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Syria to Redeploy Troops in Lebanon: Army Spokesman
A Lebanese army spokesman announced Thursday that some Syrian troops stationed in Lebanon will be redeployed from their positions in mainly Christian areas in eastern Beirut.
However, the spokesman did not reveal if the redeployment is a prelude to an entire withdrawal of Syria's some 35,000 troops in Lebanon.
The National Broadcast Network (NBN) Television Station Thursday quoted witnesses as saying that the redeployment of Syria troops, which could last for a week, has begun on Wednesday night.
Witnesses said that Syrian army trucks loaded with troops and supplies from several positions in eastern Beirut, near the Presidential Palace and the Defense Ministry, headed to the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon on Wednesday night.
Meanwhile, Lebanon's Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir and Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) chief Walid Jumblatt Thursday expressed welcome to the redeployment of Syrian troops.
The NBN quoted Sfeir as saying that the redeployment is "a positive beginning that could help establish a sound relationship between Lebanon and Syria."
Jumblatt said he welcomes the redeployment, which could benefit Lebanon's sectarian cooperation and reconciliation.
The Syrian army entered into Lebanon as a peacekeeping force in 1976 to end a civil war between Lebanon's Christians and Muslims, which broke out in 1975. The war ended in 1990, but Syria has shown no intention to pull its troops out from Lebanon.
Sfeir and Jumblatt have been spearheading the campaign against Syria's military presence in Lebanon. Sfeir insists that Syria has no legal basis to deploy its troops in Lebanon, especially after Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon last May.
Under the 1989 Taif Accord, which ended Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, Syrian troops should have withdrawn from Beirut to the mountain areas in central Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley several years ago.
Lebanese Christians accused Syria, Lebanon's main power broker, of interfering in Lebanon's internal affairs and claimed that some 350,000 Syrians working in Lebanon "are grabbing jobs and wealth from Lebanese."
However, the Damascus-backed Lebanese authority supports Syria's military presence in Lebanon and exculpates the presence as a stabilizing force against the danger of Israel's potential invasion.
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