Bechara El Khoury - Political Career

Political Career

Khoury founded the Ad-Dustour Party and served as a Cabinet minister prior to his election as President on 21 September 1943. He was a strong nationalist who opposed the French Mandate, and on 11 November 1943, he was arrested by Free French troops and imprisoned in the Rashaya Tower for eleven days, along with Riad El-Solh (the Prime Minister), Pierre Gemayel, Camille Chamoun, and numerous other personalities who were to dominate politics in the generation following independence.

Massive demonstrations forced the Free French forces to release the prisoners, including Khoury, on 22 November 1943, a date now celebrated as Lebanon's national independence day.

Khoury is remembered for his part in drawing up the National Pact, an agreement between Lebanon's Christian and Muslim leaders which forms the basis of the country's constitutional structure today, although it was not codified in the Constitution until the Taif Agreement of 1989. In the Pact, Christians accepted Lebanon's affiliation with the Arab League and agreed not to seek French protection, which Muslims agreed to accept the Lebanese state in its present boundaries and promised not to seek unification with neighbouring Syria. The Pact also distributed seats in the National Assembly in a ratio of six Christians to five Muslims, based on the 1932 census (this has since been modified to represent followers of the two religions equally). Most significantly, the three main constitutional offices (President, Prime Minister, and National Assembly Speaker) were assigned to a Maronite Christian, Sunni Muslim, and Shi'a Muslim, Lebanon's three largest confessions, respectively.

Khoury's years in office were marked by great economic growth, but the 1948 Israeli War of Independence (in which Lebanon fought on the Arab side) strained the Lebanese economy with its financial cost and with the influx of some 100,000 Palestinian refugees. These factors, along with suspicions of corruption in Khoury's administration, provoked massive demonstrations which forced him to resign on 18 September 1952. He was succeeded by Camille Chamoun, although technically Fuad Chehab succeeded him temporarily as acting president.