Pierre Gemayel (last name also spelt Jumail) was a Lebanese statesman. He is remembered as the founder of the Kataeb Party (also known as the Phalange Party]], as a parliamentary powerbroker, and as the father of Bashir Gemayel and Amine Gemayel, both of whom were elected President of the Republic in his lifetime. Gemayel was known for his opposition to foreign domination of Lebanon - whether by the Ottomans, France, or any other power, for his belief in the coexistence of Christians and Moslems in a single state, and for his abhorrence of Lebanon being used as a proxy battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A controversial politician, he survived several assassination attempts.
Pierre Gemayel was born in Bifkaya, Lebanon, on 6 November 1905. A Maronite Catholic, he was educated at Jesuit schools, and went on to study Pharmacology at the French Faculty of Medicine in Beirut, where he later opened a pharmacy.
It was often said of Gemayel that politics was in his blood. His family was one of the traditional leading families of the Maronite Community, and had played a prominent role in the town of Bifkaya since 1540. Pierre Gemayel himself got his first taste of politics at an early age, when his father and uncle, who had opposed Ottoman control of Lebanon, were sentenced to death in 1914 and were forced to flee into exile in Egypt. The family returned to Lebanon at the end of World War I, and Gemayel's uncle became a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, which led to the Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of the League of Nations. In 1935, Gemayel was appointed to lead Lebanon's Olympic team at the Olympic Games in Berlin. There he had a chance to study the organization of Germany's Nazi Party. Gemayel strongly opposed Nazi ideology, but admired their formidable and efficient organization, and concluded that to have any hope of success, any Lebanese nationalist movement would have to be structured similarly. Accordingly, on his return to Lebanon in 1936, he founded the Kataeb Party together with four colleagues, one of whom was Charles Helou, who later served as Lebanon's President from 1964 to 1970.
By the end of 1936, membership of the Kataeb Party had grown to three hundred. Alarmed by the rapid growth of what they saw as a seditious movement, French authorities ordered Gemayel to disband the party in 1937. He refused, and Kataeb members had their first skirmish with French police in Beirut. Gemayel was arrested, but was soon released. The party continued to grow, and by 1943 its membership reached 35 000. In that year, the National Assembly declared Lebanon independent of France. Free French forces, who followed General Charles de Gaulle, responded by arresting Bishara Khoury, who had been proclaimed President of the new republic, along with other prominent figures. Gemayel helped to organize a national uprising which forced the Free French, who were still fighting to regain control of their own country from the Vichy regime, to realize that holding Lebanon was a lost cause.
In the early years following Lebanon's independence, Gemayel's influence and that of the Kataeb Party was limited. In the Civil War of 1958, however, he emerged as the leader of the Christian opposition to radical Nasserist elements trying to overthrow the government of President Camille Chamoun, and in the aftermath of the war was appointed a cabinet minister in the four-member Unity government. Two years later, Gemayel was elected to the National Assembly, from a Beirut constituency, a seat he was to hold for the rest of his life. By the ending of the 1960s, the Kataeb Party held 9 seats in the National Assembly, making it one of the largest groupings in Lebanon's notoriously fractured parliament. Gemayel continued to hold cabinet posts intermittently throughout the remaining quarter-century of his life.
In 1969, Lebanon was forced by the Arab League to allow Palestinian guerillers to set up bases on Lebanese soil, from which to carry out raids against Israel. Despite his misgivings, Gemayel believed that Lebanon really had no choice, and resolved to negotiate the best deal he could. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) never observed the terms of the agreement, and Gemayel regretted not having stood up more firmly against the Palestinian intrusion. In the 1970s, the Kataeb was to build a private army, which came to be commanded by Gemayel's son Bashir, to oppose the armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon. This private army was secretly helped by Israel. It is one of the many ironies of Lebanese politics that a party that initially drew inspiration from the virulently anti-semitic Nazi movement in Germany (although it never stood for Nazi ideology), was later to become a close collaborator with the Jewish state.
In the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Gemayel initially welcomed Syrian intervention, believing that the Syrian army alone was capable of disarming the Palestinian guerrillas, whom he had come to regard as terrorists. It soon became clear, however, that Syria was occupying Lebanon for reasons of its own, and intended to use Lebanon as a proxy front for wars against Israel. In 1976, he joined other mainly Christian leaders, including former president Camille Chamoun, the diplomat Charles Malik, and the radical Guardians of the Cedars Party leader Etienne Saqr, in forming the Lebanese Front to oppose the Syrian occupation. In 1978, the Lebanese Front joined the Lebanese regular army in an unsuccessful 100-day war against the Syrian army. On October 11, Gemayel bitterly denounced the Syrian military presence in Lebanon.
Gemayel saw his younger son, Bashir Gemayel, elected President of Lebanon on August 23, 1982. Bashir was assassinated by pro-Syrian terrorists on September 14, nine days before his scheduled inauguration. Bashir's older brother, Amine Gemayel was elected to replace him. Pierre Gemayel himself initially stayed out of his son's government, but in early 1984, after participating in two conferences in Lausanne, Switzerland, aimed at ending the civil war and the occupation of the country by Syrian and Israeli troops (which had invaded the country in 1982), he agreed to served once more in a Cabinet of National Unity. He was still in office when he died in Bifkaya, on 29 August 1984, aged 78 years.
