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President Bush renews the warning signals to Syria and Hezbollah

Manuela Paraipan - 4/21/2005

"Hezbollah not only is trying to destabilize the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, but Hezbollah, as you know, is a dangerous organization," President Bush declared in an interview with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) on Monday.

Hezbollah is on the black list of the terrorist organizations in US, but both the Lebanese pro-Syrian camp and parts of the opposition sustains that Hezbollah is merely a resistance to the Israeli occupation of Shebaa Farms in the South. Lebanon claims the farms to be Lebanese, while Israel, which occupied the land in 1967, argues that it is Syrian, with Syria still maintaining its silence.

The president said that Lebanon's parliamentary elections ought to be held on time, and insisted that the Syrian and Iranian backed Hezbollah movement must lay down its arms.

"We put Hezbollah on the terrorist list for a reason; they've killed Americans in the past. And we will continue to work with the international community to keep the pressure on this group. Ultimately, the people of Lebanon are going to decide the fate of the country. And you cannot have a free country if a group of people are like an armed militia," he further declared.

The US has repeated its calls to Syria to stop backing Saddam's Baathists in Iraq, to completely withdraw from Lebanon and to shut down the offices of the militant Hezbollah.

President Bush said: "They have heard that message directly from me."

Talking about Lebanon's economic debt, President Bush said that the United States and European Finance Ministers will work with international organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund "to help this country [Lebanon] get back on its feet after occupation, help this new democracy succeed."

Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of ONU will present next week his first report to the Security Council on the extent of Syria and Lebanon's implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559.

The resolution, passed last September, and sponsored by the US and France, calls for a complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and the disarmament of all militias in the country, in clear reference to the resistance group Hezbollah. The UN will also be dispatching a team of experts to confirm the Syrian pullout on the ground. But the date of the UN team's arrival in Lebanon remains undisclosed.

As a result to mounting international pressures, Damascus had pledged late March that it would completely withdraw from Lebanon by the end of April.

Both the opposition and the international community is looking for a complete military, intelligence Syrian withdrawal as well as a major change within the existing corrupt and in large parts pro-Syrian Lebanese political class.