Background
He was born Abdel Majid Mohamed Tayeb Rafei in 1927 in a Tripoli family pre-occupied by Arab nationalist ideas.
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Abdul Majid al-Rafei
Edit ProfileGeneral politician head of Socialist
Education
After Lebanese Independence, he studied medicine in University of Lausanne, Switzerland and practiced medicine in the 1950s in Tripoli gaining huge support base. In 1957 he attended a general Baath gathering and became an official member and one of the highest figures in the unified Baath Arab Socialist Party in Lebanon.
Career
During the French Mandate of Lebanon, in May 1941, Al-Rafei demonstrated in support of the Iraqi nationalist officers uprising against the British Mandate in Iraq. But with tensions increasing between the two factions, the two Baathist parties of Lebanon were on a war footing. In 1968, he was a candidate for Tripoli election district in the 1968 general election.
With continuous extensions of the Lebanese Parliament because of impossibility of conducting Parliamentary elections because of the Lebanese Civil War and its repurcussions, he retained his seat until 1989 with the Taif Agreement and the ensuing general elections in the country. During the Syrian hegemony of Lebanon, the Iraqi branch of the Baath party headed by Abd al-Majid al-Rafei came under increasing pressure by the Syrian rulers and its activities greatly curtailed.
Politics
Heading the Iraqi faction of the historical Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party and its Iraqi wing, he is now the head of Socialist Arab Lebanon Vanguard Party. With the split of the party between the pro-Iraqi Ba'ath branch and the pro-Syrian Ba'ath branch, both factions initially became part of the National Front against the rule of President of the Republic Camille Chamoun in the 1958 Civil War. The party was active in 1960s demonstrations, and al-Rafei was detained by Lebanese authorities for his political activities during the rule of President Fuad Chehab.
The party expanded during the first half of the 1970s, and in the 1972 general election was elected to the Lebanese parliament from Tripoli bringing in 543 higher votes than the career politician and Lebanese Prime Minister for several times Rashid Karami. In 1983, after the ouster of Yasser Arafat and his supporters from Tripoli, in a campaign organized by the Syrian government and pro-Syrian political groupings in Lebanon and pro-Syrian Palestinian factions, al-Rafei, one of the biggest anti-Syrian figureheads in Tripoli and the General Secretary of the pro-Iraqi Baathist Party - Lebanon went into voluntary exile to Iraq. After the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussain was toppled in 2003 by the Western Coalition forces, al-Rafei returned to Lebanon with tacit agreement of the Syrian government and pro-Syrian political parties on certain political restrictions of no plans for relaunching of the Iraqi faction in Lebanon.
After the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri and the ensuing Cedar Revolution and the withdrawal of the Syrian forces, the Iraqi faction has been reorganized as Hizb Al-Taliyeh Lubnan Al-'Arabi Al-Ishtiraki (in Arabic حزب طليعة لبنان العربي الاشتراكي known in English as Socialist Arab Lebanon Vanguard Party).
