ALQOIMKALTIM.COM, BEIRUT  — A Lebanese national has been arrested for allegedly insulting the republic’s president, Michel Sleiman, on Facebook.

Ahmad Shuman was detained shortly after he arrived in Beirut’s international airport on a flight from Kiev.

According to prosecutors, Mr Shuman committed “libel, slander and defamation” when he and three friends set up a page on the social networking website to criticise President Sleiman.

Although widely seen as the Arab world’s most democratic state, Lebanon has strict laws created to punish those who insult the president. The office is seen as the embodiment of the republic, although the position of prime minister, presently held by Saad Hariri, is considered more powerful.

The four men created a page on the website that carried the title “We don’t want a hypocrite as president”.

The page has been taken down, but a cached version carried a lengthy essay criticising Mr Sleiman’s performance as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

It also attacked the “vagueness” of his political position, claiming that he had tried to be both pro-American and pro-Syrian at the same time, and that he had ruled out peace with Israel while also backing negotiations with the Jewish state.

The four men called the president “the worst kind of failure” and wrote disparaging comments elsewhere on the website.

“You’re like a snake; all you do is from under the table,” read one.

“You’re not worth my foot,” another.

There were also claims of sectarianism that will be viewed seriously by prosecutors in a country still scarred by years of civil war.

Mr Shuman’s colleagues, Naim Hanna, Antoine Ramia and Shebel Qasab, all in their twenties, were arrested and charged with the same offences last month.

The Lebanese justice ministry defended itself from accusations of over-reaction, saying: “Media freedom in Lebanon and any civilised country reaches its limits when the content is pure slander and aimed at undermining the head of state.”

It is the first time in Lebanon that such charges have been brought against individuals for comments they made on the internet, a fact that has prompted strong criticism from human rights groups.

“These charges undermine Lebanon’s reputation as the country with the greatest tolerance for free expression in the Arab World,” Nadim Khoury, the Beirut director for Human Rights Watch, was quoted as saying in The Daily Star, a leading Lebanese newspaper.

“Using criminal laws to censor Lebanese citizens is an embarrassing step in the wrong direction for the government.”

President Sleiman has remained silent on the subject, but a message posted on his Facebook page justified the arrests, saying that the four men had crossed the line.

“The president is a keen champion of freedom of expression but even so you must punish those whose offensive language goes beyond all norms of reality,” the message read. “Is this freedom of expression or freedom of humiliation.”

The message drew several hundred messages of support from some of the president’s 60,000 Facebook “fans”. Unsurprisingly perhaps, none dared to differ except in the mildest of terms.

The four men face up to two years in prison if convicted.

Red : Enoz Trapfosi

Source : Morrison World