BEIRUT, 11 May 2003 — Lebanese Interior Minister Elias Murr has announced plans to strip thousands of mainly Palestinians of the Lebanese citizenship which he said they obtained fraudulently, media reports said yesterday. “We will annul the citizenships of all the Palestinians who do not deserve it ... and who falsified documents and submitted thousands of applications in order to obtain it,” Murr said on television late Friday in remarks carried by local press reports.
“All those who don’t deserve it will lose their Lebanese citizenship,” the interior minister said, citing namely “people who were in prison” when they obtained the nationality. On Thursday, Lebanon’s Constitutional Council asked the Interior Ministry to strip the citizenship of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Syrians naturalized in 1994 under an official decree.
The council — a 10-member body which checks if laws are in line with the constitution — issued a unanimous ruling on a petition presented by the Maronite League challenging the legality of the naturalizations. Murr said the Lebanese people had been waiting for the ruling for nearly 10 years, adding that the 1994 decree “triggered an imbalance and constituted a dangerous precedent” by granting citizenship to Palestinians.
Murr said that Lebanese President Emile Lahoud “is opposed to the integration of Palestinians and favors their right to return” to the homes they lost in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli War. Murr said a commission will be set up next week to investigate the files of 200,000 people who obtained citizenship in 1994 — a task which he expected to take “months and not years.” For his part, Muslim MP Mohammed Yahia warned against “the very dangerous repercussions of this decision on naturalizations.” The Maronite League groups leading figures of this Christian community in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Palestinian groups with offices in Damascus have decided to keep a low profile to offset US pressure on Syria to kick them out, as US Secretary of State Colin Powell returns to the region today. By common accord, 10 anti-Israeli Palestinian groups who have been based in Damascus for many years “agreed to freeze their activities because of the circumstances facing Syria,” a Palestinian source told AFP. The source, declining to be identified, was referring to the US demand for a Syrian clampdown on Palestinian groups that could undermine Washington’s plans to promote a peace “road map” between Israel and the Palestinians.
Powell discussed the issue on May 3 during talks in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar Assad, and linked future US-Syrian relations to the closure of groups on Washington’s list of terrorist organizations. Foremost on this list are the Palestinian organizations Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Ahmad Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
