Kamal Jumblat
Kamal Fuad Jumblat ( Arabic كمال جنبلاط Kamal Dschanbulat , DMG Kamāl Ǧanbulāṭ , French Kamal Joumblatt ; * December 6, 1917 in Moukhtara , Chouf district ; † March 16, 1977 ) was a Lebanese politician and leader of the anti-government forces in the early years of the Lebanese civil war . He is the father of the current leader of the Druze, Walid Jumblat .
In 1969, on Jumblat's initiative, several left-wing parties came together to form the Lebanese National Movement . The resulting polarization of the Lebanese party landscape into left-wing Muslim and right-wing Christian parties contributed to the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990).
Jumblat was re-elected as a member of all elections to the Lebanese parliament from 1943 until his assassination in 1977 (with the exception of 1956).
Early political career
Kamal Jumblat was born in 1917 in Moukhtara in the Chouf district as a member of the prominent Jumblat family , which traditionally formed the leaders of the Druze. His father was Fouad Dschumblat (1885-1921), who was assassinated on August 6, 1921 . After the death of his father, Kamal Dschumblat's mother Nazira Dschumblat (1890–1951) played a significant role for a quarter of a century. She opened the way for him. His sister Linda Jumblat Alatrache was also murdered in Beirut.
Dschumblat studied in France at the Sorbonne and obtained degrees in psychology and sociology . He returned after the outbreak of World War II in 1939 in Lebanon back and continued his studies at the Université Saint-Joseph , where he in 1945 with a degree in law reached.
On May 1, 1948, he married May Arslan, the daughter of Prince Shakib Arslan . The Arslans were another important Lebanese Druze family. Their only son Walid saw the light of day on August 7, 1949.
Kamal Jumblat was a lawyer and prosecutor for the Lebanese government between 1941 and 1942. In 1943 he went into politics after the death of his relative Hikmat Dschumblat . In September, he was in the elections for the first time in the National Assembly as MP for Lebanon Mountain selected. In 1946 he became Minister of Economy, Agriculture and Social Affairs.
In 1947 , despite his own success in parliamentary elections, he resigned from the government in protest of electoral fraud . At the same time he was protesting against what he called the corruption of the government of Béchara el-Khoury and was one of the founders of the movement that later brought about the fall of el-Khoury.
On March 17, 1949, Kamal Jumblat officially founded the Parti socialiste progressiste (PSP) ( الحزب التقدمي الاشتراكي al-Hizb at-taqadummi al-ischtiraki ). The party is a full member of the Socialist International . The PSP is a secular -oriented socialist party, which is contrary to the religious character of Lebanese politics. In practice, this was particularly propagated by the Jumblat clan. In 1951 he was elected MP for Mount Lebanon for the third time .
Lebanon crisis 1958
In 1953 Jumblat was elected for the fourth time. He founded the People's Socialist Front and led the opposition to the new President Camille Chamoun . The pro-Western Chamoun tied Lebanon to the policies of the United States and Great Britain , which at the time were busy drafting the Baghdad Pact , which consisted of Hashimite Iraq , Turkey and Pakistan . This was seen by the Pan-Arabists as a coalition of imperialism and rejected by the influential Nasser movement . Jumblat supported Egypt , which was attacked by Israel , France and Great Britain during the Suez Crisis in 1956, while Chamoun and parts of the Maronites supported the invasion . Confessional tensions grew during this period, and both sides began to prepare for the violent conflict.
In 1956 he missed re-election to the National Assembly for the only time and complained about gerrymandering and electoral fraud by the authorities. Two years later he was one of the leaders of a political uprising that led to the 1958 Lebanon crisis and was directed against Camille Chamoun's Maronite- dominated government. The unrest escalated into street fights and guerrilla attacks . Although the revolt reflected a variety of political and sectarian conflicts, it was subject to an ideology of pan-Arabism and was strongly supported by Syria as part of the newly formed United Arab Republic . The uprising ended after the intervention of the United States on the side of the Chamoun government when the US Marines occupied Beirut. The political calm came with the resignation of Chamoun and the appointment of Fuad Schihab as the new President of Lebanon .
Unification of the opposition
Jumblat chaired the Afro-Asian People's Conference in 1960 and in the same year founded the National Struggle Front , a movement that brought together a large number of nationalist MPs. That year he also returned to the National Assembly (with his fifth election as MP) and his frontline won 11 seats. From 1960 to 1961 he was minister for the second time, this time Minister for National Education and in 1961 he became Minister for Public Works and Planning. From 1961 to 1964 he was Minister of the Interior .
On May 8, 1964, he won a seat in Parliament for the sixth time, and in 1966 he was appointed Minister of Public Works and Minister of Post, Telephone and Telegraphy. He represented Lebanon at the Afro-Asian Solidarity Congress and chaired a delegation of parliamentarians that visited the People's Republic of China in 1966 .
