Lebanon should cling to the United Nations Security Council to avoid being sucked into the orbit of any outside power as it emerges from Israel’s devastating war with Hezbollah guerrillas, former President Amin Gemayel said.
”Lebanon is a battlefield for others,” said the 63-year-old Maronite Christian leader — who should know.
His own United States-allied administration lost a violent contest with Syrian- and Iranian-backed groups determined to expel an United States-led multinational force and scupper a US-brokered agreement he reached with Israel after its 1982 invasion.
”We have to be very careful to stick to the Security Council as our only international interlocutor to solve the problems on our borders and not rely on any bilateral relations,” he said.
Gemayel said a relative consensus on Lebanon among the Security Council’s five permanent members made it easier now to muster UN support than during his 1982/88 term, when the top world body was still divided by Cold War rivalries.
He said even Syria, which he accused of consistently trying to ”punish and destroy Lebanon”, had an interest in regaining its respectability in dealing with the Security Council.
Gemayel said he feared that Security Council Resolution 1701, which halted five weeks of fighting, might suffer the same fate as a 1978 resolution after Israel’s first land invasion.
The 1978 measure was fulfilled only in 2000 when Israeli troops withdrew after years of Hezbollah guerrilla attacks.
Fragile situation
”The situation in the south is still fragile,” Gemayel said. ”The Israelis are still there, the Lebanese army is unable to face the threats and Hezbollah’s position is very ambiguous.”
He said violence could explode again unless Lebanon and the Security Council showed sufficient determination to implement 1701, which calls for Israeli forces to withdraw from the south in favour of the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers charged with policing a border zone free of Hezbollah’s armed presence.
Gemayel, whose Kataeb party has three seats in Lebanon’s 128-seat Parliament, is now part of an anti-Syrian alliance of Christian and Muslim factions that includes Druze leader Walid Jumblatt — one of his fiercest foes in the early 1980s.
The bloc, which dominates Parliament and the government, was welded together by the 2005 killing of ex-premier Rafik al-Hariri, which it blames on Lebanon’s former overlord Syria.
”What’s at stake now is the future of liberal, democratic institutions in Lebanon,” Gemayel said.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria as well as its founding inspiration Iran, must ensure that its Lebanese identity takes precedence over its affinities with Tehran, he argued.
”Hezbollah are free to respect and be part of Khomeini’s ideology, but that should not interfere with Lebanese interests and a real Lebanese national consensus,” he said.
This meant only the state should have weapons and only the the government should decide issues of war and peace, he said, alluding to Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 that sparked Israel’s five-week onslaught on Lebanon.
”Ambiguity is fatal,” Gemayel declared from the balcony of his 16th-century family home in the mountain town of Bikfaya.- Reuters