NNA - Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Beshara Rahi said on Friday during the launch of the book The Political Documents of Patriarch Howayek in Bkirky that in six years Lebanon will celebrate the centennial of the Lebanese state and this entails a renewed commitment to the national pact and the country's stabilizing and democratic role in the region.


The launching of the book, prepared by Priest Estephan Ibrahim El-Khoury under the supervision of the Maronite Center for Documentation and Research, brought together a host of political and religious figures among whom were former Patriarch Cardinal Mar Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, Caretaker Minister of Labour, Salim Jreissati, and MP Ibrahim Kanaan.


"The Book...puts within the reach of readers and researchers dozens of important documents on the era towards the end of the Ottoman Empire and the system of Mutasarrifiyya in Mount Lebanon as well as the emergence of Greater Lebanon...an era of pivotal importance in the history of Lebanon and the region," said Patriarch Rahi.


The state of Greater Lebanon, the predecessor of modern Lebanon, was created in 1920. The French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon was a League of Nations Mandate created at the end of World War I. When the Ottoman Empire was formally split up by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, it was decided that four of its territories in the Middle East should be League of Nations mandates temporarily governed by the United Kingdom and France on behalf of the League. The British were given Palestine and Iraq, while the French were given a mandate over Syria and Lebanon.


"The Book brings us back to the roots and origins that formed the identity, formula and message of Lebanon, and to the justification for the role of the Maronite Patriarchate at the national level."


The Patriarch was certain the hundredth anniversary of Greater Lebanon would provide the Lebanese, particularly politicians, with a sense of awareness and national commitment that would make Lebanon stand as the best model for unity and coexistence to other Middle Eastern countries which were seeking their spring.


=============R.Z.