EXPLOITING THE HOULA MASSACRE AS SYRIAN-LEBANESE LINES GET BLURRED
press tv
Mon Jun 4, 2012 11:5AM GMT
Lebanese army deployed troops to the northern city of Tripoli after
clashes erupted between supporters and opponents of the Syrian
government, May 13, 2012.
But what is apparent is that the American government and its NATO
allies have seized tightly upon the horror at Houla in order to justify
yet more sanctions against Syria and also to generate international
pressure for military action to achieve its original and continuing
goal, regime change.”
Despite more information slowly being made public about the
Houla massacre in central Syria last week, a criminal carnage that
slaughtered 110 civilians, including 49 women and children, the less
it is clear who was responsible.
But what is apparent is that the American government and its NATO
allies have seized tightly upon the horror at Houla in order to justify
yet more sanctions against Syria and also to generate international
pressure for military action to achieve its original and continuing
goal, regime change.
The additional sanctions being stacked up and leveraged against the
Bashar Assad government, following the Houla massacre include the
expulsion of Syrian diplomats by more than a dozen NATO countries. But
there is more to the West’s manipulation of the Houla murders and it is
the use of the images, including one showing a baby with a pacifier in
its mouth and a single bullet hole in the infants head. The calculated
and predictable global reaction, augmented by various thinly disguised
western efforts, and claimed to be funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar
is to demonstrate sole Syrian government responsibility.
Daily reports with more evidence are evidencing that this rush to
judgment is flawed and also that the campaign is designed in the West
to play upon the international publics emotions to garner support for
military action against Syria, despite White House and NATO statements
that the Kofi Annan 6-point peace plan must be given more time to be
implemented and that military options, while ‘on the table’ are not
being considered at this time.
Meanwhile, this orchestrated campaign is spilling over to Lebanon
and the line between the two countries participation and effects of
the Syrian crisis continues to blur. The last example is the death
of 12 persons, including a mother and her son, and the wounding of
50 others in Tripoli, Lebanon. The sides involved in the fighting
are respectively pro and anti the Bashar Assad regime.
Three or four gentlemen regularly sit outside a small grocery store,
opposite this observer’s flat, drinking coffee and smoking argileh
water pipes, in the Hezbollah neighborhood of Haret Hreik in south
Beirut. I rely on them and value their insights into the swirling
events in Lebanon and credit their analyses and gut instincts about
developments on the streets.
One of them commented last Tuesday evening, as he smelled the burning
tires a few streets away where some of our neighbors had closed
the airport road in protest against the apparent kidnapping of 11
“family” members, “It feels an awful lot like Ain el-Rummaneh around
here?”The gentleman’s reference was to the April 13, 1975 slaughter of
30 Palestinians when Bashar Gemayal’s right wing Christian militia
attacked a local bus carrying the refugees not far from where
the speaker was sitting. My neighbor went on to describe how Ain
el-Rummaneh was the spark that ignited Lebanon’s 15-year civil war
that killed more than 150,000. Another one million people-a quarter of
Lebanon’s population was wounded and 350,000 were displaced. Another
quarter of the population departed Lebanon, most never to return.
More are currently making preparations to leave Lebanon for, among
other reasons, the sake of their children’s future?”There are sparks
nearly every day now. Which one will cause the explosion, we don’t
know, but it is certain that one of them will,” he said.
The gentleman sitting next to him, a refugee from Safad, Palestine,
named Mansour, assured his friends that there will not be a civil
war because “those who have the arms to win one do not want one and
those who want one don’t have the weapons or disciplined militia
[needed] to win a civil war. Some are now joining the war in Syria
as a substitute, to achieve their political goals.”? It appears that
Lebanon is not the simply the object or repository of spillover from
the Syrian conflict but rather that it is very much an integral part
of the escalating conflict in Syria.
The evidence appears clear and the signs multiply daily. They are too
numerous for itemization but include the warning by all six [Persian]
Gulf Cooperation Council countries against travel by their citizens
to Lebanon, the concern expressed by the two kings Abdullah (in Saudi
Arabia and Jordan) over the current status of “a particular group in
Lebanon”, the alarm sounded by United Nations Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon and US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton over the potentially
catastrophic effects of the Syrian uprising on Lebanon, the arrest
of Shadi al-Mawlawi, and the clashes in Tripoli that followed the
shooting of Sunni cleric Ahmad Abdul Wahed at an army checkpoint.
They also include the fighting last weekend near Shatila Palestinian
refugee camp in the mixed Tariq al-Jadideh neighborhood against a
small Sunni party aligned with the anti-Syrian March 8 coalition,
the kidnapping by still-unknown persons of a group of Lebanese Shiite
pilgrims, the bombing of a bus carrying Lebanese Shiite pilgrims in
Baghdad, clashes between students on Lebanese college campuses and
even tensions at high schools, and the clash in Ras Beirut just last
Wednesday. Indeed, there are regular skirmishes on Beirut’s streets?
These events have rendered the government of Lebanon and many of its
leaders the butt of jokes and derision. The one national institution
that was touted as being a unifying force, the Lebanese army that
is respected by most Lebanese, has had its popular image shaken over
charges that its troops may have assassinated a Sunni Sheikh on orders
from above and not by a couple of rogue army check-point soldiers as
the army has claimed.
Each incident has been laced with pro- or anti-Syria overtones. Each
event was, and continues to be rooted in the Syrian uprising, which
some claim is in turn rooted in the US-Saudi-Qatar plan to deal a
blow to Iran, Hezbollah, Russia and others in the region who are
realigning political realities. Given the deep historical, familial,
cultural, political, and economic links between Syria and Lebanon,
it is not surprising that what happens in one country affects the
other and that international players seeking to manipulate these
events have remained the same for decades?
The extent of the entanglement raises the question not whether Syria
truly left Lebanon in 2005 when it withdrew forces that had occupied
the country since 1976-after all, its other manifold links remained
substantially in place. Is it possible or even desirable to separate
the two countries on this issue?
The myriad sparks of the past several weeks suggest that Syria and
Lebanon remain inextricably connected and will remain so for the
foreseeable future. Spillover lines seem already to have been erased;
the territory of the two sovereign countries is in some respects
one, despite the Sykes-Picot agreement and the French- engineered
confessional system meant to truncate Greater Syria.
It is against this danger to both Syria and Lebanon that Western
efforts to exploit the Houla tragedy continue.