KavkazCenter - Possible civil war in Lebanon?

Possible civil war in Lebanon?

A new-and bloodier-Lebanese civil war is looming.

The killing of Lebanon's Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel by unknown assailants last week brought the country, bordered on the west by the Mediterranean Sea, on the north and east by Syria and on the south by Israel, one step closer to civil war.

Many analysts predict that Gemayel's killing, the latest in a wave of political assassinations that hit Lebanon since last year's murder of the former Lebanese Premier Rafiq Al Hariri, could be the final step in a violent march toward civil war, the primary benefactor of which would be Israel and not Syria as the U.S. President George W. Bush hints in most of his speeches in which he accuses Damascus of seeking instability in its tiny neighbour country with the aim of imposing its influence and interfere in its political system.

Following the assassination of Rafiq Al Hariri in a massive bombing in Beirut last year, Syria was forced by the international community to withdraw its peacekeeping forces deployed in Lebanon.

After Lebanon became embroiled in civil war among the Christians, Muslims, and Palestinians from early 1975 to late 1976, Lebanon's president asked Syrian to send troops to the country. It was the Syrian troops, who entered the country in April 1976, who brought an end to the bloody civil war in Lebanon.

What turned the fingers of blame for the killing of Pierre Gemayel, who was head of the Christian Phalange Party, was simply the fact that the Christian Lebanese politician was a staunch opponent of Syria, and its alleged influence in Lebanon.

The killing, which received large coverage from the international media, fueled the already heated tensions between Lebanon's Sunni Muslim and Christian populations on the one hand, and its Shias and minority pro-Syria Christians on the other.

While Lebanese and Syrian press outlets were busy blaming each others' countries, and the U.S. seizing the chance to implicate Syria in the assassination, Robert Fisk, a prominent journalist and reporter with the London Independent, warned against a possible civil war in Lebanon. "For days, we had been debating whether it was time for another political murder to ratchet up the sectarian tensions now that the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora was about to fall. For days now, the political language of Lebanon had been incendiary, the threats and bullying of the political leaders ever more fearsome. Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Shia Hizbollah leader, had been calling Siniora's cabinet illegitimate. "The government of Feltman," he was calling it - Jeffrey Feltman is the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon - while the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt was claiming Iran was trying to take over," Fisk wrote.

The "assassination of Pierre Gemayel was a warning." "Why did Gemayel die just hours after Syria announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Iraq after a quarter of a century?" Fisk asked.

"And why did America's UN ambassador, John Bolton, weep crocodile tears for Lebanon's democracy - which he cared so little about when Israel smashed into Lebanon this summer - without mentioning Syria?"

Ended the Syrian presence in Lebanon, the presence of the forces that helped the tiny country out of a bloody civil war long years ago.

The latest assassination of a senior and Christian political figure in the country could definitely be another attempt to press ahead with plans to instigate further tensions between Muslims and the Christians on one hand, and pro and anti-Syrian factions on the other, who would eventually end up fighting another civil war, which would pave the way for Western interference in the country, ending its sovereignty.

Source: Jazeera