Michel Aoun
Michel Aoun was president of Lebanon from 2016 to 2022, the army commander who in 1988, when the parliament could not elect a president, had been made prime minister of a military government by the departing Gemayel and had declared a war of liberation against the Syrian army in March 1989, shelling and being shelled for six months until the Taif agreement, which he rejected, and the Syrian assault of 13 October 1990 on the Baabda palace, which sent him to the French embassy and to fifteen years' exile in Paris. He came home in May 2005 after the Syrians left, and made the alliance with Hezbollah in February 2006 that nobody had expected of the Syrians' enemy. He was elected president in October 2016 after two and a half years in which the office was empty and his allies blocked every other candidate, at eighty-one, the oldest to take it. He was born in Haret Hreik in Beirut's southern suburbs in 1933 into a modest Maronite family, joined the army in 1955, trained in France and the United States. He commanded the artillery and then the brigade that fought the Israelis at Khalde in 1982 and the Druze at Souk el-Gharb in 1983. He was commander of the army from 1984. The presidency was the collapse. The government he shared with Hariri's son and Hezbollah put the electricity on generators and the debt at a hundred and seventy per cent of output. The banks stopped paying depositors in October 2019. The protests of 17 October brought a million people out against the whole political class, his son-in-law Gebran Bassil among the most named. The pound lost ninety-five per cent of its value, and the state defaulted in March 2020 for the first time. On 4 August 2020 the ammonium nitrate that had sat in the port for six years exploded, killing two hundred and eighteen, wrecking half the city and prompting a resignation that was not his. He blocked the investigation that reached his allies, answered the World Bank's word for the crisis, deliberate depression, with silence. He said on leaving in October 2022 that the country was in a state of chaos and he had done what he could. The office stayed empty for two more years after him. He lives in Rabieh. The Free Patriotic Movement he founded is Bassil's, and his war of 1989 is the thing his supporters still cite.
- Lived: 1933 CE – ?
- Nationality: Lebanese
- Roles: president, general, politician
