Statement from Sixteen Lebanese Diaspora Organizations in support of the French - USA- UN Resolution Draft on Lebanon

Toronto - Canada

Press Release

August 8/06

"Lebanese Diaspora Supports UN Draft Resolution and Warns Against Hezbollah & Siniora Government's Attempts to Scuttle Immediate Cessation of Hostilities"


We, the undersigned representatives of the Lebanese Diaspora organizations and clubs listed below, support the UN Draft Resolution under consideration by the
Security Council.
The Siniora government's proposal to send 15,000 Lebanese army troops to the south as soon as Israeli forces withdraw is a sham, because the Lebanese
government is not simultaneously calling for disarming Hezbollah. Sending inexperienced reservists of the Lebanese army to the south without first disarming
Hezbollah is a recipe for civil war, which the Lebanese government has so far claimed as the reason for not implementing UN resolution 1559 and disarming
Hezbollah.

Lebanese national unity, as Hezbollah backers in Lebanon keep claiming as their objective, can only be achieved by subscribing to the draft UN resolution
that first and foremost puts an end to the destruction of Lebanon and the continuous killing of civilians on both sides of the border. Lebanese national unity
cannot be achieved with the rape of the most fundamental principle of State sovereignty: The primacy of the State, its institutions, and its legitimate armed forces over any horde of foreign-paid armed fanatic gangsters parading themselves as “liberators” and “resistance fighters”.

The immediate and unconditional cessation of hostilities has been the demand of Lebanon’s Siniora government since Hezbollah triggered the hostilities by crossing the internationally-recognized border and attacking a neighboring sovereign State. Now that the international community has acquiesced to the Hezbollah-hijacked incompetent Lebanese government’s demand for an immediate cessation of hostilities, that government is now imposing new and insurmountable conditions that can only be explained by Hezbollah’s blackmail of the Siniora government, given its desperation at witnessing its own demise by a united and determined international community.

The international community should listen to the cries of pain of the Lebanese people, and not to a divided Lebanese government, now supported by an equally
divided and impotent Arab League. The Lebanese people want an end to the destruction of their country and they also want an end to the pretexts and
justifications for 40 years of an ongoing farce of liberation in the south of Lebanon that has accomplished nothing but the destruction of Lebanon and its reduction to a beggar of international aid after it had been one of the most prosperous economies in the world.

The destruction of Lebanon must no longer be used by the so-called Arab world as a lever to score pitiful victories against Israel. How can Amr Mousse, the Secretary General of the Arab League, whose own country has an Israeli embassy in downtown Cairo, be lecturing the dying Lebanese on how to resist the
Israeli aggression? How can the Foreign Minister of the vulgar tyranny he calls his country, Syria, which occupied Lebanon for 30 years, whose own sieges of
Beirut, Tripoli, Zahle and other Lebanese cities in 1978, 1981, 1984 and 1989 killed by far many more Lebanese than the current Israeli onslaught, which
continues to detain hundreds of Lebanese prisoners in its jails, and which is the primary suspect in the assassination of scores of Lebanese leaders, now has
the gall to pretend to want to help the Lebanese people? The Lebanese War was placed under Arab custody for close to 35 years, and that custody has totally
failed. Now is the time to finally place Lebanon in the custody of the civilized international community, and the draft UN resolution does just that.

We call on the Lebanese people to think for themselves and adhere to the international community’s efforts to get them once and for all out of the 40-year old cycle
of violence that all their previous governments, all their previous and current militias, all the Arab world and all their corrupt leaders have failed to do.
Let them remember that all their leaders now posturing themselves as saviors who just discovered national unity behind Hezbollah, are the same leaders whose
armies and militias and weapons, in collusion with the Syrians, the Arabs, the Palestinians, the Israelis and God knows who else, shelled, killed, kidnapped, bombed
to certain death 150,000 Lebanese citizens in 35 years. This record alone should guide the Lebanese people to making the right choices today and telling
the world and their own leaders what they really want.

The current draft UN resolution is an excellent first step to put Lebanon back on the track of a definitive peace by extricating it from the insoluble Arab-Israeli conflict and the polarization of regional conflicts between Iran and Saudi Arabia. For the Lebanese government of Mr. Siniora to put additional demands, now that his initial demand for an immediate cessation of hostilities has been met is nothing short of criminal, self-serving and an assured path towards more destruction and killing.

Signatories of the release

Dr. Joseph Hitti/ New England Americans For Lebanon (NEAL)

Colonel Charbel Barakat/Free World Lebanese Cultural Union (FWLCU)-Canadian Chapter

Walid S. El-Hage/CLUB (Christian Lebanese Union-Britain

Elias Bejjani/Canadian Lebanese Free Patriotic Movement (FPM-Canada)

Toni Mouanis/Canadian Lebanese Human Rights Federation (CLHRF)

Walid Haddad/Lebanese Canadian Coordinating Council (LCCC)

Noel Haddad/Phoenician Club of Mississauga (PCOM)

Joseph Hemo/Canadian Phoenician Community Services Club (CPCSC)

Charbel Constantine/Canadian Lebanese Christian Heritage Club (CLCHC)

Chebl Zoghbi/Ex Lebanese Forces Veteran Fighter in Diaspora (LFVF)
Christian Chaoul./Guardians of the Cedars Organization in Britain
George Chaya/WCLU Media Chairman for Spanish America

Roni Doumit/World Maronite Union-Europen Chapter (WMU-Europe)

Ghabi Galo/Aramic Democratic Organization (Ardo)
Asaad Sauma/Solidarity organization for Middle Ease Christians (SOMAC)

Dr. Rachid Rahme/Secretary General of the International Committee for the Cedars Revolution in Lebanon.
 

NB: For more information, please contact us at one of the following e-mail addresses:‎
clhrf@yahoo.com or Phoenicia@hotmail.com
Related Web sites
www.10452lccc.com, www.clhrf.com, www.aramaic-dem.org, www.neal-us.org, www.lfvf.org, www.maroniteunion.org,http://www.cedarguards.org/

Note: The Canadian version of the above release was distributed in Canada under the LCCC .