If Tehran could get Riyadh to lean on the Siniora government to yield to the opposition demand for a national unity government, it would be a great diplomatic coup, but the Fars News Agency dispatch that the Hindu cites indicates lack of the Saudi interest (see, also, a Reuters dispatch today about what the Saudi ruling class said to Tehran) and Hizballah's autonomy from Tehran: "Asked by reporters in Paris about the talks, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said, 'There is no initiative really that we can call a Saudi initiative. There was a message received by the king' from Tehran"; and "The Shiite movement's leader Hassan Nasrallah said the opposition was open to foreign mediation, particularly by Iran and Saudi Arabia, but added, 'Any connivance between two countries or two governments, even ones we respect, cannot be imposed on Lebanon.'" The same point is made by Jim Quilty in a MERIP article.
<http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8511060261> News numbre: 8511060261 19:11 | 2007-01-26 Iran, Saudi Hold Talks on Lebanon
TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia have intensified efforts to broker a solution to Lebanon's crippling political crisis, Iranian media reported.
The Islamic republic's envoy in Beirut also said that Tehran was mediating in a bid to bring Saudi Arabia and Syria closer over the issue.
Iran, the main foreign backer of Lebanon's Hezbollah-led opposition, held a series of contacts on Wednesday with Saudi Arabia, a key financier of the beleaguered Western-backed Beirut government, state television said.
The secretary general of the Saudi National Security Council, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, held Tehran talks with his Iranian counterpart Ali Larijani on "the critical situation in Lebanon," it said.
The two men, whose talks came the day after three people were killed in Lebanon in clashes between government and opposition supporters, "emphasized the necessity of finding a solution agreed by all Lebanese groups."
The talks were held ahead of a donors' conference for Lebanon which opened in Paris on Thursday.
Asked by reporters in Paris about the talks, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said, "There is no initiative really that we can call a Saudi initiative. There was a message received by the king" from Tehran.
"The message was an offer to cooperate to achieve solidarity between Muslims. The return message was that if this is the intention, then it is action that speaks louder than words, and if Iran can do anything to quietly support this in the region, then this would be the best service that could be done."
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki earlier spoke by telephone with Faisal to examine "ways to find an acceptable solution," Iranian state television added.
It was Larijani's second meeting with Saudi officials in 10 days. On January 14, he traveled to Riyadh to meet King Abdullah and Prince Saud.
After those talks, Larijani told Beirut newspapers that Iran was keen to work with Saudi Arabia to resolve the crisis which has crippled Lebanon's administration since Hezbollah and its allies quit the cabinet in November.
"There is a problem inside Lebanon that we, along with the Saudis, wish to help to resolve," he said.
Both the Lebanese government and the opposition have expressed a readiness to accept the two governments' mediation.
Prime Minister Fuad Siniora called on Wednesday for improved relations with Iran, but said the ties must be between governments and not "through third parties", an allusion to Hezbollah.
The Shiite movement's leader Hassan Nasrallah said the opposition was open to foreign mediation, particularly by Iran and Saudi Arabia, but added, "Any connivance between two countries or two governments, even ones we respect, cannot be imposed on Lebanon."
In Beirut, Iranian Ambassador Mohammad Sheybani said Tehran was also trying to bridge differences between Saudi Arabia and Syria in efforts to resolve Lebanon's political crisis.
"Iran is carrying out consultations with Saudi Arabia and Syria on the situation in the region and in Lebanon," Sheybani said after meeting officials at the Lebanese foreign ministry.
"My government is trying to bring viewpoints between Saudi Arabia and Syria closer," he said.
<http://www.merip.org/mero/mero012607.html> Winter of Lebanon's Discontents Jim Quilty January 26, 2007 (Jim Quilty is a Beirut-based journalist.)
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THE INTERNATIONAL IN THE LOCAL
It is a Lebanese habit of mind to lay all the country's political difficulties at the doorstep of foreign intrigue. The habit is self-deluding, since local politicians are always complicit in foreign influence. That said, Lebanon's political crisis cannot be properly understood without taking the international climate into account. At one level, the mutual recriminations -- that Hizballah and Aoun are acting as surrogates for Tehran and Damascus, that the Siniora government is Washington's puppet -- reproduce a seductive rhetoric of externalized blame that can be traced back to the troubles of 1958. That does not make the courting of foreign patronage to advance local interests, or rumors thereof, any less important.
All the Siniora government's major policy initiatives since the summertime war -- a NATO-reinforced UNIFIL force along the southern border, foreign funding for post-war reconstruction, the tribunal to investigate Rafiq al-Hariri's assassination, Paris III -- effectively internationalize the Lebanese predicament. The effect is to reduce the nuances of local political compromise to black-and-white formulae: international relations require states to obey UN resolutions; economic growth demands compliance with the "Washington consensus"; the assassination of a figure of Hariri's stature calls for an international tribunal. Reasonable as these statements sound to many Lebanese, many others, along with Hizballah's leadership, are supremely suspicious of the "international community" as it is presently configured, and not without reason. The UN provides one example.
While reams of paper have been filled with UN resolutions condemning Israel's Palestine policies, the "international community" has never seen fit to act upon them. On the other hand, the international community has doggedly pursued the implementation of resolutions sponsored by the US, directed against Syria, Iran and Hizballah, and favorable to Israeli interests. This discrepancy explains Hizballah's sudden distrust of UNIFIL, with whom -- after a few preliminary kinks when the force first arrived in 1978 -- the party's fighters have had a good working relationship. As Nasrallah put it in a October 31 interview on al-Manar, the "party in power is seeking to make UNIFIL…occupy Lebanon and disarm the resistance…. This plan is dangerous and of the sort that could transform Lebanon into another Iraq or another Afghanistan…. This plan was already hoped for by the [leadership] before the Israeli aggression. It is an American-Israeli demand."
Hizballah's doubts about "UNIFIL II" were only reinforced by incidents that make the UN look increasingly like an instrument of US policy. On November 3, for instance, the press ran stories that Washington wanted the job of UN undersecretary-general in charge of peacekeeping for an American, in exchange for backing Ban Ki-moon's election as secretary-general. This growing skepticism about the UN has an antecedent in Hizballah's wariness of Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor who led the UN-sponsored Hariri investigation until Belgian prosecutor Serge Brammertz took over in January 2006. In the wake of the Gemayel assassination, Mehlis gave an interview to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, run on November 23. "It is apparent to anyone who is unbiased that all the clues after this attack clearly point to the forces who want to bring down the Lebanese government and get in the way of the tribunal," Mehlis said. "These are the so-called pro-Syrian forces in Lebanon. They have an obvious motive."
Many wondered how Mehlis could have gleaned these "clues" from Germany. True, the plain-spoken Mehlis is no longer running the Hariri investigation, and so no longer bound to observe codes of judicial discretion, but his remarks (which so precisely echo the reactions of White House spokesmen) provide ammunition to those who would challenge the investigation's reputation as an unbiased and apolitical exercise in international justice.
Another facet of the international environment worth mentioning is the perceived upsurge of political Shi'ism in the Arab east. Conservative Sunni regimes like Saudi Arabia have grumbled about a nascent "Shiite crescent" midwifed by the rise of the Shi'a in post-Saddam Iraq and the heightened power of Iran as the Bush administration's Iraqi adventure falters. When the Israeli air force bombed Lebanese Shi'i population centers and the international community (the Arab League included) failed to stir for two weeks, many in Lebanon concluded that Riyadh had decided to nip the Shi'i florescence in the bud. Regional politics acquired a bitter local edge with the ill-advised decision of Saad al-Hariri and his March 14 allies to parrot Saudi criticism of Hizballah.
Clearly, Riyadh is an important factor in the Lebanon equation, as witnessed by Hizballah's recent dispatch of its ministers on the pilgrimage to Mecca. On December 26, the Saudi king flew Hizballah Deputy Secretary-General Na'im Qasim and senior aide Muhammad Fanayish to Jidda for meetings with himself and Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal.
Since the end of the 2006 war, darker speculation has drifted into popular discourse -- stories of Saudi princes providing arms and/or training to Lebanese Sunnis with an inchoate resentment of Nasrallah's rising stature. After all, the story goes, Saudis with jihadi sympathies hate Hizballah even more than they despise the excesses of the royal family. Such rumors correspond to reports in the regional and international media concerning al-Qaeda's efforts to infiltrate Lebanon since the beginning of the Israeli bombardment. Depending on which reports one reads, their mission is to attack the "pro-American Siniora government," schismatic Hizballah or UNIFIL troops in south Lebanon.
