U.S. Pressures Syria To Release Lebanese Prisoners

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WASHINGTON – The State Department is planning to step up pressure on Syria to release nearly 700 Lebanese political prisoners abducted and detained during Lebanon’s civil war.


On Friday, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Dibble met with the director of Support of Lebanese in Detention and Exile, Ghazi Aad, and pledged to raise the issue at the United Nations and in Damascus. “The State Department assured us that the issue of the detainees is a very high priority, and said they would push the Lebanese government on this issue and the Syrian government,” Mr. Aad said yesterday.


A State Department spokesman yesterday confirmed Mr. Aad’s statement. “We are trying to raise international awareness on this issue, and continue to meet with representatives from Lebanon and Syria that can help keep focus on this issue,” Gregory Sullivan said. “The United States believes that the remaining Lebanese political prisoners in Syria should be returned to their families.”


Mr. Aad’s organization claims that about 646 Lebanese citizens are missing in Syria. It has for more than 10 years pressed the United Nations, Syria, and America to help reunite these prisoners with their families, or in the worst case return their bodies for burial. “There is an attempt now to try to resolve this. We are trying to signal that we think now is the time to start moving on this,” Mr. Aad, who also met with top U.N. officials last week, said yesterday.


The move to press Syria on the political prisoners is part of a multipronged strategy to squeeze Syria’s Baathist president, Bashar al-Assad, both diplomatically and militarily. Yesterday the Associated Press reported that fighting had flared up along the Syrian border in the Iraqi town of Qaim, as part of a joint American and Iraqi offensive aimed at halting the flow of foreign terrorists infiltrating Iraq via Syria.


Meanwhile, there is a widening consensus at the United Nations to accept the final report of a U.N.-appointed investigator, Detlev Mehlis, on the murder of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, earlier this year. The report is expected to pin the assassination on someone in Mr. Assad’s inner circle.


Expressing America’s hope for multilateral pressure on Damascus yesterday, a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said, “Syria’s biggest problem is not with the United States but with Syria’s neighbors, whether that be Iraq or Lebanon or … the Palestinian people in terms of their support for rejectionist groups, in terms of their allowing terrorists to transit their territory or whether that is to try to influence the political atmosphere in Lebanon.”


The Mehlis report was originally scheduled for release this month, but Lebanon’s prime minister, Fuad Siniora, said on Sunday that he expects the mandate of the U.N.-authorized investigation into the Hariri assassination to be extended until mid-December.


Currently, Mr. Mehlis is scheduled to report his findings to the U.N. Security Council on October 25. Yesterday a U.N. spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said that he was not aware that an extension was requested by Mr. Mehlis, but that technically it would be possible under the council mandate. A request by Mr. Mehlis for more time “Would have to go to the secretary-general who would have to approve it,” Mr. Dujarric said.


A U.N. official familiar with the situation told The New York Sun that Mr. Siniora wants the extension because as long as Mr. Mehlis’s team is in the country, Lebanese who lived in fear of Syrian retaliation, now feel emboldened to come forward with evidence. “Siniora wants Mehlis in the country as long as possible,” the official, who asked for anonymity because of his position, told the Sun.


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