He supported the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel for ideological reasons, but also to get support from the Palestinian fedayeen , who were based in the Lebanese refugee camps . The large number of Palestinian refugees was rejected by the majority of Christians in Lebanon, but Jumblat managed to form a hard core of opposition around the Arab nationalist slogans of the Palestinian movement. Demanding a new Lebanese order based on secularism , socialism , Arabism and an abolition of the denominational system, Jumblat began to rally disappointed Sunnis , Shiites and left-wing Christians into a national opposition movement.
The road to civil war
Jumblat was elected MP for the seventh time on May 9, 1968 and was reappointed Minister of the Interior in 1970, a reward for his last-minute change of mood in the presidential election, which resulted in Suleiman Frangieh's victory with one vote over Elias Sarkis , who was like the clear winner had looked. As Minister of the Interior, he legalized the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). In 1972 Kamal Jumblat received the Order of Lenin of the Soviet Union . In the same year he was elected to the National Assembly for the eighth time. The following year was unanimously elected Secretary General of the Arab Front, a movement that was supporters of the Palestinian Revolution.
The 1970s brought growing tension in Lebanon between the Christian-dominated government and Muslim and left-wing opposition groups who demanded better representation in the government apparatus and greater integration into the Arab world . The conflict revolved around the same religious and political positions as it had during the Lebanon crisis in 1958.
Both the opposition and its key Christian opponents organized armed militias and the risk of armed conflict steadily increased. Jumblat had transferred his own PSP into an army that he made the backbone of the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), a coalition of left-wing Lebanese who demanded the abolition of the denominational quota system that discriminated against Muslims. Palestinian radicals on the opposition front also joined the LNM, and the alliance maintained good relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) . The presence of the Palestinians in the ranks of the opposition was a novelty compared to the 1958 conflict.
Lebanese civil war
In April 1975, a series of acts of revenge culminated in a massacre of Palestinian workers through the Phalange , which sparked open street fighting in Beirut. In August 1975, Jumblat announced a program to reform Lebanon's political system, and the LNM publicly questioned the government's legitimacy. In October a new round of fighting broke out and quickly spread across the country: the Lebanese civil war had begun.
From 1975 to 1976 Jumblat acted as the main leader of the Lebanese opposition in the civil war, and with the help of the PLO , the LNM quickly gained control of almost 70% of Lebanon's area. This caused the Syrian intervention at the request of the country's Christian leadership, as the Assad regime feared the collapse of the Christian-dominated order. About 40,000 Syrian soldiers invaded Lebanon in 1976 and quickly overran the positions of the LNM; a truce was declared and the fighting subsided. However, the conflict as such remained unsolved and during 1977 the violence began to escalate.
Assassination attempt on Jumblat
On March 16, 1977, Kamal Jumblat was assassinated . The primary suspects include the Greater Syrian grouping Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), which had fought alongside Chamoun against Jumblatt as early as 1958. It was not until 2005 that his son Walid Jumblat, who immediately followed him in 1977 as leader of the Druze in Lebanon and chairman of the PSP, accused Syrian intelligence agents of responsible for the murder of his father. For years, Walid had acted alternately with or against Syria and finally broke with Syria in 1991. Doubts about the Syrian involvement arose early in Lebanon. In 1985, the former GDR ambassador, Wolfgang Bator , instead blamed Israel and the United States and Lebanese right-wing extremists who belong to them.
In June 2005, George Hawi , the former general secretary of the Lebanese Communist Party , claimed in an interview with Al Jazeera that Rifaat al-Assad , the brother of Hafiz al-Assad and uncle of the current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was behind the killing of Jumblat was standing. Rumor has it in Lebanon that Syria was also involved in Hawi's death by a car bomb a few days later.
Works
Kamal Jumblat wrote more than 1200 articles, in both Arabic and French.
- Kamal Joumblat: I speak for Leban , Zed Press, London 1982. ISBN 0-86232-097-6 (Original in French; the manuscript of the book was finished a few days before Jumblat's death and was published posthumously in 1982.)
See also
Web links
- Kamal Jumblat in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
- Literature by and about Kamal Dschumblat in the catalog of the German National Library
- www.kamal-joumblat.net
Individual evidence
- ↑ Authority data entry GND 124567401 : "Ǧunbulāt (family)". Query date: June 14, 2018.
- ^ Robin Leonard Bidwell : Dictionary of Modern Arab History . London / New York 1998, p. 220.
- ↑ Michael Wolf: Between the assassination attempt and the UN . Military Publishing House of the GDR, Berlin 1985, pages 345–263.
- ↑ George Hawi knew who killed Kamal Jumblatt ( Memento June 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), Yalibnan, June 22, 2005.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Jumblat, Kamal |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Djoumblat, Kamal; Jumblatt, Kamal; Ǧunbulāt, Kamāl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Lebanese politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 6, 1917 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Moukhtara , Chouf District |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 16, 1977 |