Violence in Lebanon serves Syria

By SALIM MANSUR

The capacity of Palestinian militants with their supporters among the wider Palestinian community in the Middle East and elsewhere to self-destruct seems to be hard-wired into their politics. This is again in evidence in the newest round of violence sparked by Palestinian militants of Fatah al-Islam linked with al-Qaida in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camps in Tripoli, Lebanon.

The purpose of al-Qaida is unambiguous. It is to undermine political order through terror in pursuing the strategic goal of precipitating sectarian conflicts within Muslim countries.

Violence and disorder, al-Qaida operatives believe, will contribute to the making of Islamist revolution and seizure of power by those allied to the aims of al-Qaida as were the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Palestinian Islamists gathered under the banner of Hamas are joined to al-Qaeda and ready to do the biddings of regimes, such as Iran and Syria. Their war (jihad) against Israel is part of the larger war against the West in general and the United States in particular.

The appearance of Fatah al-Islam in the Palestinian refugee camps located in Lebanon comes as no surprise, and its confrontation with the Lebanese state is not much different than that of the Hezbollah in undermining the authority of the central government in Beirut.

A weak Lebanese state has fallen prey to the wider politics of its neighbour, in particular Syria whose rulers in Damascus have viewed Lebanon for a long time as their doormat.

The question that hovers over the current violence in Lebanon is to what extent this serves Syrian interests, converging with the strategic purpose of al-Qaida, to destabilize a weak and communally divided country.

The answer is likely a great deal. The present crisis coincides with efforts in the Security Council to establish a tribunal under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter for bringing to trial suspects in the February 2005 murder of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon.

Kofi Annan as Secretary-General appointed Germany's Detlev Mehlis as the Commissioner of the UN investigation into the murder of Hariri in May 2005. The Commission's report concluded "many leads point directly towards Syrian security officials as being involved with the assassination."

The Syrian regime views the UN effort to bring Hariri's murderers to trial as an existential threat. The regime is a family-clan business under the present dictator Bashar Assad, and the regime has a record of ruthlessness in maintaining power.

But Hariri's murder sparked a popular outcry among Lebanese known as the "Cedar Revolution," and it forced Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon that had come to be seen as an occupation stretching over nearly three decades.

Damascus has been reluctant to accept Lebanon's relative freedom from its control. Some Lebanese -- such as journalists Gebran Tueni and Samir Kassir -- critical of Syria have paid with their lives while others have been intimidated by Syrian goons associated with the Hezbollah.

Palestinian militants of Fatah al-Islam might be independent of the Syrian regime and financed by sources not linked to Damascus. But the timing of their confrontation with the Lebanese military is indicative of their collaboration with Syrian authorities against the politics of the "Cedar Revolution" that runs deep across communal divisions in a new Lebanon struggling to be born.

The UN tribunal might hold a gun to the head of the Syrian regime by unmasking the murderers of Rafik Hariri. Damascus in turn might be warning Beirut through Palestinian thugs linked with al-Qaida of greater harm it can unleash against Lebanon in the future.