Etienne Saqr

Etienne Saqr (last name also spelt Sakr or Sacre) is a right wing Lebanese nationalist politician and founder of the Guardians of the Cedars militia group and political party (Hiras Al-Arz in Arabic).

Saqr was born in Ain Ebel in 1937, the son of Caesar Saqr, a school principal. Saqr was educated in French schools in Tripoli and Beirut, but the elder Saqr's death in 1944 left the family in relative poverty, which precluded a university education for Etienne Saqr. Instead, he joined the Sûreté générale (General Security Directorate) in 1954 and was involved in fighting against Muslim rebel forces in the civil war of 1958. He left the police in 1969 and went into business and became politically active in Lebanese nationalist circles. He opposed the Cairo Agreement of 1969, which allowed Palestinian guerrillas to launch commando raids into Israel from bases in Southern Lebanon; he not only opposed the principle of an armed non-Lebanese force on Lebanese soil, but also viewed Israel as a natural ally of Lebanon's Christians, a position shared by few of his political contemporaries privately, and none publicly.

In the early 1970s, Saqr helped to organize the Lebanese Renewal Party, and in 1974 and 1975 he formed the Guardians of the Cedars under the nom-de-guerre Abu Arz (father of the cedars). In the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975, the Guardians of the Cedars fought under the slogans 'No Palestinian will remain in Lebanon' and 'It is the duty of each Lebanese to kill one Palestinian'. Saqr aligned the Guardians of the Cedars with the mainly Christian Lebanese Front and its military wing, the Lebanese Forces, a coalition dominated by Bachir Gemayel's Phalangist militia. Always an idealist and a militant, Saqr objected Gemayel's and others' perceived need to make practical and tactical compromises, and when the Lebanese Front accepted Syrian intervention in 1976 (which Saqr strongly opposed), he withdrew from the Front and from the Lebanese Forces. The Guardians retreated to the mountains, but continued to fight on the LF side in key battles, including East Beirut (1978 and Zahle (1981).

Openly pro-Israeli, Saqr welcomed the Israeli invasion in 1982. Other politicians (such as Gemayel and the National Liberal Party leader Camille Chamoun) cooperated with Israel in secret, and mostly for tactical reasons, but Saqr's collaboration with Israel was based on ideological conviction. From 1983 onwards, he supported Sa'ad Haddad's (and later, Antoine Lahad's Army of Free Lebanon (later known as the South Lebanon Army), a group armed, financed, and trained by Israel.

Believing that the Christian forces needed to maintain unity, Saqr refused to take sides in the feuding in the 1980s between rival Lebanese Forces factions led by Elie Hobeika and Samir Geagea, although he was ideologically closer to the latter. From 1988 to 1990, he strongly supported General Michel Aoun, but avoided alienating the Lebanese Forces, fellow-Christians with whom Aoun was feuding. Saqr supported Michel Aoun's declaration of war on Syria in March 1989, but after Aoun's defeat Saqr fled to Israeli occupied southern Lebanon. He tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Aoun to seek Israeli assistance.

Saqr was placed under house arrest in 1990 by his former allies, the Lebanese Forces, after the later accepted the Taif Agreement to end the civil war. Eventually, he was forced to leave Beirut for Southern Lebanon. Upon Israel's withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000, Saqr fled to Israel. In an address to the Knesset a few days later, Saqr rebuked his host country for withdrawing from Lebanon, charging that in doing so, Israel had ["made heroes out of Hezbollah."

Saqr is married to Alexandra, with whom he has two daughters (Pascal and Carole) and a son (Arz). He has been sentenced to death in absentia by a Lebanese court on charges of collaborating with Israel.

Sources: Guardians of the Cedars (http://www.gotc.org/) Robert Fisk: Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War.