Press Release from the Canadian Lebanese Coordinating Council (LCCC)
Toronto – Canada,
Phone & Fax (905) 272 9389
NewsLine - News bulletins around the Clock (905) 270 0565
Web site http://www.10452lccc.com
E.mail: clhrf@yahoo.com
& Phoenicia@hotmail.com
August 8/ 2006
For Immediate Release
"Lebanese Diaspora Supports UN Draft Resolution and Warns Against Hezbollah &
Siniora Government's Attempts to Scuttle Immediate Cessation of Hostilities"
The LCCC supports the UN Draft Resolution under consideration by the Security
Council, addressing the Israeli-Hezbollah on going war in Lebanon, reiterates
its previous stances in this regard and calls for the following:
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.
For the LCCC
Chairman/ Elias Bejjani
Political Adviser/Charbel Barakat
*The
lccc is the Federal umbrella for the following nonprofit municipal, provincial
and federal Canadian registered groups:
Canadian Lebanese Human Rights Federation, (CLHRF), Canadian Lebanese
Free Patriotic Movement (FPM-Canada), Phoenician Club of Mississauga (PCOM),/Canadian
Phoenician Community Services Club (CPCSC),Canadian Lebanese Christian Heritage
Club (CLCHC),World Lebanese Cultural Union (WLCU)-Canadian Chapter.
N.B: The above release in its world wide Lebanese Diaspora version was co signed by 16 groups from the USA, Canada, France, England, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland Mexico, Argentine and Lebanon