Kasmiyeh, Lebanon – The Lebanese army deployed in southern Lebanon on Thursday for the first time in 36 years as the fractured country’s central government tried to reassert authority in the face of Hezbollah’s growing clout.
A few thousand lightly armed Lebanese troops crossed the Litani River into the war-ravaged south shortly after sunrise, the first of 15,000 expected to arrive by the weekend.
Their role is expected to be largely cosmetic: Under a compromise with Hezbollah, the army won’t disarm Hezbollah fighters or search for their weapons.
In televised speeches Thursday, two of Lebanon’s prominent political leaders criticized Hezbollah’s refusal to hand over its huge cache of weapons and urged the powerful Shiite Muslim militant group to cede military authority to the central government.
Saad Hariri, son of slain Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, praised “the heroic fighters of the resistance” but added that the time has come for the state to assume full authority over Lebanon.
“We are facing a destroyed country, and the Lebanese will not allow anyone to make the state the weakest part of the national equation,” said Hariri, a Sunni Muslim who leads Lebanon’s largest parliamentary bloc, the diverse, anti-Syrian group known as the March 14 forces.
Veteran politician Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the Druze sect, said Hezbollah had undermined the government by failing to consult it before abducting two Israeli soldiers in the July 12 cross-border raid that triggered the conflict.
Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and other March 14 leaders appear worried that Hezbollah, with funding from Iran, is consolidating its influence over Lebanon’s large Shiite minority by moving quickly to rebuild devastated areas.
While the government has focused on political issues such as the dispute over disarmament, Hezbollah representatives have fanned out across the south to assess damage.
In a victory speech after Monday’s cease-fire, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah pledged to provide a year’s rent for anyone who lost a home in the conflict.
Lebanese news media hailed his words as “statesmanlike” and “presidential.”
Jumblatt and Nasrallah had traded thinly veiled barbs during the fighting, but Jumblatt addressed his rival directly Thursday.
He accused Hezbollah of acting as “a tool for the Iran-Syria axis on Lebanese land” and he warned Nasrallah that regaining the government’s trust wouldn’t be easy.
“Now you have a great name in the nation. You are a symbol now,” Jumblatt said. “From afar it’s easy for those people to hold your portrait. But from near, my country has been destroyed and burned.”
The remarks seemed to be addressed as much to Hezbollah’s patrons, Syria and Iran, as to Nasrallah.
