Walid Jumblatt (born August 7, 1949) is the current leader of the Progressive Socialist Party "PSP" of Lebanon, and the most prominent leader of the Druze community. The origin of the Jumblatt family is the Kurdish Janpoulad family coming from Shamel Janpoulade and dating back to Janboulad Ibn Kassem al Kirdi al Kaisari, known as Ibn Arabou (1530-1580), and governor of Aleppo. Walid Jumblatt is the son of Kamal Jumblatt, the founder of the PSP, the party which Walid Jumblatt currently leads. He is the maternal grandson of Prince Shakib Arslan. His first wife was Gervette "Gigi," a Jordanian woman of Circassian origin who is the mother of his child Timour. His current wife is the Syrian Nora Sharabati,the daughter of the former Syrian Minister of Defense Ahmed Al-Sharabati. Walid Jumbulatt is graduated from the American University of Beirut in Political Science. The BBC describes Jumblatt as " the smartest leader of Lebanon's most powerful Druze clan and heir to a leftist political dynasty based around the Progressive Socialist Party. He is seen by many as the country's political weathervane - consistently emerging on the winning side through the twists and turns of the 1975-90 civil war and its troubled aftermath. He was a supporter of Syria after the war but, since the death of strongman Hafez al-Assad in 2000, he has campaigned for Damascus to relinquish control. Jumblatt has spoken openly of the fear that he - like murdered former PM Rafik Hariri - may face assassination because of this stance. This pitted him against former president Émile Lahoud, whom he considers a Syrian puppet, and the Lebanese Shiite party Hezbollah of which he said: "Their fighters have done a good job defying and defeating the Israeli army, OK, but the question we ask is where their allegiance goes: to a Lebanese strong central authority or somewhere else?" After the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005, Jumblatt said that a shaken Hariri had told him months before that Hariri had been personally threatened by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a 15-minute meeting in the Syrian capital Damascus in August 2004:"(President) Lahoud is me ... If you and Chirac want me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon." Jumblatt said, "When I heard him telling us those words, I knew that it was his condemnation of death." His comments have been included in the FitzGerald Report, the United Nations's report on the investigation of the Hariri assassination. The report criticizes Syria for the political tensions which preceded the assassination. The United States, the European Union and the United Nations have demanded a Syrian pullout from Lebanon and an international investigation into Hariri's murder. Jumblatt has publicly spoken of his fear of being assassinated, like Hariri, because of his current stance towards Damascus. The unsuccessful attempt on the life of his closest political ally and friend, MP Marwan Hamadeh, in October 2004 was interpreted by many as an ominous message addressed to Jumblatt.[citation needed] In an interview with The Chicago Tribune, when asked about his concerns for his safety, he answered, "That's trivial; I don't think about it. When they will come, they will come." As recently as November 2009 Jumblatt changed tack again. Syria, he now says, is the core of the Arab world; Lebanon is destined to be on its side. If he had once spoken ill of Bashar Assad, it was only in the heat of emotion, Jumblatt told al-Manar, the television station run by Hizbullah.

Politics

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