- Henri Jibrayel
Henri Jibrayel, born on 18 September 1951 in
Marseille , is a French politician with Lebanese and Assyrian roots.His father was an Assyrian survivor of the
Assyrian genocide who had taken refuge with his parents in aBeirut slum. He married in 1938 aMaronite young woman from Bkassine (nearJezzine ), then joined theFree French Forces after De Gaulle'sAppeal of 18 June . After the war, the family got the French naturalisation and was hosted by its new fatherland in a slum near Marseille. The father was sent inMadagascar till 1950 to repress the anticolonial insurgency, then again inIndochina in one of France's colonial wars. In 1963, the family, including 8 children, tries a come back inLebanon , and settle in Ain al-Remmane, but this attempt leads to a fiasco and two years later the family turns back to Marseilles, Henri leaves school at 15, becomes a crane driver, and afterwards enters the French "Poste" [ [http://www.magazine.com.lb/index.asp?ArrowIndex=0&HId=&HIssueNum=2590&Category=3&DescId=6547&Desc] , Magazine-L'Hebdo (Beyrouth), Nº 2590 du Vendredi 29 Juin 2007] .
After being a trade-unionist at the "Poste", he becomes "conseiller général" for the Socialist Party in a Marseille "canton" and "maire-adjoint" in a Marseille "secteur" in 2001, then he is elected member of the
National Assembly of France on June 17, 2007 with 57.41% of votes (25.85% at the first round), so becoming one out of three [the two others areGeorge Pau-Langevin , an Afro-Caribbean woman fromGuadeloupe , elected in Paris, andArnaud Montebourg , whose mother Leïla Ould Cadi is anAlgeria n] metropolitan [in French, "France métropolitaine" refers to the European French territory, as opposed to the "France d'outremer", Overseas France, i.e. the overseas departements and territories in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and the Pacific] deputies with non European family roots.ources
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