Lebanon yesterday hosted a rare summit of regional leaders aimed at defusing tensions over reports of an impending indictment against Hezbollah members for the murder of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri.
The meeting between Lebanese President Michel Sleiman, Saudi King Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was hastily organized amid fears of Sunni-Shiite violence erupting in Lebanon should the UN court probing Hariri’s 2005 murder implicate the powerful Hezbollah.
Abdullah and Assad are to arrive together from Damascus and meet Sleiman before attending a luncheon to which members of Lebanon’s unity government — which includes two Hezbollah ministers — have been invited.
Saudi and Syrian flags were on display throughout the capital along with huge portraits of the king and a welcome message.
Security was also tight ahead of the visit, with additional army and police deployed and some streets cordoned off.
“The whole visit is about containing the situation for the immediate future,” said Sahar Atrache, a Beirut-based analyst with the International Crisis Group think-tank. “They are here to exert influence on their internal allies ... to prevent a real escalation.”
Assad will be visiting Lebanon for the first time since Hariri — father of current Prime Minister Saad Hariri — was assassinated in 2005, leading to a sharp downturn in relations between Damascus and Beirut.
Syria, as the main power broker in Lebanon at the time, was widely blamed for the murder of the Sunni former premier, but it has consistently denied any involvement.
Relations have been on the mend since 2008, when diplomatic ties were established for the first time between Beirut and Damascus. Saad Hariri has made four trips to Syria in the past eight months.
Saudi Arabia, a staunch supporter of the slain Hariri and his son, has played a key role in the rapprochement between the two countries.
The Saudi monarch is expected to press Assad to use his influence over Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, to avoid a political stalemate or a sectarian conflict similar to the one that brought Lebanon close to civil war in 2008.
Fears of renewed conflict rose last week after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said he knew that the UN tribunal probing Hariri’s murder was set to indict members of his Shiite party.
He made it clear that he would not accept such a scenario, accusing the tribunal of being politicized and part of an Israeli plot.
“The Arab leaders’ visit to Lebanon is an opportunity to show Arab unity in the face of this plot which aims to destabilize Lebanon and sow sedition,” Hezbollah deputy Hassan Fadlallah said. “This would not be in the interest of the Lebanese or their Arab brothers.”
Analysts say that in addition to threatening civil peace, an indictment of Hezbollah members would deal a blow to the party’s reputation and destabilize Hariri’s unity government.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the