The Diplomat

If anyone had told Kabalan Frangieh ‘94 that at the age of 27, he would be responsible for saving almost 200 people from impending death, he wouldn’t have believed it.

And yet, in 2003, as the newly assigned Deputy Chief of Mission to the Ivory Coast in West Africa, urgent appeals reached him from petrified and stranded Lebanese nationals residing in Monrovia - who make up much of the merchant class of Liberia – of being trapped in their homes without food or water. Around them, the shelling was incessant. They desperately appealed for help to get out of the country as rebels besieged the capital. Humanitarian and aid agencies have already been forced to shut down operations because of the danger.

Staff at the Lebanese Embassy had been evacuated. Frangieh and one other employee were on their own.

Americans and Europeans were already evacuating their nationals. I can do this, thought Kabalan. I have to bring them here to the Ivory Coast, and quickly. The reports from Liberia described massacres. Don’t panic, Kabalan. Think.

It was then that a sense of calm came over him as he remembered his days in India. It was his first post in the service. At only 23, he was assigned to the Lebanese Embassy in India as Deputy Chief of Mission. He was a newbie, relatively untrained, and still confused about his career choice. Just one week after his arrival, the ambassador went on holiday, leaving the young anxious Frangieh fumbling to find what his duties exactly entailed. For a few days, he allowed this incessant anxiety to engulf him. I wanted to come to India, he reminded himself. I wanted to be different. Prove that you can do it.

Only two years earlier, he was an AUB student rallying his peers to take part in the student movement he co-founded with other IC alumni at the university. The ‘Commoners’ promised to change everything at the university from the administration to the campus itself. A handful at IC, (“I am what I am” he had written defiantly under his 1994 torch picture), he became a full-blown activist at AUB. He continuously felt that he had to make the world better for people around him. Upon graduation and after

giving the valedictorian speech, he sat for a diplomacy test. Not that he wanted to be a diplomat. But just because there was a test. He passed with flying colors and somehow found himself in the rather unwanted foreign service. I don’t like it, he thought, but here I am.

He was given a choice of countries for his first assignment. Without hesitation, he chose India. It was beginning to dawn on him that his ego was getting rather inflated. Materialism around him was also beginning to irk him. He longed for some spiritual growth. He knew that he would find that growth in India. And so he packed a small bag and set off to the mystic orient. Now, with the ambassador on a two-month leave, Frangieh found himself running the Lebanese Embassy. The anxiety eventually gave way to a sense of efficiency. By the time the ambassador returned, Frangieh had picked up all the diplomacy nuances and duties required. Along the way, he had also picked up what he had long yearned for: a spiritual awakening. He had even acquired an Indian guru. Slowly but surely, his perceptions changed. The avid activist boy in him grew into a levelheaded adult.

“I started the journey in India of really becoming a man on the spiritual plane and not on the material plane as you are taught to be,” he said. “This was my real personal growth. Me, Kabalan, and not the product of my parents, my school, or university. And this helped me a lot in my career.”

And now was the biggest moment in his career – and life – so far: saving his people in Liberia.

Kabalan Frangieh in South Africa

It was a race against time. Frangieh discovered that a French Navy ship off the Liberian coast, Orage, had evacuated the European and Americans. That’s our only chance, he thought. They must go back and pick up the Lebanese.

He grabbed the phone and placed a call to the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There’s a French ship that just set off. Ask it to come back. The ministry contacted the then Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. The PM called French President Jacques Chirac.

The phone rang. The ship was coming back! In a fervent state now, Frangieh called his counterpart in Liberia. Get the Lebanese nationals to the ship. Now. To the sound of heavy mortar fire, the Lebanese managed to flee to the port.

Meanwhile, Frangieh called the Lebanese council members in Ivory Coast to a meeting. When he had arrived over a year ago, the Lebanese community members were at odds. To his surprise, the Lebanese in Africa had allegiances to the

various sects in Lebanon. Even here, he had thought sadly. He had then insisted on holding many reconciliatory meetings. Put your differences aside and find a common goal. It worked. The members had become much closer.

