Etienne Saqr was born in 1937 in the southern Lebanese village of Ain Ebel, one of eleven children reared by Caesar Saqr, a school principal. He was weaned on the memory of an infamous massacre of Christian villagers by local Shi'ite Muslims in May 1920, which claimed the life of his grandmother. Saqr acquired a French education typical of Maronite families in Lebanon, passing the years of his youth at schools in Tripoli and Beirut. After the death of his father in 1944 left his family without financial resources, Saqr was forced to forgo a university education. Instead, at the age of seventeen, he went to work for the Sureté Générale (General Security Directorate). This apprenticeship in national security, which saw him officiating at various posts along the Syrian border, influenced his thinking about the fragility of Lebanese sovereignty. During the early 1960s, he took part in the crackdown against the Syrian Social National Party (SSNP), a group favoring unity with Syria, which had carried out a failed coup attempt in 1961.
In 1962, Saqr moved from the geographical and political periphery of the country to the capital city and assumed a position in the presidential palace. The next eight years allowed him to study the presidencies of Fouad Shihab and Charles Helou and reflect upon the problems of weak leadership. During this period, Etienne married his wife, Alexandra, from Zahle and together they bore two daughters, Pascal and Carole, and a son, Arz.
In 1969, exasperated by the government's inability to confront this growing threat to Lebanese security, Saqr left the Sureté Générale and went into private business, giving him the freedom to become politically active. He soon established a rapport with intellectual personalities who shared his anxiety about the impending calamity, such as the poet Said Aql (who he would later call his mentor).
In 1974, he went to Baalbek to buy weapons and recruited a small group of nationalist-minded Lebanese to prepare for the Palestinian threat. The following year, the group was formally established as the Guardians of the Cedars ( Hiras Al-Arz ).
On the issue of the Palestinians, Saqr advocated unyielding confrontation and made clear the Guardians ultimate wartime objective - that "no Palestinian shall be left on the soil of Lebanon." Asked how he would achieve this in a July 1982 interview, Saqr replied, "Very simple. We shall drive them to the borders of brotherly Syria." The Jerusalem Post , 23 July 1982.
Throughout the war, Saqr's forces closely coordinated with the key Christian militias - Pierre Gemayel's Phalange militia, commanded by his son, Bashir; Camille Chamoun's Tigers militia, commanded by his son, Dany; and the Marada Brigades of then-President Suleiman Frangieh, commanded by his son, Tony.
Realizing that his Christian allies lacked the strength of will to fight the Syrian presence (or even to stop fighting each other), in 1982 Saqr openly welcomed invading Israeli forces. Since the mid-1970s, Saqr had developed a public and amicable relationship with Israel that was unique in the politics of Beirut. Whereas Chamoun and Gemayel had sought and received Israeli military aid due to short-term strategic considerations and avoided public discussion of their ties to Israel, Saqr believed there to be a common destiny binding the Jewish and Lebanese peoples in the Arab-dominated Middle East and never wavered from expressing this view openly.
Abu Arz continued to maintain neutrality with regard to the internecine quarrelling which continued to plague the Christian community in the 1980s, particularly the rivalry within the LF between Samir Geagea and Elie Hobeika . While Saqr opposed Hobeika's attempt to lead the LF toward accommodation with Syria (which culminated in the Tripartite Agreement of September 1985), he was greatly disturbed by the fighting which broke out between pro-Geagea and pro-Hobeika forces in late December and persuaded Army Commander Michel Aoun to intervene and prevent the slaughter of Hobeika's men. In part because of his efforts to stop the bloodshed, Saqr was invited by Camille Chamoun to join the newly reestablished Lebanese Front, the political body parallel to the LF.
While he had been instrumental in the founding of the LF in 1976, he disagreed with the narrow Christian ethos that came to prevail within it and sympathized with Aoun, who enjoyed broad support from all sectarian communities. Seeking to bring an end to the bloodshed, he mediated between the two sides when Geagea's fighters were defeated by army units in Monteverde and Beit Mery in the Metn region. At the time, Abu Arz was present daily at the presidential palace at Baabda with Aoun.
Abu Arz firmly supported Aoun's declaration of a war of liberation to oust the Syrians in March 1989, though he questioned the lack of political strategy to assure success. Syria by that time had received firm American support for its occupation of Lebanon, which was further legitimized by the October 1989 Taif Accord. Abu Arz implored Aoun to seek Israel's assistance, but the general refused and persisted in condemning the Israelis nearly as loudly as he condemned the Syrians. Nevertheless, Abu Arz formed the Broad Front for Liberation and Change as a political cover for Aoun's military struggle. After the LF accepted the Taif Accord in 1990, he and his family were placed under house arrest by LF forces. He was later forced to leave Beirut and went to live in southern Lebanon.
Rather than joining Amine Gemayel and other notable Maronite exiles in Paris, Saqr decided to relocate to the southern border region under the control of Israel and the SLA. Over the years, Etienne secretly visited his family and party members twice in Beirut, avoiding the eyes of the ubiquitous Syrian mukhabarat (intelligence services).
Although Abu Arz conducted political activities from Sabbah, near Jezzine, during the next decade, he was not allowed to play a military role. In February 1998, he wrote a four-page proposal calling for the transformation of the security zone into a launch pad for the liberation of all Lebanon, but Israeli military commanders and their SLA counterparts would entertain no thoughts of offensive action. As Israeli public support for a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon increased rapidly toward the end of the 1990s, Saqr vigorously lobbied the Israeli government to allow the transformation of the SLA into an autonomous force capable of fending off Hezbollah attacks after the departure of Israeli forces, but to no avail. Taking his appeal to the United States, Saqr addressed a Lebanese-American conference in Washington in June 1998 and testified at a congressional committee hearing in February 2000.
In May 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered a precipitous IDF military withdrawal from south Lebanon, without warning SLA commanders, leading to the collapse of the militia and the flight of around 7,000 Lebanese, including Saqr himself, into Israel. Addressing a group of Israeli parliamentarians in the Knesset a few days later, Etienne rebuked his host country, charging that Israel had "made heroes out of Hezbollah."
Since the Syrians completed their conquest of Lebanon in 1990, the authorities in Beirut have constantly cracked down on the Guardians of the Cedars. Saqr himself has been sentenced in absentia to death by a Lebanese court on charges of "collaborating with the Zionist enemy." Those members of the Guardians in Lebanon who have openly identified themselves as such have been indicted on similar charges. Indeed, the authorities have assaulted and jailed many Lebanese purely on the basis of having met with Saqr. In 1996, a journalist for the daily Al-Nahar , Pierre Atallah, was brutally beaten by plainclothes security agents after meeting with him and forced to flee abroad. In August 2001, Lebanese security forces arrested Habib Younis, the former Beirut bureau chief of the London-based daily Al-Hayat, and Claude Hajjar, a prominent human rights activist, on charges of plotting with Saqr to organize opposition to the Syrians.
Despite the enormous personal sacrifice he has been forced to make, Saqr remains defiantly opposed to the Syrian presence in Lebanon and continues to insist that he will "bend only to God."