AMERICAN LEBANESE COORDINATION COUNCIL

Rice: Time to Put Lebanese Track Into Motion

Posted in NEWS & ANALYSIS by Administrator on the June 21st, 2008
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said it was time to put into motion the “Lebanese track” after the start of discussions between Israel and Syria on the one hand and the Jewish state and Palestinians on the other.
“Once you had the beginnings of Israeli-Syrian discussions and you have Palestinian-Israeli discussions going on, I don’t think you want to be in a position in which the Lebanese track is the one that’s left out,” Rice said in an interview with CNN. 

In answering a question as to why she has said that it was time to resolve the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms issue, Rice said: “Part of our concern that Shebaa be addressed now is because…you don’t want Lebanon to be left to the side. And so that’s one of the reasons, the principal reason, for bringing it to the floor now.”

She said that in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is supposed to have a cartographer’s report on the Lebanese claims about Shebaa Farms.

“The U.N. had declared Shebaa as Syrian. And so that work needs to be completed,” Rice told CNN.

In another interview with the Wall Street Journal, Rice said Israel should use its talks with Damascus to raise the issue of arms transfers to Hizbullah through the Syrian border since Syria is “the land bridge.”

“It would be very good to tell the Syrians that to make the neighborhood more peaceful, maybe they should take responsibility for sealing their border with the Lebanese,” she said.

In answering a question about reports that Hizbullah increased its rockets from 17,000 to 40,000 after the end of the July-August 2006 war, Rice focused more on positive developments by saying: “For the first time the Lebanese army is in the south. And I don’t think that Hizbullah has returned to the south in the strength that it once held there.”

“When you have international forces in the south and you have Lebanese forces in the south, that’s an important change from 2006,” she said about the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers and the Lebanese army in south Lebanon under Resolution 1701 which ended the Israel-Hizbullah war.

She called the army “an important national institution” and said President Michel Suleiman “seems to be a very strong figure.”

Other positive developments in Lebanon according to Rice were “the Lebanese laying claim to the Palestinian refugee camps as a sovereign state” and the presence of a “democratic majority” in the country which prevented the “minority” from blocking the formation of the international tribunal that would try suspects in ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s assassination and related crimes.

She said a new Lebanese government would be formed and prepare for the 2009 parliamentary elections.

“The key for the majority there will be to make its case to the Lebanese people. And one of the things that I think they can use to make their case is that Hizbullah’s an odd resistance movement if its principal function has been to turn its weapons on its own people,” Rice said.

The top U.S. diplomat also stressed that Lebanon is now better off than it was under Syrian hegemony “and with Hizbullah in a place in July 2006 where it could literally be a state within a state and launch a war against Israel.”
 

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