1559 Seen as Terminating Syria's Dream of Annexing Lebanon in Stages

Naharnet

France and the United States have agreed to delay a decision on the future of the U.N. peacekeeping force in South Lebanon, pending Kofi Annan's report on the progress of enforcing resolution 1559, which was seen in An Nahar Wednesday as having ruptured Syria's dream of annexing Lebanon stage-by-stage. The Franco-American move clears the way for the Security Council this week to extend the term of the 2000-strong U.N. force known as UNIFIL for six extra months as of Feb. 1 without scaling down its size or changing its peacekeeping mandate, An Nahar said in a Washington-datelined dispatch on Wednesday. The 15 member-states of the U.N. executive arm are currently holding informal consultations on Lebanon's request for an unconditional UNIFIL extension. A voting session is scheduled for Friday, An Nahar's Washington correspondent Hisham Milhem reported. The U.S. and France have agreed to re-examine UNIFIL's future in light of the way Lebanon's elections for a new parliament are conducted in May and Annan's biannual report on the implementation of resolution 1559 in April. UNIFIL's new mandate expires on July 31, Milhem noted. Al Hayat quoted unidentified western sources at the U.N. in New York as saying Annan's personal envoy Terje Roed-Larsen was poised to fly to Damascus for talks on the 1559 implementation once President Bashar Assad returns to the Syrian capital from his state visit to Russia. There was no word whether Roed-Larsen would visit Beirut for the same purpose before or after the Damascus trip. But Al Hayat quoted unnamed French sources as saying Presidents Bush and Chirac were expected to hold follow-up talks on resolution 1559 at the NATO summit scheduled for Feb. 21 in Brussels. An Nahar on Wednesday ran the second and final installment of a takeout entitled 'A Geo-Strategic Reading into the Lebanese-Syrian Relations." Dr. Nabil Khalifeh, the takeout writer, concluded that 1559 had terminated Syria's historic dream of annexing Lebanon in stages. The Lebanese government was alarmed by the American-French attitude, fearing that it could herald the UNIFIL's withdrawal from South Lebanon in summer. The foreign ministry in Beirut has summoned the ambassadors of the security council's 15 member states to ascertain that UNIFIL's mandate won't be terminated by the expiry of the new extension.