Saad Hariri’s block vows to overthrow Lahoud After Elections
Sunday, 22 May, 2005 @ 5:42 PM

NaharNet, Lebanon
May 22 2005

Aramoun, Lebanon: The Hariri Block has vowed to unseat President Lahoud
once the May-June elections install a Lebanese parliament free from
Syria’s influence for the first time since the1975-1990 civil war
guns fell silent.

Legislators of slain ex-premier Rafik Hariri’s bloc in the current
parliament took the ‘topple-Lahoud’ oath in an elections rally in
suburban Aramoun on Beirut’s southern flank, calling Lahoud the head
of Lebanon police state pyramid.

The oath coincided with reports that coalition negotiations between
Gen. Aoun and Walid Jumblat were teetering on the brink of collapse
over the Aley-Baabda election tickets, with the General expected to
hold a news conference Sunday or Monday to formalize the schism.

The first anti-Lahoud salvo at the Aramoun rally came from legislator
Walid Ido. “The dweller of the Baabda palace will have one option after
the elections are over, which is to quit. We will tell him ‘go because
you have long been the source of all crises in the country,” Ido said.

“People are bent on shooting the ballots from the polls at Rafik
Hariri’s assassins. The truth about the assassination will begin to
unfold after you go,” said Ido in a thinly veiled charge of a Lahoud
complicity in Hariri’s Feb. 15 murder.

Another Hariri legislator, Serge Toursarkissian, an Armenian, said in
a speech in fluent Arabic at the Aramoun rally: “Three victories are
in store for us in the polls: We shall enter the new parliament en
masse, we shall be in the new government also en masse and we shall
finally enter the Baabda Palace,” he said.

Saad Rafik Hariri, who fielded three tickets for all 19 Beirut seats
in Parliament on a platform of tribute to his father’s policies,
was absent from the Aramoun rally because he had not returned yet
from a private visit to Saudi Arabia.

Source: Naharnet

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress