Chronicle of a War 1975 - 1990
تاريخ النشر: 01/12/2005
الناشر: شركة الشرق الأوسط لتوزيع المطبوعات
نبذة المؤلف:THIS SPECIAL VOLUME of Le Memorial du Liban series covers the war which devastated Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. It is intented to perserve a memory to avoid a recurrence because the past has been forgotten. It is intended to bear witness to the insufferable barbarity of some, the errors ...of others, the cynicism of all. It is intended above all to be a tribute to the silent heroism of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens, who, whatever their beliefs and leanings, refused to submit to a collective human madness.
For fifteen years flames consumed Lebanon, its land and people, victims of a tragedy whose reasons and aims have been widely analysed, which shattered the regional political scene, left between 150,000 and 200,000 dead, uprooted hundreds of thousands and cost tens of billions of dollars.
This book does not aim to provide new revelations on the events which marked the conflict. There is no shortage of such works. In line with the policy of the rest of the Memorial du Liban, it only charts the progress of a war which, launched to free the state and its people from the suffocating grip of the Palestinians, and stoked by the direct intervention of the Syrians followed by the Israelis, ended in fratricidal infighting which destroyed any possibility of resisting foreign diktats.
In the literature on this period certain terms, coined by the goreign press and widely adopted since, are common. Too simplistic and to narrow, they should be corrected. To call the mainly Christian camp right-wing or conservative, their adversaries leftist or Islamic-progressive, is in some respect to give a false impression. Many Muslim figures did not support the Palestinian behaviour and remained outside the conflict. Similarly with a number of Christians like Raymond Edde, head of the National Bloc, who opposed the very principle of Christian militia. And was it not a tribal leader, Kamal Jumblatt, who was elevated by the so-called progressive camp to head the Lebanese National Movement?
Because the past and the present are indissolubly linked, because ane should know how to relate them in order to look to the future, this Chronicle of a War is intended only to recall a tragic past in order to exorcise it from the present. It responds to a duty to provide a memorial to those who were swept away by the catastrophe, and to the coming generations.
It would be futile to try to forget a tragedy in which the Lebanese were the main actors and the only victims. And if the present trend is towards forgiveness, surely this would be without merit or extent if it were to depend solely on forgetting. إقرأ المزيد