Jumblat Warns of 'White Coup d'Etat' to Unseat Lahoud

Naharnet

With another Progressive Socialist Party activist escaping an assassination attempt, Druze leader Walid Jumblat declared that the opposition may have reached the fringes of a 'white coup d'etat' and may demand the resignation of President Lahoud. The PSP chief spoke in an interview aired by Al Arabiya satellite network Sunday night just as a power outage engulfed Beirut and all satellite dishes went dead for more than an hour, preventing the population from seeing or hearing Jumblat's escalatory declarations. There were suggestions in the local media Monday morning that the blackout was stage-managed by a state-supported Moukhabarat secret service, taking Jumblat's confrontation with Lahoud's Syrian-extended regime to a higher peak. The escalation of the political clash was further dramatized by an apparent attempt to assassinate PSP activist Akram Saab in Shweifat by a bomb planted in his 4-wheel car. He escaped with minor leg injuries that forced him to use a walker. Jumblat's thinly veiled threat to constitutionally unseat the Syrian-backed Lahoud coincided with the president's return to Beirut from a year-end vacation with his family in southern France. "It marked a fiery entrance to 2005," commented An Nahar. "The opposition wholly wants to end the police state regime of Syrian and Lebanese Moukhabarat service," said Jumblat, warning of a "more dangerous era under the shadow of a biased government bent on rigging the coming elections." "I think we have reached the fringe of demanding Lahoud's resignation and I hope we won't end up in a situation similar to the1952 ouster of former President Bishara el-Khoury by passive resistance," Jumblat said. "We may be on the threshold of a white coup." The Druze chieftain also warned that he would demand the reopening of the unresolved case of his father's assassination in 1977 if the Lahoud regime persists in a week-long intimidation campaign against PSP activists in cases dating back to the 1975-1990 civil war. The elder Jumblat, Kamal, was murdered in a gunfire ambush in the Druze hinterland in the midst of a confrontation with Syria a year after it sent its army to Lebanon ostensibly to end the civil war. The senior Jumblat was then allied with Yasser Arafat's guerrillas. "If they want to reopen files, I also will demand the reopening of my father's file. Let them dare say who killed him," the junior Jumblat said in an indirect reference to a possible Syrian involvement to engineer Kamal Jumblat's assassination