Bassil and his Protégé Adwan: When Chickens Come Home to Roost

Gebran Bassil honeymooning with Hezbollah

Rami Adwan, the alleged rapist from the Paris Lebanese Embassy

 

 

 

Well-informed diplomatic sources reveal that the French judiciary’s investigation of the Lebanese Ambassador in Paris, Mr. Rami Adwan, has taken a dangerous development. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs has urged its Lebanese counterpart to lift the immunity off Mr. Adwan and allow him to go on trial in the two cases brought against him. “In view of the seriousness of the facts mentioned, we consider it necessary for the Lebanese authorities to lift the immunity of the Lebanese ambassador in Paris in order to facilitate the work of the French judicial authorities,” the French foreign ministry told Agence France-Presse late on Friday.

The sources say that the decision of the Lebanese Foreign Ministry to send a delegation to Paris to investigate with Mr. Adwan suggests that the Lebanese government refuses to lift Mr. Adwan’s immunity and allow the French authorities to prosecute him.

This situation, with its risks of a diplomatic row between France and Lebanon, gets much more interesting if you include Gebran Bassil inthe picture. Mr. Adwan was for years Bassil’s Office Manager before he was appointed – corruption oblige - Ambassador to Paris by none else than Bassil himself, then Foreign Affairs Minister in the Lebanese government. Mr. Bassil is the head of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a Christian party closely allied with the Iranian terrorist organization of Hezbollah.

Caught with his pants down – no pun intended – Mr. Adwan is accused of rape and intentional violence by two women employees at the Lebanese embassy in Paris. One victim said she was assaulted in the diplomat’s flat last year, while the other accused him of trying to suffocate her at her home by pressing her face to her bed. The first former employee, aged 31, filed her complaint in June 2022 for a rape she says was committed in May 2020 in the ambassador’s private flat, according to sources close to the investigation. According to the complaint, she had a relationship with the ambassador who carried out “psychological and physical violence with daily humiliations”. The second woman, aged 28, made a complaint last February after what she said was a series of physical attacks after she turned down sexual relations. She claims Adwan tried to hit her with his car after an argument on the sidelines of last year’s Normandy World Peace Forum.

Now it seems that Mr. Adwan, in typical boss-client relationship in Lebanese politics, has sent several messages to his boss, Mr. Gebran Bassil, threatening him with disclosing everything he knows about Mr. Bassil and all the shady business the latter has asked of him, if Bassil abandons him to the French authorities. This prompted Bassil to ask Lebanese Foreign Affairs Minister, Mr. Abdallah Bou-Habib, himself a crony of Bassil, to protect Adwan by refusing to lift his immunity.

The diplomatic sources say that the only thing the Lebanese Foreign Ministry can do to avoid Mr. Adwan's prosecution, is to whisk Mr. Adwan out of Paris to Beirut after questioning him. In protecting Mr. Adwan in this manner, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry would not comply with the French request to hand him over, although the charges against him are unrelated to his diplomatic work and Adwan may not benefit from immunity anyway.

The question then is: How can the FPM of Michel Aoun and Gebran Bassil ask for the resignation of the Governor of the Bank of Lebanon, Mr. Riyad Salameh, in order to hand him over to a French prosecutor when Lebanese laws protect him, while there have been no demands from the FPM to lift Mr. Adwan’s immunity and hand him over to French authorities? Does the FPM now doubt the integrity of the French judicial system in Adwan's case, after long promoting a French prosecution of the Governor of the Bank of Lebanon?

As a collaborator and a protégé of Mr. Bassil, Mr. Adwan surely knows a lot of secrets concerning the head of the FPM, which may explain why Bassil finds himself compelled to defend him at any cost. For a self-proclaimed “reformer”, Mr. Bassil is facing one more hurdle in his disastous career. He is already under sanctions by the US Treasury for corruption. His behavior in the presidential election stalemate is problematic to say the least, since he believes he alone should be president. But his ally the Iranian terrorist organization Hezbollah dumped him for an alternate traitor, Sleiman Frangiyeh. Abandoned by all the other Christian parties, and cuckolded by his former Shiite lover, he has nowhere to go but down. The Rami Adwan case is likely to dig his political grave even deeper.