kennyboy: where are human right friends ??
A Second Critic of Syria Is Assassinated in Lebanon
By JOHN KIFNER
BEIRUT, Lebanon, June 21 - A second outspoken critic of Syria was killed in a bomb blast that ripped through his car today, only hours after the official results of Sunday's election were announced.
A small, precisely placed explosive was put underneath the car's passenger seat, killing George Hawi, a former leader of the Lebanese Communist Party. It appeared almost identical to the killing last month of an anti-Syrian journalist, Samir Kassir.
Mr. Hawi's driver escaped serious injury in the blast, in the Wata Musaitibi neighborhood of Beirut, illustrating the methodical nature of the assassination.
Lebanon's anti-Syrian movement swept the voting on Sunday in the country's far north, the official results showed, giving it a firm parliamentary majority.
But euphoric notions of a new era in national politics were mitigated by the fact that the election also revived religious hostilities that seemed buried when hundreds of thousands of Lebanese rallied last spring in revulsion over the assassination of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and over Syria's power.
Final results from the last of four rounds of voting found that the anti-Syrian slate led by the slain prime minister's son, Saad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, and Walid Jumblatt, the Druse chieftain, took all 28 northern seats, giving them a majority of 72 of 128 deputies.
The young Mr. Hariri acknowledged the difficulties at a news conference at his family's palace tonight - Lebanese journalists burst into applause at his entrance - dodging questions on who would be prime minister and whether President Émile Lahoud, an ally of Syria, would be replaced.
"We have to maintain dialogue with everybody," he said. "We will not close the door on anyone."
But his chief rival, the former army commander Michel Aoun, a Maronite Catholic who returned from 15 years of exile and broke with the opposition grouping on his return last month, was having none of it.
"There's a dispute over values," General Aoun, whose bloc has 21 seats, said Monday. "We will be in the opposition. We can't be with a majority that reached through corruption. We can't collaborate with people who don't have the minimum of morality."
General Aoun also accused his opponents of using "the ugliest and most provocative confessional tactics" to turn out Sunni Muslim voters in the north, where they have a slight population edge.
The campaign, which began with an unlikely coalition of former civil war enemies seeking to bridge sectarian rivalries, upended some political traditions in this beautiful, battered country, but made others worse, particularly the religious divide that devastated the country in the 1975-90 civil war that is estimated to have killed more than 150,000 people.
The strong-willed General Aoun, who had left 15 years ago as an enemy of Syria, has now formed somewhat paradoxical tickets with politicians widely seen as vassals of Syria, including Michel Murr, the longtime interior and defense minister, and Suleiman Franjieh, the northern Christian clan leader. While General Aoun railed at every turn against "corruption," Mr. Murr was widely seen by Lebanese as the politician who had most enriched himself.
But, General Aoun stunned everyone by winning 15 of 16 seats in the Maronite mountain heartland in the third round of the four-stage election on June 12, virtually eliminating the Christian establishment of wealthy families and old militia leaders who had joined the multireligious opposition.
"What Aoun did was to work on the nerve of the Christians," said Jad al-Akhaoui, a Lebanese journalist, meaning their fears.
The turnabout was particularly upsetting to Mr. Akhaoui, because he was a close friend of Samir Kassir, a fellow journalist and outspoken critic of Syria who died when his car blew up early this month, in an assassination, like that of Mr. Hariri, for which Lebanese blame Damascus. Mr. Akhaoui had worked with Mr. Kassir organizing a huge demonstration in March that helped build pressure for the final Syrian troop withdrawal in April. "The Christians had no leader to gather around," he said. "He worked on the confessional thing. He worked on the Christian nerve, that we are weak, surrounded by Muslims."
That sentiment was voiced on Sunday by a young voter in the northern Maronite mountain town of Zgharta. The voter, Simon Finianos, 29, stood with a clutch of supporters of Mr. Franjieh.
"It is not fair to the Christians, this election," he said. "They are more than us. If we are 50,000 they are 100,000. All the Christians are very frightened. They are frightened for their existence."
Zgharta was linked in a large electoral district with the Sunni Muslim city of Tripoli. A last-minute surge of Muslim voters there - turnout had been hovering around 30 percent, election workers said, until Mr. Hariri went on his family's television station a little before 4 o'clock with an appeal - carried the area for the opposition slate and, for the first time in memory, threw a Franjieh out of office.
"What we feared is happening," Mr. Franjieh, whose father was slain in 1978 by a rival Christian warlord, told Lebanese television. "I think the north has been divided along sectarian lines. We have arrived at what we used to warn against."
Other supporters of Syria echoed the theme, with a former prime minister, Omar Karami, from a powerful Sunni clan, calling for the ouster of the Sunni mufti of Lebanon, Sheik Muhammad Rashid Kabbani, whom he accused of making inflammatory sermons supporting Mr. Hariri. |
