Aoun to Al-Manar: MOU Results Great despite Challenges

Source: Al-Manar TV, 06-02-2009

Three years have passed since the Memorandum of Understanding between Hizbullah and the Free Patriotic Movement has been signed...
Three years have passed on the understanding that opened a new page in the lives of the Lebanese people, a page based on dialogue and coexistence and put an end to the era of collision and conflicts...

Three years have passed on the understanding that constituted a pattern of national unity and Islamic-Christian coexistence...
Three years have passed... Yet, the MOU is always as solid as it was in the first day...

A lot were the "challenges" that the understanding met, challenges that threatened the whole understanding but were unable of removing it from the memory of the Lebanese nation...
But once again, the Memorandum of Understanding proved to be above all considerations, surpassed all challenges and prepared itself to even more challenges...

In the third anniversary of the understanding signing, Lebanese can't but recall the historic meeting that joined at one time the "Resistance leader" in reference to Hizbullah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the "Reform General" in reference to the head of Change and Reform parliamentary bloc MP Michel Aoun... a meeting that produced an understanding that turned to be the "topic of the town" for at least three years...

Commemorating the MOU's third anniversary, Aoun spoke exclusively to Al-Manar and declared that the results of the mentioned understanding were not only great but also huge and enormous despite all the challenges. "The results were more than positive and great because the challenges we met were huge," Aoun said.

He explained that the challenges were not easy to tackle: re-initiating the positioning of the two parties in the Lebanese political scene in order to create the harmony between the nation's real components, achieving the Resistance's victory against the Zionist entity in the July 2006 war, demonstrate openness to all political factions. "The national unity, safeguarded by the MOU, finally triumphed," the General emphasized.

According to the General, persisting in targeting the MOU was not strange. "It's consistent with the principle stating that everything that contradicts the ‘Israeli' goals in Lebanon must be beaten," he stressed.

Aoun made sure to tell all those who were betting on an "Israeli" war against Lebanon following the parliamentary elections that they were completely mistaken. "This is a strategic error in analysis," Aoun said, recalling that the MOU has actually closed the door before any attempt to de-stabilize the situation in Lebanon as well as to beaten the Resistance.

He concluded by noting that the live contacts between him and Sayyed Nasrallah were not so many. "But actually we don't need to meet a lot since our general principles are known and they are very close," he said, noting that everything that happened in the past three years has actually proved that.