No Plan for Salam to Resign despite Growing Crises

Prime Minister Tammam Salam has stressed that he will not resign despite growing political and environmental crises that are threatening to spiral out of control.

According to the Kuwaiti al-Anbaa daily published on Thursday, Salam told religious officials and diplomats that the country's political situation is grave but that he would not announce his resignation.

His decision might have come as a result of pressure exerted by top diplomats, mainly the Saudi Ambassador, not to take any resignation decision over fears that the country's crises would worsen.

Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Awadh Asiri said following talks with Salam on Tuesday that “the Kingdom is keen on the continued functioning of state institutions, chiefly the premiership.”

Al-Anbaa said that Asiri traveled to Riyadh on Wednesday to brief the Saudi leadership on Lebanon's political situation.

On Wednesday, Salam headed the fourth meeting that the ministerial waste management committee has held since Monday. But the conferees failed to reach any solution to the garbage crisis that erupted after the closure of the Naameh landfill on July 17.

The landfill, which opened in 1997, in the town of Naameh south of Beirut, was meant to receive trash from the capital and the heavily-populated Mount Lebanon area for only a few years until a comprehensive solution was devised.

But that plan never came to fruition, as efforts to pass waste legislation withered in Lebanon's notoriously fractured and stagnant parliament.

After the landfill's closure, streets overflew with waste and the air filled with the smell of rotting garbage.

The committee found a temporary solution to begin taking trash to several landfills in undisclosed locations. But its decision was met with severe criticism and protests by residents and local officials who refused the waste of Beirut and Mount Lebanon to be dumped in their areas.

The garbage crisis came amid a gridlock in the cabinet over its decision-making mechanism.

The Free Patriotic Movement has stressed that its ministers should have the right to coordinate with Salam on setting the cabinet's agenda because they consider themselves as representatives of the president in his absence.

Their conditions intensified the tension between the different parties.

G.K.

D.A.