial regimes which repress intellectual and political freedoms. Most of these regimes fell down and the ones which remained are unable to feed their people. It was better that officials in Lebanon stabilize the security in the South, put an end to aggressions and repeated daily bombings on properties and houses and assure water and electricity and other fundamental needs of the citizens for they feel themselves belonging to a nation and a State.
7. Such campaign which came directly after the successful visit of the Patriarch Sfeir to Al Chouf and Jizine regions does not encourage other visits to the South or to any other regions in Lebanon so that the rest of Lebanese be not accused of threatening the national security or qualified as agent.
8. These detentions occur while some officials in the world and the region review their global regime, free the political retained, allow a larger intellectual movement, and adopt the principle of national reconciliation between the people and officials, and between the opposition and the power. Whereas the practices of the Lebanese regime goes today to where other have failed.
Translated by: Joyce Tary
