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Princess Lalla Mariam of Morocco looks on, while Lebanese Culture Minister
Ghassan Salameh appears in the background during their visit to the National
Museum in Beirut 17 July 2001. The Princess, who is the head of the Moroccan
children's Rights Watch, was appointed recently a goodwill ambassador by
UNESCO's general director Koichiro Matsuura.
Later Lebanese President Emile Lahoud presented a National Order of the Cedar medal to Princess Lalla Mariam of Morocco at the Baabda presidential palace near Beirut. AFP PHOTO |
BEIRUT, July 17 (AFP) - Some longtime absconders rushed to pay their electricity bills Tuesday, while Lebanon's state prosecutors continued their investigation into a veritable who's who list of Lebanese politicians, who had skipped out on paying their power fees. "The men are rushing in record numbers to rid themselves of their debts to the company," said Emile Geha, head of the employees' union at the state-owned Electricite du Liban (EDL).
Sources close to EDL have indicated that over the last two days around 1.5 million dollars have been paid in overdue fees, although the state electricity company is owed more than 650 million dollars. On Friday, striking EDL workers published some 40 names, including powerful parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri, as well as state bodies, hospitals and private firms, who had failed to pay overdue bills. Many of the notables have threatened to file libel suits against the EDL workers.
Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri ordered an investigation Saturday into the reports. The two general financial prosecutors charged with the dossier, Rukuz Rizk and Khalil Rahal, have already met with EDL director Georges Mowaad and two other company officials, a judicial source said.
Geha and other union heads had been questioned regarding the publication of their list. Rahal and Rizk had demanded Tuesday that Mowaad submit his own list of people who had failed to pay their accounts and the electricity employees responsible. About half of EDL subscribers, mainly in impoverished areas of outhern and northern Lebanon, are known not to pay their electricity bills.
The government, which has invested over one billion dollars in the last six years for the rehabilitation of power stations and networks damaged in the country's 1975-1990 civil war, covers EDL's annual losses, which are estimated at 400 million dollars.
EDL workers went on strike last week to protest a cost-cutting move in the national budget, which would make them pay full price for their own electricity bills, ending a perk going back more than 50 years. The strike was suspended Saturday for a week to allow negotiations to take place.
TEHRAN, July 17 (AFP) - Iran's ambassador to Syria Hossein Sheikholeslam has rejected Israeli press reports saying a senior member of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards fled to Israel from Lebanon. In an exclusive interview with the conservative Qods daily published Tuesday, Sheikholeslam said reports that an "Iranian has sought asylum in Israel are baseless."
"These rumours are manufactured by the Zionist regime and aim at justifying their inabilities during clashes in southern Lebanon," he said. On July 9, Israel's Maariv newspaper said a Revolutionary Guard was being detained in Israel after entering the country from Lebanon. He reportedly told his interrogators that he fled to Israel because he was persecuted in Iran for criticising its religious leaders.
It quoted Israeli security officials as saying the man, who told his questioners he was sent to Lebanon with five other Iranians, had a senior role within the Revolutionary Guards or Pasdaran. "It is unclear to us whether he decided to come to Israel to undertake hostile activity or whether he decided to flee to a Western country because of persecution," the paper quoted a security source as saying.
The Iranian embassy in Beirut later "categorically" denied the presence of Pasdarans in Lebanon. Iran does not recognise Israel and favours a peace plan which would see the return of all Palestinian refugees followed by a referendum on the future of the territory disputed by the Israel and the Palestinians.
by Marc Carnegie
JERUSALEM, July 17 (AFP) - Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Israel is a "cancerous tumour" that should be wiped off the map of the earth -- now he is reportedly closer than ever to realising his goal. According to top Israeli officials, Iran's Islamic regime has sent Hezbollah guerrillas in south Lebanon as many as 8,000 Katyusha rockets that could easily strike most of the northern third of Israel.