Sometimes there is more than mere rumor, as on November 28 when a 28-year old Syrian man named 'Umar 'Abdallah exploded outside a passport control office on the Syrian-Lebanese border. A statement from the Syrian Interior Ministry (not necessarily the most reliable source) claimed 'Abdallah was trying to cross the border with forged documents when he was found out, fled and detonated the belt of explosives he was wearing. He was, they say, the military commander of al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, a militant organization claiming links to al-Qaeda.
PEACE AMONGST PATRONS?
It is not difficult to despair of a resolution to the Lebanese crisis before more blood is shed. As seen on January 24-25, the Lebanese army's mandate is restricted to standing between demonstrators of different confessions -- a function of its own sectarian makeup. The troops of the Internal Security Forces have been held back from this crisis, inspiring opposition assertions that the Interior Ministry is a tool of the Hariri family.
Even more problematic is the singular lack of statesmanship on the part of the political class, who, pleas for calm notwithstanding, seem overall more inclined to speak on behalf of their communities or their patrons than any "national interest."
That leaves the international community. Beiruti media outlets aired a story on January 25 claiming that Riyadh and Tehran were working on a way to defuse Lebanon's political crisis. The pro-March 14 al-Nahar newspaper and al-Safir, a daily generally sympathetic to the opposition, both reported that Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki had been in touch with his Saudi counterpart by telephone. The phone call was read as a hopeful sign, since both government and opposition camps have said they are ready to accept such mediation efforts.
As if to remind all parties that Hizballah does not simply dance to Tehran's tune, though, that day Nasrallah remarked that no agreement could be imposed against the will of the Lebanese people. He vowed not to back down from demands for a veto in the cabinet and early elections. "There is talk of reviving serious initiatives, a Saudi-Iranian action…. We bless any effort," Nasrallah told a gathering in the dahiya. "But any possible agreement between any two respected governments is not binding upon the Lebanese…. The role of brotherly and friendly states is to help the Lebanese reach consensus…. No one in Lebanon or outside Lebanon should think that the opposition could contemplate going back or abandon its goals."
On January 26, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal dampened hopes of a regionally sponsored solution. "There is really no initiative that we can call a Saudi initiative," he told the international press from the sidelines of Paris III. "There was a message received by the king from [Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei…. [It] was an offer to cooperate to achieve solidarity between Muslims. The response was that…if Iran can do anything to calm its supporters in the region, then this would be the best service that could be done for the sake of Muslim solidarity."
<http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-saudi-iran.html> January 27, 2007 Saudi King Says Iran Putting Region in Danger: Paper By REUTERS Filed at 8:52 a.m. ET
RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia told an Iranian envoy this month that Shi'ite power Iran was putting the Gulf region in danger, in a reference to Iran's conflict with Washington over Iraq and nuclear policy, a newspaper said.
In the interview in Kuwait's al-Seyassah on Saturday, King Abdullah also issued a veiled warning to Iran to quit what he said were efforts to spread Shi'ism in the Sunni-dominated Arab world.
The United States and its key ally Saudi Arabia accuse Iran of ``interference'' in Iraq, through backing Shi'ite militias and parties, and suspect Tehran is developing a covert nuclear weapons program -- a charge Iran denies.
``Saudi leaders and the Saudi state have always known their limits in dealing with nations, east and west. I explained this to Ali Larijani and advised him to pass it on to his government and its followers, with regard to foreign dealings,'' he said.
``The dangers it (Iranian government) could fall into will fall upon all of us.''
Saudi sources have said Larijani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, visited Riyadh this month to seek help with Washington and reassure Saudi Arabia over the nuclear program.
King Abdullah also appeared to accuse Iran of exploiting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for its own ends. ``The Arabs alone should solve the issue of Palestine ... We don't want anyone to trade in our issues and become stronger through them,'' he said.
Iran is backing Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas, which is conflict with Western countries because it refuses to recognize Israel before entering into peace negotiations. It also backs Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah, which is leading a popular campaign to bring down the Western-backed government.
Arab states have had difficulty persuading the United States to restart peace talks leading to a state for the Palestinians.
King Abdullah also said efforts to spread Shi'ism in the Arab world would fail. Leading Sunni clerics have said in recent months that Iran is promoting Shi'ite belief in Arab countries.
``We are following this issue and we are aware of the extent of Shi'ite proselytism and how far it has got,'' the king said.
``But we don't think it will achieve its goal because the huge majority of Muslims who are Sunnis would not change their faith and sect ... We know our role as the state where the message (of Islam) began,'' he said. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>