Lebanese President Michel Sleiman will visit Damascus next week for talks with Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad, as the two neighbors move to establish diplomatic ties, an official said yesterday.
“The summit will be held on Aug. 13,” an official from the presidential palace told reporters.
Relations have been tense since Syria pulled its troops out of Lebanon in 2005 in the aftermath of the assassination of Lebanese billionaire and former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, ending a three-decade military presence.
Syria was widely blamed for the massive Beirut car bomb blast that killed Hariri but denies any involvement. The issue remains a key bone of contention between the two countries.
It will be Sleiman’s first official visit to Syria and the first meeting with Assad since the two leaders announced in Paris last month that they planned to establish ties.
The two neighbors have never had official diplomatic relations since their independence from France more than 60 years ago and the move is widely seen as a necessary step for Syrian recognition of Lebanese sovereignty.
Despite its 2005 troop pullout from Lebanon, Syria is believed to still wield much political power in its smaller neighbor and backs the Hezbollah-led opposition.
But Syria is gradually being welcomed back into the international fold, with a high-profile visit by Assad to Paris last month and the launching of indirect peace negotiations with Israel after an eight-year freeze.
Lebanon’s new national unity Cabinet, in which the opposition holds veto power, adopted a policy statement on Monday calling for “brotherly relations with Syria on the basis of mutual respect of sovereignty and the independence of both countries.” It also called for the demarcation of borders.
A parliamentary vote of confidence on the manifesto will allow the government to begin to function officially.
An official from speaker Nabih Berri’s office told reporters that parliament would probably meet on Friday.
The unity government was formed after a debilitating 18-month political crisis that culminated in fighting that left 65 dead in May and saw an armed Hezbollah-led takeover of large swathes of west Beirut.
Sleiman came to office after a deal struck in Qatar between the rival factions on May 21 — filling a six-month void in the presidency.
After the Doha accord, French President Nicholas Sarkozy moved to reward Assad by renewing contacts with Syria, which the West had isolated from the international community for alleged meddling in Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Western-backed ruling bloc accuses Syria of destablizing the country and being behind a series of assassinations of prominent anti-Syrian figures.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver