BEIRUT: Lebanon’s new national unity government won a vote of confidence in Parliament yesterday following stormy debates among rival lawmakers on the thorny issue of Hezbollah weapons.
The vote will allow the 30-member Cabinet — which was formed by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora a month ago under a May power-sharing accord that ended a dangerous political crisis — to finally start work. “One hundred MPs have given their confidence to the Cabinet, five voted against and two abstained,” Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri told the assembly, which currently has 127 MPs.
MPs from rival factions have locked horns in sharp exchanges over the arsenal of the Hezbollah movement, which insists it has the right to resist Israel. “Despite some of the sharp criticisms expressed by some of the MPs ... we are determined to turn over a new page in our relations,” Siniora said in an address before the vote.
The confidence motion follows the government’s drafting of a policy statement that also insists on “the right of Lebanon, its people, its army and its resistance to liberate its land.”
The ruling majority in Parliament nevertheless insists on the Shiite militia’s disarmament, something vehemently rejected by Hezbollah and its political allies.
It is the first government to be formed after the crisis between rival factions that degenerated into violence that left 65 dead in May, taking the country to the brink of a new civil war.
Controversy over Hezbollah’s weapons intensified after its fighters captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid in July 2006 that sparked a 34-day war that devastated Lebanon. It boiled over again when Hezbollah led an armed takeover of large swathes of predominantly Sunni west Beirut during the May unrest, the worst since the 1975-1990 civil war.
The Hezbollah-led opposition, with 11 ministers, has the power of veto in the new Cabinet under the May accord between the rival factions that allowed MPs to elect a new president after a six-month vacuum.
