Lebanese students protest disappearance of Christian militant

BEIRUT, May 15 (AFP) - Some 1,000 university students gathered here Wednesday to protest against last week's disappearance of a former official from the banned anti-Syrian Christian Lebanese Forces (LF) militia. The students, responding to a call by Christian groups opposing Syrian dominance over Lebanon, gathered in a lecture hall at the state Lebanese University to denounce "the impotence of the authorities to disclose the whereabouts" of Ramzi Irani.

Student leader Patrick Rizkallah said Irani's dissapearance "comes as part of the continued repression against the opposition." Irani, a member of the Order of Engineers who works at the French oil giant TotalFinaElf in Beirut, disappeared on May 7. His wife informed the authorities the next day that her husband had vanished after work.

She called on the government to reveal the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, but General Prosecutor Adnan Addum assured Irani's family that he was not arrested by any of the state security services. In a statement published Wednesday, Lebanese Christian groups based in the United States accused "Syrian occupation forces" of Irani's dissappearance.

For its part, the Progressive Socialist Party of Druze leader Walid Jumblatt called on the authorities Wednesday "to act in a serious and efficient manner because the dissapearance of Mr. Irani constitutes a failure at the security and judicial levels." In August 2001, army intelligence services rounded up some 200 members of the anti-Syrian opposition without prior permission from the government. All were freed except Tufiq Hindi, a top member of the Lebanese Forces, and two journalists. The three were accused of having contacts with Israel.

Drug use among Lebanese youth has doubled in past decade: survey

BEIRUT, May 14 (AFP) - Drug use among Lebanese youth and in particular students has doubled in the past 10 years, a survey published by a Lebanese NGO in cooperation with the United Nations said Tuesday. "The number of students using drugs has at least doubled between 1991 and 1999 and the average age of first-time users is between 14 and 17," a Lebanese NGO for the fight against drugs called Idrac said in its report. The study was released during a conference organized by the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP), the Lebanese interior ministry and Idrac.

Mehdi Ali, an ODCCP official, said the target was to prepare a national program for 2003 aimed at reducing drug usage. Interior Minister Elias Murr said that "2002 will be the year to eradicate opium and cannabis cultivation" in order to protect the "health and future of  the youth."

He added 1,500 drug traffickers were arrested in 2001, and that the campaign to eradicate opium and Indian hemp would continue. In May 2002, the anti-narcotics bureau destroyed 200 hectares (500 acres) of opium poppy fields in the Baalbek-Hermel region without facing any resistance from farmers.

The Lebanese government, aided by the Syrian army, clamped down on drug cultivation in 1993. Drug cultivation and trafficking brought the country an income of about four billion dollars a year in the 1980s during the civil war. It did not manage in 2001 to stop the cultivation of hemp, whose continued cultivation was justified by the economic crisis and failure of a UN-backed crop substitution program.

Palestinians demonstrate in Lebanon on Israel's anniversary

AIN EL HELWEH, Lebanon, May 14 (AFP) - Some 2,000 young Palestinian refugees marked the anniversary of the creation of Israel Tuesday with a demonstration demanding their "right of return to Palestine". About 1,000 school children marched through the refugee camp of Ain el Helweh, near the southern city of Sidon. They wore traditional Palestinian clothes and held up signs bearing the names of their towns of origin, which were occupied or destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948.

"We will never abandon our right of return to Palestine", read a large banner carried at the head of the march and surrounded by Palestinian flags. Meanwhile further south in Tyre, 500 children staged a sit-in at the United Nations headquarters. They wore black headbands that said "we will not forget Palestine".

Marches also took place in other refugee camps around Tyre. In the northern city of Tripoli, hundreds of young Palestinians from the Beddawi and Nahr al-Bared camps staged a sit-in in front of the offices of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). After holding a rally, the demonstrators handed UNRWA officials a letter addressed to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan telling him "we continue to hold on to our sacred right to return to Palestine".

Israel was created on May 14, 1948. This anniversary is commemorated in Israel according to the Hebrew calendar and was celebrated this year on April 17. The Palestinians remember the occasion as the "nakba", meaning catastrophe in Arabic.