Skip to main content

Hezbollah: Talks over soldiers under way

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Tuesday that "serious negotiations" were under way over the fate of two Israeli soldiers whose July 12 capture by his militant group sparked a month of brutal fighting in Lebanon.In a three-hour taped television interview, Nasrallah said a negotiator appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been meeting with Hezbollah and Israeli officials.


Image hosted by Webshots.com
by advokatku
He would not provide details about the negotiations, but told Hezbollah's TV station, "We have reached a stage of exchanging ideas, proposals or conditions."Officials from the Israeli Defense Ministry and Foreign Ministry were not available for immediate comment.Nasrallah has offered to exchange the two Israeli soldiers for Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, but Israel has repeatedly refused. Although the U.N. resolution that ended the 34-day war called for the soldiers' unconditional release, Israel has exchanged prisoners in the past."They are serious negotiations ... It's better to keep it away from the media ... this issue is on track. We are moving ahead.


Image hosted by Webshots.com
by advokatku
How long does it take? It's up to the nature of the negotiations, " Nasrallah said.In the same interview, Nasrallah warned that any attempts by an international force to disarm Hezbollah would transform Lebanon into another Iraq or Afghanistan.Nasrallah said there are fears that the beefed up U.N. peacekeeping force in south Lebanon would be transformed into a multinational force whose mandate would be to disarm Hezbollah."This is dangerous and will lead to transforming Lebanon into another Afghanistan and another Iraq," Nasrallah said in taped interview on Hezbollah's television station Al-Manar.A U.N.-brokered cease-fire that ended the 34-day Israel-Hezbollah on Aug. 14 does not give a direct mandate to the peacekeepers to take Hezbollah's weapons by force, unless the guerrillas are encountered in the buffer zone along the border with Israel.A resolution passed by the U.N. in 2004 did call for the disarmament of all militias in Lebanon. But Hezbollah has refused to lay down its arms, and the 15,000 Lebanese troops patrolling the buffer zone in south Lebanon along with U.N. peacekeepers don't have the political will to take the group's weapons by force.Nasrallah expressed concern that deteriorating security could force Lebanon's Western-backed government to ask U.N. peacekeepers to take stronger actions than their current mandate dictates.Since the war ended, Beirut has witnessed a string of minor attacks, including a grenade fired at a downtown building that houses a dance club. The explosion, which was near U.N. offices, injured six people, broke windows and damaged cars.Many people believe the attacks had political or sectarian overtones, but no suspects have been publicly named.Nasrallah said Hezbollah, despite attempts to keep arms from being smuggled to the guerrilla group, has "regained all its vigor."

Image hosted by Webshots.com
by advokatku
The group has 33,000 rockets, he said - up from the 22,000 he said his guerrillas had on Sept. 22."The resistance in Lebanon is strong, cohesive, able and ready, and they will not be able to undermine it no matter what the challenges are," he said.The Hezbollah leader also accused the United States of being responsible for continued violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying U.S. policy in the region has failed."Afghanistan is a failure ... In Iraq, there is clear failure on the security, military and political levels ... Who shoulders responsibility? It's the American administration and the occupation forces in control of the situation," he said. Nasrallah said America's plans in the Middle East face "failure, frustration and a state of collapse," and predicted the U.S. would be forced to leave the region in the future - just like it left Vietnam after the war there three decades ago.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents  By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s.   During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization.   Even though NU was one of the ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith.   Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy.   But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...