Bassil at the Free Patriotic Movement annual fundraising dinner

"Today we live the citizen liberation (from dependency) and the state liberation (from corruption) and we are paying the price." - Bassil

14/3/2018

(Edited and translated by the M. E. Times Int'l)

The "Free Patriotic Movement" organized its annual fundraising dinner and on the occasion Minister Gebran Bassil, the head of the FPM, delivered a speech, in which he said:

The war has evaporated but the liberation has remained.

The casual people of history have left but we stayed together to commemorate the meaning of liberation, because we have lived the land liberation and paid the price. Today we live the citizen liberation (from dependency) and the state liberation (from corruption) and we are paying the price.

Historically, the nations are experiencing exceptional moments of reunion that are not easily repeated. We lived these moments in the seventeenth century with Fakhr el-Din, who went into exile and then the Lebanese nation nucleus was formed.

The March 1938 coup with Michel Aoun resulted in the will to liberate the land and the decision, and most importantly, it reversed the misconception that "Lebanon's strength resides in its weakness" and was replaced by the idea of a "strong Lebanon" that has founded the strong Lebanese state based on the Lebanese army and not the militias. Then came the liberation of Lebanon from the Israeli occupation in 2000, from the Syrian guardianship in 2005, Israel’s breakup in the July 2006 war and the expulsion of terrorism in August 2017… This is the essence of understanding between us and Hezbollah, the protection of Lebanon and its strength.

The same option is clear from the 1989- the leader and the people chose the liberation and the political class mostly chose abroad. When we returned in 2005, we discovered that they wanted to transfer us from one tutelage to the other. From then on, the torch of struggle and resistance did not flame out. On the contrary, the pain turned into a force that made us refuse to surrender under the most difficult circumstances. We refused and we resisted because freedom is the same, the aim is to liberate the citizen instead of the land, liberate the partnership from “the quadruple detention”, by the power of the charter and the right.