Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt called Sunday for a swift Cabinet formation to ward off the threat of strife facing the divided country, saying the bloody clashes in Sidon have added urgency to the need for a new government.
“A government must be formed without impossible conditions being set. Let the differences be taken from the street to the Cabinet table,” Jumblatt told Al-Jadeed TV by telephone.
He voiced support for the Army’s efforts to prevent strife as a result of deep national divisions over the more than 2-year-old civil war in Syria.
Jumblatt was commenting on Sunday’s bloody clashes between the Lebanese Army and supporters of Salafi Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir in Abra, east of the southern city of Sidon, which left at least 10 soldiers dead and 38 others wounded in the worst round of violence linked to the conflict in Syria.
He said he would soon send caretaker Social Affairs Minister Wael Abu Faour to Saudi Arabia for talks with former Prime Minister Saad Hariri on the 10-week-long Cabinet deadlock.
Prime Minister-designate Tammam Salam resumes his efforts in earnest this week to form a new Cabinet amid difficulties facing his mission as the rival factions stand firm on their unyielding positions on the makeup and role of the government.
Caretaker Public Works Minister Ghazi Aridi warned that if the game of conditions and counterconditions between March 8 and March 14 parties persist, no Cabinet would be formed any time soon.
“The 8-8-8 Cabinet is rejected by Hezbollah and the March 8 side. The Future Movement and its allied political parties have set a condition not to sit at the same table with Hezbollah while it is fighting in Syria,” Aridi said in an interview with An-Nahar newspaper published Sunday.
“The party [Hezbollah] will not return from Syria now and will not stop its battle there. If these conditions from here and there persist, I don’t see a Cabinet formation,” he said.
Hezbollah reiterated Sunday its rejection of Salam’s proposal for a 24-member Cabinet divided equally among the March 8 and March 14 camps and the centrists – a reference to President Michel Sleiman, Salam and Jumblatt.
Salam renewed his support for the three-eight Cabinet proposal after meeting Sleiman at Baabda Palace Saturday. He also reaffirmed his opposition to granting a blocking third [veto power] to any party in the new Cabinet.
Salam reiterated his call for a Cabinet of “national interest.” He said the unstable security situation in the country demanded the government be formed quickly.
“The nature of the government I am seeking falls under the title of the nation’s interests and the not the interests of a certain group or [political] force,” Salam said at Baabda Palace.
MP Mohammad Raad, who heads Hezbollah’s bloc in Parliament, urged Salam not to waste his time on the three-eight Cabinet, saying such a Cabinet would not be able to survive. He renewed Hezbollah’s call for the formation of a Cabinet in which all political parties are represented according to their parliamentary representation.
“The 8-8-8 formula or the ‘king minister’ or any proposal in order for the political parties not to be represented in the Cabinet formation according to their real size [in Parliament] will not be able to survive,” Raad told a Hezbollah ceremony in the southern town of Khiam to mark Imam Mahdi’s birthday.
“A Cabinet that can see the light of day and that can survive is the Cabinet in which all political parties are represented according to the size of their representation in Parliament,” he said.
Hezbollah’s caretaker Minister of State for Administrative Reform Mohammad Fneish called for a swift formation of a new government to protect civil peace now that the 17-month extension of Parliament’s four-year mandate, which expired on June 20, has gone into effect after the Constitutional Council failed to rule on petitions challenging the extension. Fneish warned against setting conditions by the March 14 coalition for joining the Cabinet. “If some insist on raising the ceilings [demands] and putting conditions without accepting the logic of real partnership, this means that they don’t want to facilitate the formation of the government, but rather [want to] keep the country in the circle of crises and trouble,” he said during a luncheon in honor of Lebanese expatriates in the southern town of Bazzouriyeh.
Separately, Iran’s President-elect Hassan Rouhani met in Tehran with caretaker Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour in the first meeting with an Arab or foreign official since his election last week, the state-run National News Agency reported. Following the meeting, Rouhani called Sleiman in the first phone contact with a head of state since his election, the NNA said.
by:Hussein Dakroub
