Jordan Times
Friday, September 15, 2006
Jordan vows continued
support for Lebanon
Agencies
KING ABDULLAH ON Thursday pledged he would continue to support Lebanon and help
it get back on its feet after the Israeli offensive.
The King told Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora that he was confident that a
united Lebanon would be able to overcome the effects of the Israeli offensive.
The Monarch renewed Jordan’s support for Lebanese reconstruction efforts.
“Jordan’s continuous support for the efforts being made by the Lebanese
government are aimed at spreading the government’s sovereignty over all Lebanese
territory,” King Abdullah said.
He also reiterated that a comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East
must find roots in a solution to the Palestinian cause, particularly through the
establishment of a Palestinian state.
Siniora, who held talks with Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit on regional issues and
bilateral ties, thanked Jordan for the assistance it provided during the
34-day-long Israeli offensive that ended in mid-August.
“We will never forget your brave stance in supporting Lebanon,” Siniora said.
Jordan set up a humanitarian airlift operation to Lebanon at the start of the
offensive and later dispatched army engineers to help rebuild bridges destroyed
in the fighting and defuse bombs left behind by Israel.
Earlier this month, the Jordanian government decided to exempt Lebanese
businesses of taxes and tariffs.
Siniora’s short visit to Jordan was part of a regional tour to drum up support
from Arab nations for its reconstruction drive and the UN resolution that ended
the fighting between Israel, and Lebanon’s Hizbollah fighters.
Siniora flew in from Cairo where he reiterated that no contact was possible
between Lebanon and Israel, and said his government would stay in power despite
criticism by Hizbollah.
Siniora Thursday vowed his military will confiscate any weapons it sees in
southern Lebanon, in a sharp retort to the leader of Hizbollah’s boast that his
armed men are still on the border with Israel and won’t leave.
The new tensions, one month into the Hizbollah-Israeli ceasefire, showed the
challenges still ahead for both Lebanon’s leaders and a UN peacekeeping force.
They also underscored growing friction between the group and the government,
which is led by opponents of Hizbollah’s patron Syria.
“I intend for the Lebanese army to prove its presence in the area south of
Litani River,” Siniora told reporters after talks with Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak in Cairo.
“We want this area to be under the army’s and the Lebanese state’s control. The
army has all the authority to ban any armed appearances and confiscate those
weapons.” Some 15,000 Lebanese troops, backed by an equal number of UN
peacekeepers, are deploying in a zone between the Israeli border and the Litani,
about 30 kilometres to the north, to enforce a ban on Hizbollah weapons.
Siniora’s comments made it clear that the troops will not actively hunt out
hidden Hizbollah arsenals. The UN ceasefire calls for the fighters to eventually
be disarmed, but neither the Lebanese army nor UN soldiers want to provoke a
confrontation with the heavily-armed Hizbollah.
Siniora, however, made clear his Western-leaning government would no longer
allow the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hizbollah to dominate the south.
But Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview aired late
Wednesday that Israel’s monthlong bombardment had failed to dismantle Hizbollah
or push the fighters north.
“Now the war is finished. There is no demilitarised zone south of the Litani
[River]. The resistance [Hizbollah] is present south of the Litani and is
present in all of south Lebanon,” Nasrallah told Al Jazeera television.
Hizbollah fighters, who have controlled parts of south Lebanon for years, are
believed to be laying low and blending in with the local population — as they
did before the war.
Hizbollah’s senior political officer in south Lebanon, Sheikh Hassan Izzeddine,
said the group was exercising “self-restraint” in the face of Israel’s “flagrant
violations” of the UN resolution.
Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Mark Regev said Israel was not violating the
ceasefire.
Regev instead alleged continued violations on the Lebanese side, in particular
the failure to set free the two Israeli soldiers whose capture by Hizbollah on
July 12 sparked the war. The UN-backed ceasefire called for their unconditional
release, and the world body is to send an envoy next week to broker indirect
talks between the two sides.
He also said Hizbollah “continues to maintain an armed presence in south Lebanon
and continues to receive arms from outside sources in direct violation of the
international arms embargo that the resolution specifically calls for.” The UN
has asked Israel to pull down a barbed wire fence Lebanon claims encroaches on
its territory and said it would issue a complaint to Israel’s army after four
overflights by its jets in Lebanese airspace. The Lebanese army said Thursday
that Israel had carried out 12 overflights that day. Similar incidents have
occurred regularly in violation of the ceasefire, which went into effect August
14.
Still, UN officials expressed optimism.
“The good news is that the cessation of hostilities is holding up very well,”
said Alexander Ivanko, spokesman of the UNIFIL peacekeeping force in southern
Lebanon. “The situation is still tense, but it is stable.” Israeli forces, which
at their peak numbered 30,000 troops and penetrated 30 kilometres into south
Lebanon, have largely pulled back to a 3 to 5-kilometre band along the border,
Ivanko said.
Maj. Gen. Alain Pellegrini, the commander of the UN peacekeepers, said he
expected the Israeli withdrawal to be completed by the end of the month.
Meanwhile, under a beefed-up UN Security Council mandate, troops from France and
Spain were expected to move into the war-weary south within the next few days to
reinforce the peacekeeping mission, joining the UNIFIL force now made up mainly
of Italians, Ghanaians and Indians.
The UN force is now about 3,800-strong and should be close to 5,000 by the end
of the week.
More than 850 Lebanese were killed, mostly civilians, and almost 160 Israelis
died in the war. Along with targeting Lebanese infrastructure, Israeli warplanes
and artillery pounded Hizbollah strongholds south of Beirut and in eastern and
southern Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the group’s rocket arsenal. Hizbollah
responded by firing more than 4,000 rockets on northern Israel.
The war was widely seen in Israel as a failure, in part because the military did
not crush Hizbollah and was unable to stop rocket attacks during the fighting.