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Why Hizballah Will Not be Disarmed

[Times-UK] Nick Blanford - Forget about Hizballah being disarmed. It is just not going to happen. Hizballah doesn't want to be disarmed and there is nobody else willing to do it. Even if the Lebanese government had tried to force the army to do it, I think the army would have refused. A lot of its senior officers are loyal to President Emile Lahoud, the last leading ally of Syria to remain in office in Lebanon. Many people regard the Lebanese army as almost a proxy of Hizballah. The Shia contingent, which represents about 60 percent of all soldiers, would have refused to take on their Shia brothers in Hizballah. It is clearly understood that the last thing that foreign countries sending troops to maintain the cease-fire want to do is to get involved in disarming Hizballah - or even in preventing Hizballah from reaching the border and attacking Israel. The countries willing to offer troops for the new UN mission want a political understanding to be in place at the start, that Hizballah won't attack Israel and that when they arrive in south Lebanon they will not find Hizballah still deployed in bunkers along the border. In effect, they want the UN force to be mainly a PR stunt to reassure the international community that the situation in Lebanon is under control.
2006-08-17 01:00:00
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