Lebanon Public Figure Directory
Nohad Machnouk was appointed as the minister of interior and municipalities in Prime Minister Tamam Salam’s government on 15-2-2014.he is a member of parliament representing Beirut’s and has served in this post since the parliamentary elections of 2009. He is a member of the “Future Bloc” coalition and the “Lebanon first” parliamentary alliance. He serves of the committees for Human Rights and Foreign Affairs.
Machnouk started his career as a journalist and writer, and has thrived at the crossroads of politics and journalism ever since. In the 1970s, Machnouk began to work for the local newspaper Beirut Al Masa and then later for the pan-Arab magazine Al Hawadeth. He specialized in the Arab-Israeli conflict and became one of its most prominent analysts.
He then went on to write for Al Ousbou’ Al Arabi, Assayad, Al Anwar, Al Dustur, and then finally settled at Annahar Al Arabi wal Douwali where he would cover an array of topics pertaining to regional politics. In 1983,Machnouk contributed to the founding of Al Liqaa Al Islami, a political gathering of prominent politicians and civil society leaders led by the late Mufti Hassan Khaled that called for an end to Syrian dominance of Lebanon and a halt to civil conflict.
After several figures of the gathering were assassinated, including the Mufti Khaled, Machnouk moved from Lebanon and settled in Cyprus then Paris up till the early 1990s. In 1988, he began working with the late Prime Minister Rafik El Hariri on the Solidaire Project and, when Hariri was chosen to form the post-war government in 1992, Machnouk was appointed Senior Political and Media advisor for the prime minister.
He served in this position up till 1998, when Syrian Intelligence forced him into exile given his anti-Syrian tendencies and amidst an orchestrated effort to weaken Hariri as a prelude to his exclusion from public life.
Machnouk took residence in Paris and then Cairo for five years, and then returned to Beirut in 2003 but remained banned from participating in public life until the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon in 2005.
In 2005,l Machnouk returned to journalism, and began writing a weekly column for Lebanese Daily Assafir, an article which was simultaneously published by the Emirati newspaper Al Bayan up till 2009. In 2010, he became a member of the Council of Trustees of the Yasser Arafat Institution.
Born in Beirut 1955, studied political Science.
Married and has four children.