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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (219370)	2/16/2005 11:52:06 AM
From: RetiredNow	Respond to of 1575360

Syria is the logical culprit for Lebanon's ex-PM's murder.... time.com Why Syria Feels the Heat from a Beirut Bombing Critics tie the Hariri assassination to Syria's efforts to keep control over Lebanon By TONY KARON Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005 There is no evidence, thus far, linking any specific suspect to Monday's assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. But as fears sweep Beirut of a resumption, after a 15-year timeout, of the bloody civil war that began in 1975, Syria and its allies in the Lebanese government are already taking the heat. Lebanese opposition parties have openly accused pro-Syrian politicians in Beirut of complicity in or authorship of the crime, and have warned President Emil Lahoud and other members of his government to stay away from Wednesday's funeral lest their presence provoke violence. The U.S. responded to the killing by demanding Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and by summoning home its Damascus ambassador in order to express its “profound outrage” over Hariri's death. The Bush administration has stopped short of directly accusing Syria of complicity, although it has not hidden the obvious implications of its actions — and has warned that it holds Syria responsible because of its domination of Lebanon. Syria has professed innocence and President Bashar al-Assad condemned Hariri's killing as a “horrible terrorist act,” but that has not dimmed ire of Lebanese opposition groups and the Bush administration. Damascus had been hard at work in recent months maneuvering to maintain its fraying control over the fate of a neighboring country it has treated more like a restive province over the past three decades. Hariri, a one-time ally of Syria, had symbolized the best hope of a growing opposition movement in Lebanon to press for Syrian withdrawal. Although he had carefully nurtured his own relationship with Damascus during his tenure as Prime Minister, Hariri had decisively broken with Syria last October when he resigned in protest at efforts to alter Lebanon's constitution, at Syria's behest, to allow the pro-Syrian president Emil Lahoud to serve a further three years. He quit soon after voting for the change demanded by Syria. Pro-Syria politicians blamed Hariri, well-connected in Arab capitals and a close friend of France's president Jacques Chirac, for orchestrating the passage earlier this year of UN Security Council resolution 1559, which demands the withdrawal of the 15,000 Syrian troops that remain in Lebanon — Syrian forces first arrived in 1976, eventually enforcing a fragile peace between rival Lebanese factions and armed Palestinian refugees, and running the country as Syria's own fiefdom ever since. New Lebanese elections are scheduled for May, and Hariri had been under mounting pressure to take the lead in an opposition campaign to rally a vote for ousting Syria.