'Organized Campaign' against al-Rahi over SLA Expected to Increase
Hizbullah is expected to up its campaign against Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi for embracing hundreds of exiled countrymen who fled after Israel ended its occupation of Lebanon.
An Nahar newspaper said on Monday that an “organized campaign” will be taken to another stage to criticize al-Rahi, who met with the former members of the South Lebanon Army during a religious visit to the Holy Land.
Al-Rahi assured the exiles he was trying to help, adding: "We are following up your suffering with the respective authorities in Lebanon."
Several Hizbullah officials have rejected the presence of “Israeli agents” in Lebanon, in an apparent response to al-Rahi “who went to the Palestinian occupied territories to convince them to return.”
"Someone went to occupied Palestine to convince some agents who withdrew with the enemy's soldiers in May 2000 to return to Lebanon,” Loyalty to Resistance bloc MP Ali Meqdad said on Saturday.
"They have become Israelis and do not want to regain the Lebanese and Arab identity,” he stated.
Shiite cleric Sayyed Ali Fadlallah also described the SLA members as traitors.
“If we don’t call those who were tools of the enemy ... traitors, then whom should we use this description for?” he asked on Sunday.
Head of Hizbullah's Juristic Committee Sheikh Mohammed Yazbek also stressed that only the Lebanese state can condemn or acquit the Lebanese who fled to Israel in 2000.
Bkirki officials told al-Joumhouria daily it was “impermissible” to attack the patriarch for being a “patriotic authority who represents a people that struggled to form the Lebanese entity.”
The officials, who were not identified, said the seat of the Maronite church also had reservations on Hizbullah's behavior on several issues.
“Its facilitation of the election of a new president would be a good start to bridge the gap between the two sides,” they said.
Hizbullah and the majority of the March 8 alliance's MPs have boycotted parliamentary sessions aimed at electing a president, leading to a vacuum in the country's top Christian post after the expiry of Michel Suleiman's six-year term on May 25.
Despite the campaign, the patriarch has remained silent.
He will not retort to the criticism against him unless it crosses the limit, the Bkirki sources said.
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