DAMASCUS, 4 May 2005 — Syria, which ended 29 years of military presence in Lebanon last month, said yesterday a joint Syrian-Lebanese military committee would check to see if an old Syrian border post was on right side of the frontier. An Arab satellite channel has shown footage of the post near a village in the Bekaa Valley and said Syrian troops were still present in Lebanon.
“An official source said that the general command of the army and armed forces has decided in coordination with the leadership of the Lebanese Army to form a joint military committee that includes officers and topography experts to probe this issue,” the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported.
The agency said the source was commenting on reports that said “a number of Syrian soldiers have crossed the Syrian-Lebanese border in the area of Deir Al-Aashaer and the east of Kfar Kouk”.
The post has been near the village of Deir Al-Aashaer since before 1976 when Syria rushed troops into Lebanon to help end the 1975-1990 civil war. Some Lebanese say it is about 300 meters inside Lebanon, others say it is in Syria.
Syria said in April that it had completed the withdrawal of all of its troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon in line with a UN Security Council resolution that also requires the Arab state to end its sway over Lebanese politics. A United Nations team is verifying the Syrian withdrawal.
The agency said separately Lebanon’s new Prime Minister Najib Mikati would visit Syria today to discuss ties with Damascus. Sources said Mikati was expected to meet Syrian President Bashar Assad. Mikati’s new government, which won a vote of confidence in Parliament on Wednesday, is preparing for parliamentary elections on May 29, the first without a Syrian military presence for 33 years.
Mikati said in an interview published Monday that Syrian troops are located in Deir Al-Aashaer “but we are certain that the Syrian position falls within Lebanese territory”. “We will of course speak with Syria about this when I visit Damascus,” he told France’s Le Monde newspaper.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese opposition yesterday pressed for 11th-hour changes to an electoral law it regards as favorable just two days before the president is to call parliamentary elections. Opposition parties want revisions to the constituency boundaries established for the last elections in 2000 and, after a five-day parliamentary recess for public holidays, today will be their last opportunity to change the law. But so far Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a pro-Syrian Shiite, has rebuffed calls for a debate.
“It is all in Berri’s hands,” Christian opposition MP Nayla Moawad told AFP. “The 2000 electoral law is the worst. It was passed under Syrian tutelage in order to guarantee the control of the Syrian-Lebanese intelligence services over the Lebanese Parliament,” she charged.
Another opposition MP, who asked not to be identified, said he feared Berri would prevent any debate as the existing law favored his Amal faction. An earlier attempt by the opposition to put forward amendments in a parliamentary committee Thursday proved abortive after they failed to reach a quorum. Most opposition MPs said they would prefer to see the elections go ahead on schedule later this month, as required by the constitution, rather than delaying them for the sake of changing the boundaries.
