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_WORLD WATCH______________________________
________________Lebanon_______________
Calls for Syrian withdrawal
Patriarch is warned on public statements
Lebanese Catholic leaders, with Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir at the fore, have been increasingly vocal recently about their displeasure with the Syrian occupation of their country. In March, the country’s Muslim leadership responded by defending the Syrian presence, and urging Christians to mute their criticisms.
During a March visit to the United States, Patriarch Sfeir made a concerted effort to call international attention to the Syrian military influence in Lebanon. Syrian troops entered that country in 1976, when civil war tore through Lebanon. At first the Syrian positions in the north and northwest of Lebanon were seen as a counterweight, balancing the Israeli military presence in the south of the country. But while the civil war ended early in the 1990s, and the Israeli troops pulled out nearly a decade later, about 35,000 Syrian soldiers remain in Lebanon. The Syrian influence over the Lebanese government is palpable; the country has become a virtual fiefdom of Damascus.
“Any homeland has to possess sovereignty,” the Maronite patriarch told a cheering crowd in Beirut after he returned from his month-long trip abroad. His words echoed the complaint raised just a few days earlier by the president of Beirut’s prestigious University of St. Joseph. Father Selim Abou, SJ, had said: “It is not so much the physical presence of this army which wounds the dignity of the Lebanese, as the symbol of domination it represents.”
Soon Muslim leaders responded with their own public statements warning that Christians should tone down their protests. Sheikh Rifai Hammoud told worshippers in Koueikhat mosque, near Akkar in northern Lebanon, that the Beirut government and moderate Christian political leaders should persuade Patriarch Sfeir to be silent. In a veiled threat, the sheikh asked security officials to “carry this message” to Christian leaders, and let them know that if the public protests against Syria continued, it “would lead to disturbance for Christians in Akkar.”
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, a leader of the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, also opposed the Catholics’ arguments, although he voiced his opposition in less ominous terms. Patriarch Sfeir and Father Abou “speak only for themselves,” he said. He argued a prompt Syrian withdrawal could cause a renewal of violence among other factions in Lebanon. “We cannot risk it,” he continued.
Still other Muslim leaders made the convoluted argument that the Maronite leader’s call for Syrian withdrawal was itself the cause of the factionalism that has plagued Lebanon for decades. “The demand by some people that the Syrian army leave Lebanon is the cause for our state of division,” said Sheikh Mohammad Rashid Kabbani, the nation’s highest Sunni Muslim religious authority. The criticism of Syrian military influence “has provoked a state of anxiety and instability in the country,” he charged.