Intelligence sources cited in the Haaretz newspaper Tuesday said Iran is stepping up its weapons shipments to the Lebanese guerrillas, airlifting hundreds of tons of arms and materiel via Syria in the past few days. Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer told the Jerusalem Post that Iran has become "the mother of international terrorism."
The fundamentalist Shiite militia Hezbollah has been perched along Israel's northern border since Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon in May 2000, ending 22 years of occupation in what then prime minister Ehud Barak hoped would lead to a comprehensive regional peace. But with the collapse of the peace process, Hezbollah's violent struggle to oust Israel from south Lebanon after Iran and Syria helped found the group in the 1980s was taken up as a model of how to stand up to the Jewish state.
Now, Israeli officials say, Hezbollah is establishing a growing presence in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank as well as throughout Lebanon, where Iran's closest Middle East ally Syria is the main powerbroker. The Iranian embassy in Beirut has fervently denied claims that troops from Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards are on the ground in Lebanon, operating command-and-control centres for high-powered Iranian missiles pointed at Israel.
"There has been a major deterioration in the security situation across the region, mostly due to a resurgence of Iranian power," says Dore Gold, a top advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "This poses a threat to not just Israeli interests but the interests of most Western countries and the Middle East," he told AFP, underlining that the Islamic republic is believed to be only five years away from having a nuclear weapon.
Moderate President Mohammad Khatami has rehabilitated Iran's image on the international stage with his calls to open up the country to foreign investment and his moves to instil a degree of political and social freedom at home. But it is Khamenei who has final say on all matters of state, and he used an international conference organised by the Iranian parliament earlier this year in Tehran to claim that Zionists had conspired to exaggerate the Holocaust.
Some foreign press reports said Khatami was embarrassed by the speech, but with representatives of the groups and nations most hostile to Israel all gathered under Iran's umbrella, the conference underlined Tehran's implacable hostility to the Jewish state. Iran has also been a fierce defender of the Palestinian cause, using its growing power to try to corral the Muslim world into adopting a unified stance against Israel despite the fact non-Arab Iranians feel little sympathy with the struggle.
The latest reports of massive Iranian firepower hardly more than a stone's throw from Israel will likely to little to calm nerves outside the region amid fears that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could spill over to regional war. But that presence is unlikely to deter the rush of foreign nations willing to throw money at the Islamic republic for a piece of its lucrative, and still well undeveloped, oil and gas sector.
Gold cautions Europe -- which can count France, Italy and Norway among nations already investing in Iran's petrochemical sector -- to remember that Iran's developing weapons industry could also put missiles in reach of the continent. "The military capabilities being developed in this region," he says, "affect European security before they affect American or Israeli security."
MARJAYOUN, Lebanon, July 17 (AFP) - Israeli warplanes again overflew southern Lebanese regions on Tuesday, according to security sources. The jets, in two consecutive sorties, flew at high altitude over the border zone which Israel had occupied for 22 years until its May 2000 troop pullout, they said. Last Wednesday, Israeli jets had broken the sound barrier over the capital Beirut and regions in southern and northern Lebanon.
On June 29, United Nations special representative Staffan de Mistura said Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer had told him the day before flights would be halted over Lebanon. There would also be no more supersonic bangs, de Mistura added.
But the same day, Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas attacked Israeli troops in the disputed Shebaa farms border area, triggering an Israeli air raid which destroyed a Syrian radar station in eastern Lebanon on July 1. Shortly after the raid, the Israeli air force also broke the sound barrier over Beirut and the southern port city of Sidon, and again two days later over Tripoli.
Israeli jets had ended their violations of Lebanese airspace briefly after Israel ended its occupation of southern Lebanon. But they soon resumed, and intensified since October, when Hezbollah snatched three Israeli soldiers patrolling the disputed Shebaa Farms area, which was captured from Syria by Israel in 1967 and is now claimed by Beirut.
