Kudos To You Mr. President

The Lebanese President deserves praise and respect for his own choice of Ministers.

I don’t often post fawning pieces on this blog, but I also don’t often find many politicians who make decisions to further the interest of the country before their own.

The Doha agreement allotted three ministerial positions to Mr. Suleiman, yet instead of installing hardcore loyalists — perhaps from the Army — as any ambitious politician would have done, he decided to sacrifice one to end the feud between Mr. Aoun and the Murr family over the Ministry of Defense. As for the Ministry of Interior, he chose Mr. Ziad Baroud, perhaps the most qualified person in the country to supervise the upcoming elections and reform the electoral system.

Mr. Ziad Baroud is a young, energetic, promising human rights lawyer with extensive experience in electoral reform in Lebanon. Here’s a brief profile of him from an NYU school of Law website:

Ziad Baroud is a Managing Partner at Haddad Baroud Daher and Tohme Law Firm in Beirut, Lebanon. He supervises the long and short term consultancies and legal advice in various legal disciplines, including: public and administrative law, civil law, educational law and syndicate law. In addition, Mr. Baroud is the Secretary-general of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections and the Retainer legal counselor for the World Bank’s office in Beirut. He is also a Lecturer of Public, Labor and Syndicates Law at the Universite Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth in Beirut. Mr.Baroud received his Master in Law from Universite Saint-Joseph in 1992, and his Diploma in Conflict Resolution from Lebanese American University in 1996.

Here’s more from Now Lebanon:

Ziad Baroud is a lawyer and human rights activist. He is a lecturer at St. Joseph University, where he received his masters in law in 1992. Baroud’s areas of specialty are public and administrative, civil, educational, and syndicate law. He also works as a consultant with the United Nations Development Program, offering advice on local governance and decentralization, and is the retainer legal counselor for the World Bank’s office in Beirut. Baroud served as secretary general of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections and was a member of the National Council for a New Electoral Law, which wrote a draft law in 2006. He disagreed with the law’s mandate to divide the mohafaza of Mount Lebanon into two constituencies and lodged a formal objection, which was submitted to parliament along with the law.

As a disclaimer, I don’t really know anything about the third guy (Joe/Youssef taqla) except that he descends from one of the fathers of Lebanese Independence, but if his genes are any indicator, he’s hardly a yes-man.

Mr. Sleiman has put the right people at the right place, and for that he deserves our praise.