BEIRUT (AFP)
Lebanese lawmakers gather on Tuesday for the first time in nearly a year for a highly contentious presidential poll, with members of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority demanding increased security after one of their number was killed by a car bomb this week.
A military source told AFP on Sunday that security would be boosted from Monday around the parliament building where the special session to elect a new president is due to take place.
Leftist parliamentarian Elias Attallah, a member of the west-backed ruling coalition – also known as March 14 -- demanded "several measures to protect the lives of deputies" for the vote.
"Such measures must continue to be applied until a new president is elected," he told AFP, adding that "it is the duty of members of the majority to attend Tuesday's session in parliament." |
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Concrete measures Attallah said concrete security measures must be taken around the perimeter of the parliament building in central Beirut, on roads leading to it and also for MPs' vehicles.
"In order for the security to be total, the problem of the camp must be solved," he said, referring to the tent city set up by the Shiite Hezbollah-led opposition in the city center near government offices and parliament.
"The opposition must get rid of this encampment since it has renounced its claim of wanting a government of national unity and is now concentrating on efforts to find a consensus candidate for the presidency," Attallah said.
The vote to replace current pro-Syrian head of state Emile Lahoud will come less than a week after the assassination of MP Antoine Ghanem and four others in a car bombing.
Ghanem's killing, the latest in a spate of attacks against prominent anti-Syrian figures, was seen by the ruling Western-backed majority as an ominous warning from Damascus ahead of the vote.
Ghanem was the eighth member of the anti-Syrian majority to be assassinated since the February 2005 murder of five-time prime minister and billionaire tycoon Rafiq Hariri.
Syria, which was forced to end three decades of domination in Lebanon after the Hariri murder, has denied involvement in that killing and all of the subsequent ones.
Ghanem's death reduced the government's support in parliament to 68 out of the remaining 127 MPs.
Analysts believe the highly tense presidential poll will determine whether the country moves forward or plunges into chaos.
"These elections are not mainly about the presidency," Amal
Saad-Ghorayeb, a political analyst with the Beirut office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told AFP.
"This is really a struggle for Lebanon's identity, its foreign allegiances and that's why this is considered perhaps the most deeply polarized conflict that has ever existed in Lebanon." |
