BEIRUT, 21 June 2007 — The Arab League chief yesterday urged Lebanon’s feuding leaders to break a political impasse that has paralyzed the country and warned that “time is running out.” Amr Moussa began Tuesday a three-day visit here, in an attempt to help politicians end the months-long crisis between the Western-backed government and the Syrian-supported opposition led by the militant Hezbollah group.
Lebanon has been going through its worst political crisis since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war. Parliament is not functioning and the government just barely, after a quarter of Cabinet members resigned.
Another crisis is looming over the presidency — the legislature must vote on a replacement when President Emile Lahoud’s term ends in November, but it is highly unlikely that lawmakers will be able to agree on a candidate, in turn leading to a power vacuum.
Also, opposition supporters have been holding a sit-in outside Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s office since Dec. 1, calling for his resignation and the formation of a national unity government in which they would have veto power. Siniora, backed by the United States and the West, has refused to step down.
The Arab League delegation was dispatched to Beirut after a foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo last week in the wake of the assassination of a prominent Lebanese pro-government lawmaker. Walid Eido’s slaying in Beirut was blamed by his supporters on Syria. Many had demanded the Arabs act to end what they call Syrian interference and the smuggling of weapons into this country.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese Army yesterday said it has seized all the main positions of its Islamist foes in a besieged refugee camp, exactly a month after the launch of a showdown with Fatah Al-Islam.
“All the buildings in the new part of the camp where the terrorists were dug in have been taken, and one could say fighting has stopped in this area,” an army officer told AFP.
The new part of Nahr Al-Bared camp is an overspill roughly the same size as the original Palestinian refugee camp, whose perimeter was fixed in 1948 by the United Nations and where all the buildings were of one-story only. The northern overspill contains high-rise concrete buildings overlooking the road to the Syrian border, and it is there that diehard extremists of Al-Qaeda inspired Fatah Al-Islam have pulled back to make a last stand.
So far at least 141 people, including 74 soldiers, have been killed in the deadliest internal violence since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war that comes amid increasing political and security insecurity in deeply-divided Lebanon.
Apart from the occasional burst of automatic gunfire, the Lebanese Army’s tanks and artillery ranged on high ground overlooking the camp were silent yesterday.
The northern part of Nahr Al-Bared lining the coast is now a wasteland of shattered concrete skeletons and fallen slabs where the military is edging forward.
Since the weekend the army says it has destroyed or overrun six Fatah Al-Islam outposts and found “the bodies of several armed elements which had been apparently prepared for burial at the abandoned positions.” On Sunday, army chief Brig. Gen. Michel Sleiman predicted an end to the siege within days.
