Lebanese Renewal Party
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The Lebanese Renewal Party (LRP) is a banned political party in Lebanon formed in 1972 as the political arm of the paramilitary force known as the Guardians of the Cedars. It is often characterized as right-wing extremist, but by its followers as a patriotic nationalist movement. Its membership is almost exclusively Christian, but it is a secular organization. The party is still led by its founder, Étienne Saqr (Abu Arz).
[edit] History
It was formed by right-wing activists opposed to the presence of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The refugee population also included a substantial element of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters, especially after the 1970 Black September events in Jordan. This created severe tension in Lebanon, and is believed by many to have been a driving factor behind the outbreak of civil war in 1975.
During the Lebanese Civil War, the party and its militia was a small but active part of the Maronite-led alliance fighting the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) of Kamal Jumblatt, and its Palestinian allies in the Rejectionist Front and PLO. During the early fighting in the war, the party was implicated in the massacres of Karantina and Tel al-Zaatar. In 1977, the main Christian-backed militias (LRP plus the National Liberal Party and the Kataeb Party) formed the Lebanese Front coalition. Their militias joined under the name of the Lebanese Forces, but the Lebanese Forces soon fell under the command of Bashir Gemayel and the Phalange. The LNR and the Guardians of the Cedars were uncompromisingly opposed to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.
After the 1982 Lebanon War the party cooperated with Israel Defense Forces, and its militia joined the South Lebanon Army (SLA). After the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon in 2000, most of the leadership fled to Israel. The group was banned by the Syrian-dominated government and decided to give up its arms to become a traditional political party. It remains banned, and is only a minor force in national life. Still, some of the rhetoric used by the LRP in advocating its domestic policies was revived during the Cedar Revolution in 2005, which forced the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon and led to expectations of political reform.
[edit] Ideological beliefs
The Lebanese Renewal Party is ethnocentric, and believes that Lebanon is not an Arab country. It labored extensively to create or discover non-Arab cultural expressions, and went so far as to design a new alphabet for Lebanese Arabic, which it claims is a language in its own right. Accordingly, the party was staunchly opposed to Pan-Arabism, which was advocated by many in the LNM and the left-wing Palestinian movements. As far as the Lebanese Christian community is concerned, the belief that Lebanon is not an Arab country was substantiated by some segments of Lebanese society, espcecially the Maronites.
One of the main themes of the party's rhetoric was its preoccupation with ridding Lebanon of Palestinians. It regularly employed hate speech, as when the party asserted that it was "the duty of every Lebanese to kill one Palestinian" and compared them with germs, snakes, and a cancer in the body of the nation. The party still insists that all Palestinians, Syrians and other foreigners must leave Lebanon.
Another distinguishing element of the party's politics was that it advocated cooperation with Israel. While there were several other movements on the Christian side in Lebanon that cooperated with Israel during the war, the LNR was the only organization openly and ideologically committed to this, regarding a Jewish-Christian axis as the best protection against Arabism and the Palestinians.
