Rice: Lebanese Should Elect President ‘Without Reference to Syrian Occupation’

 

     

Beirut – Naharnet — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said the U.N. Security Council should consider implementing measures to punish those responsible for arms smuggling from Syria to Lebanon.

“I think the United Nations Security Council owes it to Lebanon and it owes it to its own resolution to look very seriously at how this is happening and to propose ways that the perpetrators could be deterred from doing it or punished if they continue to do it,” Rice said in an interview on Al-Hurra television channel Thursday.

While agreeing that the smuggling of arms is a violation of Security Council resolution 1701 and a serious problem for its implementation, Rice confirmed that the Europeans are working with the Lebanese government “to try to enhance the capability of the Lebanese army to deal with this.”

“The Lebanese army has intercepted several shipments … the Lebanese have made available information about some of this smuggling,” she said. Rice also reiterated the need to elect a president for Lebanon “without intimidation” or “foreign interference,” stressing that the election of a new head of state “will be, of course, a matter for the Lebanese.” “The Lebanese people will make that decision,” she said.

“They need to be able to make it without foreign interference. And that is our concern: that they need to be able to make it without intimidation; they need to be able to make it without reference to a past in which, for instance, Syria occupied Lebanese territory. “They need a president who is committed to Lebanese sovereignty and committed to Lebanese democracy,” Rice added. “But I would just say one thing to the Lebanese people.

This, in some ways, has been a difficult time because it’s a difficult anniversary, the terrible times of the war a year ago when Lebanon suffered so much. And the international community and the United States have tried to respond to help the Lebanese people rebuild,” she said in reference to last summer’s Israel-Hizbullah war.

“The Lebanese Government has also responded. The government of Prime Minister (Fouad) Saniora has done remarkable things. When you think that the Lebanese army is actually now deployed throughout the country for the first time in decades, that they are actually fighting (Fatah al-Islam) terrorists on behalf of the Lebanese people, these are real accomplishments,” Rice acknowledged.

She said, however, that there’s more work to be done, “but Lebanon has good friends in the international community and good friends of a democratic and sovereign Lebanon.”