BEIRUT, July 17 (AFP) - Lebanon will sign a free trade agreement with Iraq in the "near future, Economy Minister Bassel Fleihan said Tuesday. "We will witness the signing of the deal between Lebanon and Iraq for a free trade zone in the near future," Fleihan said at the opening of the second annual exhibition of Iraqi products held at the Beirut Hall. "We are ready to pursue the issue of the free trade zone. The Lebanese government has taken the decision and is ready for that and we have agreed on all the clauses," he said.
Last month, the chief of the Lebanese industrial association, Jacques Sarraf, said the deal was expected to be signed in July. Earlier this month, the head of the Beirut chamber of commerce, Adnan Kassar, said Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri had "assured us that Lebanon is ready to sign a free trade deal with Iraq, similar to agreements signed with Syria and Egypt."
A number of leading businessmen and politicians are urging the Hariri government to speed up the process of normalisation between Lebanon and Iraq, to develop economic and trade exchanges and to import Iraqi crude oil that Baghdad is offering at half price, as is the case for Syria, Jordan and Turkey.
Lebanon, which broke off diplomatic relations with Iraq in 1994 after the assassination in Beirut of an Iraqi opposition leader, resumed them in March but only at the level of charge d'affaires. Relations earlier picked up in 1997 when Syria, which wields great influence over Lebanon, improved its ties with Iraq. Before the 1990 international sanctions on Iraq, Baghdad was the main buyer of Lebanese products and Lebanon was the prime destination of Iraqi tourists and businessmen.
BEIRUT, July 17 (AFP) - A Palestinian man has been detained for suspected links with an armed attack last year by a Palestinian gunman against the Russian embassy in Beirut, judicial sources said Tuesday. The sources, which did not disclose the identity of the Palestinian or the date of his arrest, said the suspect was due to be heard for links with the case by examining magistrate Hatem Madi on Thursday.
Madi will then issue an act of accusation which will be referred to Lebanon's supreme court. On January 3, 2000, Palestinian gunman Ahmad Raja Abou Kharroub, a 30-year-old member of a small outlawed Sunni Muslim extremist group, attacked the Russian embassy in Beirut with rockets before he was gunned down by police which suffered one dead in the operation. Seven other people were injured.
Kharroub had a statement in his pocket saying that he wished to "die as a martyr for Grozny", thus hinting that his attack was in protest at Russia's military offensive against Muslim rebels in Chechnya. Since the incident, security measures have been tightened around Russian interests in Beirut, mainly the embassy and the cultural center.
UNITED NATIONS, July 17 (AFP) - A UN team investigating the handling of a UN video showing presumed members of Hezbollah allegedly involved in kidnapping three Israeli soldiers will leave New York late Tuesday for the Middle East, a spokesman said.
The head of the mission, Joseph Connor, has assembled a seven-person team to look into the matter, which has strained already testy relations between the United Nations and Israel. "In this two-week period, Connor expects to travel to the Middle East and some of his people from this team will be leaving tonight," said UN spokesman Fred Eckhard. "He expects to finish his work in a couple of weeks"
The 30-minute tape was filmed by an Indian peacekeeper the morning after the October 7 kidnapping in the disputed Shebaa Farms area of the Israeli soldiers by members of the fundamentalist Shiite Hezbollah. It reportedly shows efforts by UN troops to remove two abandoned cross-country vehicles and their interception by a group of armed men, allegedly from Hezbollah.
The vehicles were marked with blood stains and carried false UN license plates, a UN official recently said. The UN admitted July 5 it had the videotape after denying its existence for months. Citing need to preserve neutrality in the region, Annan offered both Lebanon and Israel the opportunity to view an edited version of the tape, with the faces of presumed Hezbollah members obscured. Israel has demanded to see an unedited version.
The internal investigation will also look into allegations that Hezbollah members bribed UN troops to get access to the three Israeli soldiers. Eckhard announced the opening of the inquiry last week saying the affair had embarrassed the United Nations and created questions about its credibility.
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