The evening of September 4 found Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora phoning world leaders to tell them of an official complaint that his cabinet had filed to the UN Security Council over Israel’s air and sea blockade.
Israel was maintaining the blockade even after UN resolution 1701 called for its lifting.
By press time of The Sofia Echo, efforts to have it lift it amounted to no more than wishful prods. On September 6, UN secretary general Kofi Annan said that he hoped Israel would lift the blockade within a day or two.
France responded to Lebanese pleas with calls to immediately lift the blockade, with French ambassador to Lebanon Bernard Emie reminding Israel that Lebanese authorities had already taken extra measures to control their borders. On September 6, the Lebanese army entered five towns in southern Lebanon for the first time in a couple of decades, Bulgarian news agency BTA said. Bulgaria joined in calls for an immediate lifting of the blockade.
The governments of Bahrain, Syria, Algeria, Italy and Belgium responded to Lebanon’s calls with sit-ins in support of the country, Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star reported. Italian prime minister Romano Prodi said that he was doing his best to get the blockade lifted as fast as possible. So was the head of the Belgian senate, who addressed the Belgian parliament against the blockade.
The Arab parliament, meanwhile, continued the offensive and on September 5 called on Arab governments to send their aircraft and ships to the country without Israel’s consent. “If an aircraft arrives here without the consent of Israel, Israel would not be able to hit it,” the head of the Arab parliament, Mohammad Jassem al-Saqr, told the Daily Star.
The Arab parliament addressed Lebanese diasporas as well, urging them to protest in front of government buildings in their countries of residence and press for an end to the blockade.
The support coming from EU countries looks small, which is not a surprise, bearing in mind that the two-day informal conference held in Finland at the end of August, managed only to start the processes of looking for that unified EU voice that would turn the EU into the decisive factor in solving the Lebanon-Israel conflict. “There is the intention on the side of the EU to fight for a leading role in finding a solution that is as flexible as it can be,” Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin said after the first round of talks. “The aim is to find a political solution that would regulate the whole conflict in the region.”
An EU foreign ministers’ declaration said that the road map for peace in the Middle East would not be dropped, but “will become an element of the future resolution to all open issues in the Middle East - the problems of Lebanon, which led to today’s conflict, the solution to the Palestinian issue, the problem with Syria, the place and role of Israel in the region”.
The EU should not be humble about stepping up a more decisive approach to the Middle East. Kamen Velichkov, a former temporary head of the Bulgarian mission to Israel, hinted at that in a January 2005 article in Mediapool. The EU had played a decisive role in shaping some of the most important international documents on the Middle East, including the road map for peace, he said.
European MPs drafted the road map at an August 30 2002 unofficial meeting in Ellsinore. The US, Russia, and the UN later read and accepted it.
A larger EU role, however, should be twinned with larger fiscal support for Lebanon as well. Probably on the par that the EU provided to Palestinian authorities in 1993 - 2001. About 50 per cent of technical help to Palestine, or some 1.42 billion euro, had at that time come from the EU, Bulgarian diplomat Kamen Velichkov said in a January 2005 Mediapool article.
At the August 31 Stockholm Donor Conference on Lebanon, however, the EU committed $54 million and thus came out only fifth in the list of contributors. The United Arab Emirates, Italy and Spain followed the EU with $50 million, $38 million, and $34 million donations, respectively. Qatar, the US, the Arab Fund and Saudi Arabia gave the greatest amounts - $300, $234, $112 and $60 million, respectively.
Swedish foreign ministry spokesman John Zanchi said organisers were hoping for much more, the BBC said. The Lebanese government had estimated costs caused by Israeli air strikes at $3.6 billion. France and other countries have therefore planned to prepare a new conference to assist Lebanon, the Daily Star said. Bulgaria will also contribute about 100 000 euro worth of humanitarian relief, Deputy Foreign Minister Feim Chaoushev said in Stockholm.
Bulgaria has also committed a frigate and a medical team of no more than 10 people. The Bulgarian Government would want the frigate to stay in Lebanon for only two months. The UN, however, wants it for six months. Former ambassador to Israel Tsanko Yablanski said that Bulgaria should not rush its decision on participation in the operations because it had no interest in the region and should therefore wait and evaluate opportunities before taking a decision, Focus News Agency said. Though the mission was supposed to be peacekeeping, it also mentioned the disarmament of the Hezbollah militant group, meaning that the UN resolution was unclear and could lead to problems, Yablanski said. The National Movement Simeon II, on the other hand, insisted on a more “visible” Bulgarian presence in Lebanon.
Bulgarian disagreement over what to do was caused by upcoming presidential elections and the fact that the Bulgarian Socialist Party electorate opposes Bulgarian presence in Lebanon, Dnevnik daily said.
The debate over who should contribute what to Lebanon should continue to be hugely topical not only in Bulgaria, but worldwide as well because Lebanon should not turn into a next Iraq or Afghanistan. Speaking to the New Yorker, American journalist Jon Lee Anderson said that the US had done so little to reconstruct the two, both in terms of political life and infrastructure, and that this failure had played too well into the hands of Muslim extremists.
More recently, Hezbollah has also effectively captured people’s loyalties and taken away that role of the state from the Lebanese government, and, for that matter, from the larger actors in the conflict-including the United States, he said. Hezbollah announced that it would pay for the reconstruction of homes for tens of thousands of people and that it would itself rebuild, with funds from Iran, Anderson said.
A similar opinion was expressed by a young Lebanese attending the August 12 vigil on Beirut’s Martyr’s Square. The Lebanese, previously deeply divided along race, class and religion, have now come together with some of the more radical trade unions to coordinate aid for refugees, Indymedia said. Some of those present at the vigil chanted in support of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
That, among other things, makes the decision of Turkey and all other Muslim countries that decided in favour of contributing troops to Lebanon, extremely important.
