I will return home and tell all, says Lebanese leader after meeting Macron
SAAD HARIRI, the Lebanese prime minister, has said he will return to Beirut in the coming days and explain his sudden resignation – and mysterious stay in Saudi Arabia – that has prompted political turmoil in Lebanon.
“I will participate in the celebrations for our independence ( on Wednesday) and it is there that I will make known my position on all the issues after meeting with the president of our republic, General Michel Aoun,” he said in Paris.
Mr Hariri made the promise at the Elysée Palace after a meeting with Emmanuel Macron during which he thanked France, a former colonial ruler of Lebanon, for the “positive political role” it is playing in the Middle East.
Mr Macron leveraged France’s close relations with both Saudi Arabia and Lebanon to secure a deal that saw Mr Hariri travel to Paris and begin a possible resolution of the crisis caused when he announced his resignation on Nov 4 from Riyadh. The French president visited the Saudi capital on Nov 9, inviting Mr Hariri to Paris to dispel fears that he was being held in Riyadh against his will.
A smiling Mr Hariri posed with his wife and eldest son on the steps of the Elysée yesterday alongside Mr Macron and his wife, Brigitte.
While Mr Hariri has insisted that he resigned of his own volition, many Lebanese believe that he was forced to step down by Saudi Arabia as part of its campaign to confront Iranian influence in the Middle East.
President Aoun, an ally of Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia group closely aligned with Iran, accused Saudi Arabia of holding Mr Hariri “hostage”.
Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre, said that whatever Saudi Arabia had hoped to achieve through the resignation of Mr Hariri, a Sunni, it had ended up uniting Lebanese citizens of all sects.
“With Lebanon so far what they’ve done has backfired,” she said.
The Arab League is due to meet today at Saudi Arabia’s request and Riyadh is pushing its fellow states to aggressively condemn Iran and the firing of a missile from Yemen into Saudi territory two weeks ago.
Meanwhile, dozens of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest men, detained in an anticorruption crackdown, are in their second week of detention in a gilded prison at Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel.