BEIRUT, Lebanon (Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Speaker Nabih Berri said Monday that Shiites in Lebanon would not be dragged into sectarian strife, adding that the sect would work responsibly to eliminate factors that lead to tension.
“Arab Shiites, and especially Lebanese, will not fall into the trap of sectarian strife, despite the fact that we are witnessing attempts to drag them [Shiites] into it,” Berri said. Speaking at the opening session of an international conference to honor two prominent Shiite clerics in the Beirut southern suburbs, Berri said Shiites would work responsibly to eliminate factors behind sectarian tension.
“We in Lebanon will be the most committed to national unity and the formula of coexistence,” Berri said.
Berri said that recent visits by Western officials to Lebanon were aimed at turning the country into a base for launching attacks on Syria. In reference to some Lebanese factions, Berri said that some groups were working on shifting the confrontation from the one between Lebanon and Israel in the south to one between Lebanon and Syria in the north.
“We have to pay attention and [remember] who preserved the unity of this country, and who destroyed and occupied it for many times,” the speaker added.
Syrian authorities and some of Syria’s allies in Lebanon have accused Future Movement officials of providing arms and funding the ongoing unrest in Syria.
Berri spoke also of the Cedar Revolution, saying it weakened the country significantly.
“We present the official revolution in Lebanon under the title of the Cedar Revolution, but it took Lebanon back 60 years legally on the democratic level. [It] exhausted public funds, increased public debt and provided an atmosphere for further foreign interference in [Lebanon’s] present and future,” Berri explained.
“This is the reason for its [the Cedar revolution’s] failure rather than that mentioned by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” Berri said.
Addressing the U.S. Congress last week, Netanyahu said that the same tyranny which ended “the brief democratic spring in Iran” in 1979 had “smothered Lebanon’s democratic Cedar Revolution.”
The Cedar Revolution is a reference to the popular protests which erupted in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14, 2005, culminating in a massive rally on March 14 of the same year, when hundreds of thousands of Lebanese flocked to Downtown Beirut and demanded the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon after Damascus was accused of the assassination. The March 14 coalition was named after that day. The Syrian army pulled out of Lebanon in April 2005 after a 29-year presence.
Berri warned of foreign interference in the popular protests that are currently sweeping the Arab world, saying it was aimed at achieving the goals of the “war of dominance” which foreign powers started by invading Iraq and Afghanistan.
Berri voiced his confidence that “the Syrian army is aware of its national obligations and that there is no history of sectarian strife in Syria.”
“What Syria has witnessed opened the door for the challenge of a second corrective movement under President Bashar Assad which will put Syria in the future,” Berri said.
A coup which brought late Syrian President Hafez Assad to power in 1970 was referred to as the “corrective movement.”
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