Now, he called on them for help. This is the situation he told them: We have just under 200 Lebanese stranded in Liberia. We are going to bring them here to the Ivory Coast. We arranged 72-hour visas for them, but now we need to provide them with hotels, meals, and airline tickets to Beirut. Will you help?

The Ivory Coast Lebanese quickly got on the job. A few hours later, 175 shellshocked passengers got off the ship and were warmly welcomed by the Ivory Coast Lebanese. Hotel rooms and meals were ready. In the interim, Frangieh contacted MEA, which sent one of their airplanes to the Ivory Coast. Twenty-four hours later, the evacuees were on their way to Beirut.

As Frangieh came to the hotel lobby to bid them goodbye, one elderly man approached him and showed him a label sewn inside his pants: “Made by Hanna Khoury,” it stated. Khoury was Frangieh’s maternal grandfather, a famous tailor in Liberia in the 1950s.

“I remember your grandfather well,” explained the elderly man. “You are as good-hearted as he was.”

After a three-year appointment in Vienna, Frangieh was posted in Poland and adopted its Lebanese Ambassador, Massoud Maalouf, as his mentor. From

him, he learned the art of diplomacy. “He was my example as an ambassador,” recalled Frangieh. “So giving, so generous, so competent, so honest and straightforward.”

Ironically, Frangieh was then contemplating a move to leave diplomacy. But Maalouf talked him out of it, and Frangieh found himself not only accepting his career choice but resolving to excel in it. “Thanks to him, I now know what it was to be competent.”

And so it was with this new determination that he accepted the post in São Paulo, Brazil, as Lebanon’s Consul General to São Paulo.

He was quick to note that the closeknit Lebanese community in Brazil had practically little or no contact with their home country. “Untouched and unrecognized” by Lebanese diplomats, as described by Frangieh.

According to the Brazilian and Lebanese governments, around 7 million of Brazil’s population are of Lebanese

Arab Chambers honors outgoing Lebanon consul

descent. The Lebanese, who began to immigrate to Brazil in the late 19th century, seemed to be everywhere to Frangieh; in the parliament, businesses, trades, theatre, TV, schools. “There were more Lebanese here than in Lebanon,” said Frangieh.

For Frangieh, now 31, it was the ultimate challenge: bringing them home. Spiritually if not physically. And so began an endless series of meetings, events, lunches, dinners, “you name it,” he said. “We reached out to everyone.”

Finally, in 2016, 300 Brazilian-Lebanese nationals were flown into Lebanon to take part in a conference and tour, organized by the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They represented all walks of Brazilian life from politicians and professors to actors and singers, including a Formula 1 driver. Among them were filmmakers and journalists. Back in Brazil, a series on Lebanon began to appear on television and social media. The number of Brazilian tourists arriving in Lebanon increased significantly. Similar tours followed in the next few years.

But perhaps the most poignant moment for Frangieh was fulfilling his then bedridden grandmother’s wish. “Find my brother,” she had asked. “I don’t know what happened to him.” Frangieh’s maternal grandparents and their children had immigrated to Brazil in the 1950s. Only one daughter – recently married - stayed behind in Lebanon (the mother of IC’s math teacher, Jeanette Frangieh). Over time, the family lost touch. It would be years before word reached them that Frangieh’s grandparents and sister had died. Only one brother remained. After much effort, Frangieh managed to find him. A tearful family reunion followed. Unfortunately, Frangieh’s grandmother died before knowing that her brother had been found and was alive.

“This career is my journey in life and is still a discovery process for me,” said Frangieh. “What I do know for sure is that I want to be involved in Lebanon, and I like to make the life of Lebanese living abroad easier. Lebanon is my country, and I will fight for it until the end.”

In 2018, Frangieh became the ambassador of South Africa. He is also responsible for Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The staff has been given strict instructions that all embassy guests are to be given the five-star treatment. He is currently in the process of opening up South African/ Lebanese communities to Lebanon.