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Lebanon war destroyed hope in future -Jumblatt http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=L0354378
Sun 3 Sep 2006
By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent
MUKHTARA, Lebanon, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Hizbollah's war with Israel has plunged Lebanon into uncertainty, its fate once again tied to Middle Eastern conflicts most of its people would rather avoid, Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said.
Jumblatt, speaking to reporters at his ancestral home in the Shouf mountains, linked Lebanon's long-term stability to the nuclear dispute with Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"If the Americans go ahead and press the Iranians with sanctions and if ... they try to strike Iran, it will lead to troubles in Lebanon," he said on Saturday.
Unless the Israelis learned that brute force could achieve nothing and instead struck a deal on a viable Palestinian state, he said, Lebanon would remain in a vicious cycle. "Every two or three years we'll have a new round of fighting."
Jumblatt, 57, who led a formidable Druze militia in the 1975-90 civil war, now sits with some of his former Christian foes in an anti-Syrian coalition controlling a government in which Hizbollah and its allies hold a powerful minority share.
He berated Washington's "stupid approach" in backing Israel's blockade of Lebanon, saying plenty of arms were already in the country and the diverted trade benefited only Syria.
He attacked Syria, Iran and their Hizbollah ally for wrecking any chance that after last year's Syrian troop pullout, Lebanon could disengage from regional turmoil and build a state.
"This dream was stolen, kidnapped," he said, blaming Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah for picking a fight with Israel by snatching two of its soldiers, provoking what Nasrallah has since admitted was a response he had not expected.
"What's the use?" Jumblatt said of Nasrallah's regrets. "The war is over for the time being, but the toll of destruction is terrible." Just as bad, he said, was the loss of confidence.
"What's the future of my country?" he asked. "I'm stuck here, my destiny's here, but look at the generations ahead."
Jumblatt questioned how long Hizbollah would keep its pledge to observe a U.N. truce that halted the fighting on Aug. 14.
"Okay, they want to keep the situation quiet now, and then what?" he asked, suggesting that Hizbollah might renege on its promise "if they get orders" from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
He also said Assad had deceived U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan when he told him on Friday that he would tighten border security to stop the Shi'ite Muslim guerrillas from rearming.
Jumblatt said two weapons convoys had crossed the Syrian border recently. Lebanese security officials have denied this.
FAMILAR GAME
"So Assad is playing again the same old trick ... telling Annan and the Americans 'I'm here, I'm the ruler of the game' -- at the expense of Lebanon of course," Jumblatt said.
He said the Lebanese army, which has sent 8,600 troops to the Syrian frontier and is deploying 15,000 in the south, did not have enough forces or equipment to control the border fully.
Asked if Hizbollah might lay down its guns and become a Lebanese party independent of Syria and Iran, he said: "The one who gives money and weapons is the one who (gives) orders."
He insisted the state must have a monopoly of weapons and establish its authority everywhere, including in the Palestinian camps and the south, but acknowledged it could not impose its will on Hizbollah, which fought the Israeli army for 34 days.
"If you have a dual authority -- on one side the camps, on the other the Lebanese army; above ground the Lebanese army, under ground Hizbollah; somewhere UNIFIL (peacekeeping troops) -- this is very fragile," he said.
Jumblatt, who accuses Syria of assassinating his father in 1977 and former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in 2005, said Syria would try to "torpedo" the government as it prepares to authorise an international tribunal to try Hariri's killers.
"We have to expect trouble, maybe riots and maybe assassinations. We got used to his (Assad's) methods," he said.
U.N. investigator Serge Brammertz reports this month on his inquiry into Hariri's killing. Syria has denied previous U.N. assertions that its security officials were involved.
Jumblatt said Lebanon's role as a diverse, multiconfessional land acting as a link between east and west was under threat.
"It seems the Syrians, the Iranians, want to drag us out of this position to be part of the east, this dark east," he said.
Dialogue, not violence, was the only way for war-weary Lebanese to deal with the challenges Hizbollah posed, he said.
"But the young people, the people who had hope in Lebanon, the liberal-minded people, I think they won't stay here.
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