Saeb Salam

Saëb Salam

Saëb Salam ( Arabic صائب سلام, DMG Ṣāʾib Salām , born January 17, 1905 in Beirut ; † January 21, 2000 in Geneva ) was a politician who was Prime Minister of Lebanon four times between 1952 and 1973 .

Political career

Saëb was the son of Salim Salam, the head of a prominent Sunni family who was politically active during Lebanon's membership of the Ottoman Empire and during the French mandate of the League of Nations . Salam first became politically active when he protested against the French and British mandates in the Levant and Palestine in 1941 .

In 1943 Salam was elected to the National Assembly for a Beirut constituency. In 1946 Salam became Minister of the Interior , his first cabinet position. He became prime minister for the first time on September 14, 1952 , but his government survived only four days in the face of strikes and demonstrations and President Béchara el-Khoury was forced to resign. Salam's government also resigned. He was reappointed Prime Minister on May 1, 1953, this time by Camille Chamoun (whose election was supported by Salam); this time he remained in office for 106 days until August 16, 1953.

Salam was of Prime Minister Abdullah Aref al-Jafi appointed in 1956 to the oil minister and traded with Aramco linking the refineries Zahrani and Baddawi to the oil fields in Saudi Arabia and Iraq through the Trans-Arabian Pipeline from. President Chamoun's support for the British , French and Israeli invasion of Egypt during the Suez Crisis led both him and Jafi to protests. He participated in the following demonstrations and was injured in the process. While he was recovering in the hospital, he was placed under arrest, but was released after a five-day hunger strike .

Salam lost his seat in the parliamentary elections in 1957 , as did Jafi, Rachid Karamé (the son of Abdel-Hamid Karamé ) and Kamal Jumblat . Allegations of electoral fraud were never confirmed, but the gerrymandering of the constituencies was little controversial. The four formed an opposition bloc that became a five-month armed rebellion in 1958 against President Chamoun's plans for a second term and joining the pro-Western Baghdad Pact . The rebellion only ended with the election of General Fuad Schihab in September 1958. Salam called off the rebellion with the words that became his trademark : No winner, no loser.

Salam became Prime Minister again on August 2, 1960 and remained in office until October 31, 1961. He broke with President Schihab because he believed that Schihab gave unnecessary power to the police. During the 1960s he was in opposition to Schihab and his elected successor Charles Helou , whom he accused of making Lebanon a "police state". In 1968 he turned against political disturbances by the military reconnaissance. His rejection of Schihabism increased and in 1970 he helped form a parliamentary coalition that elected Suleiman Frangieh as president with only one vote ahead of Elias Sarkis . For the fourth time, Salam was appointed Prime Minister by Frangieh on October 13, 1970. This government lasted until April 25, 1973 and was its longest. He fell out with Frangieh and resigned after an Israeli commando in Beirut that killed three Palestinians because Frangieh refused to dismiss Army General Iskandar Ghanem for inaction. Salam stated that he was no longer available for the post of prime minister.

further activities

Salam also remained influential outside the office. After the Israeli invasion in 1982 , he mediated between the US envoy Philip Habib and the PLO under Yasser Arafat and thus enabled the PLO to be relocated from Lebanon. He opposed Bachir Gemayel's presidential candidacy but began to work with him on a number of reform proposals after his election. When Gemayel was assassinated on September 14, 1982 without having been introduced to his office, Salam supported his brother Amine Gemayel and convinced the majority of the Muslim MPs in the National Assembly to vote for Gemayel.

Exile and death

In 1985 Salam went into exile in Geneva , Switzerland , after surviving two assassinations . He had drawn the ire of the Syrian government and extreme Muslim groups over remarks at peace conferences in Geneva and Lausanne the previous year, and he did not feel safe to return to Lebanon until 1994. From his exile, he nevertheless played a key role in the negotiations that led to the Taif Agreement in 1989 and which ultimately brought about the end of the Lebanese civil war .

From 1957 to 1982 Salam chaired Makassed , a charitable organization in the field of education and health care. He had three sons, Tammam, who is now a member of parliament, Faisal, who was killed in a car accident in 1996, and Amr, a businessman, and two daughters, Thurayya and Anbara. He was married to his wife Tamima Reda Mardam-Beik from 1941 and died of a heart attack on January 21, 2000.

Web links

• Saeb Salam in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• Saeb Salam, 95, Former Lebanese Prime Minister ( New York Times obituary , Jan. 23, 2000)

predecessor	Office	successor
Nazem Akkari Chalid Schihab Ahmed Daouk Rachid Karamé	Prime Minister of Lebanon 1952–1952 1953–1953 1960–1961 1970–1973	Aref al-Jafi Aref al-Jafi Rachid Karamé Amine Hafez