BEIRUT (AFP) – The pro-Syrian Hezbollah coalition scored a landslide win in round two of Lebanon’s elections and claimed a clear mandate for anti-Israel guerrillas to keep their weapons in defiance of international calls for disarmament. The mighty Shiite Muslim Hezbollah and the rival movement Amal, campaigning on a pledge to keep on with the armed resistance against Israel, won all 23 seats in southern Lebanon, Interior Minister Hassan Sabaa said Monday. In the first elections to be held since Syria was forced by intense global pressure to end its 29-year military presence in Lebanon in April, the two groups maintained their grip on the volatile southern region still intermittently rocked by border clashes with Israel.
“The south has declared, clearly and before international observers, its backing to the resistance as a path for the past, present and future,” said Amal’s influential chief Nabih Berri, also Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker.
“Even the rival candidates are resistance fighters,” he said at a press conference, rejecting calls for “disarming the resistance.”
Hezbollah number two Sheikh Naim Qassem told reporters after Sunday’s vote that “the southerners wanted to state clearly a ‘yes’ for a unified stand toward the resistance and for the unity of Lebanon.”
“They gave a clear message to the foreigners, particularly to the Americans, that the people of Lebanon are unified over the resistance and the independence” of the country, he said.
Amal groups fought Israeli troops after they first invaded Lebanon in 1978, but the flame of the resistance was later primarily carried by Hezbollah during the last 15 years of Syrian domination.
Hezbollah, the only armed group not required to lay down its arms after Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war because it was spearheading the resistance, has vowed to continue to fight for the disputed Shebaa Farms border district.
But the issue could prove to be a headache for the government that emerges after the elections, with a UN resolution last year sponsored by France and the United States calls for the disarming of all militias.
Hezbollah officials have repeatedly accused the administration of US
‘ name=c3> President George W. Bush — which maintains Hezbollah on its terror list — of interference in Lebanese internal affairs.
“The south… one voice for the protection of the resistance and its arms,” read the headline of As-Safir newspaper.
“On the 23rd anniversary of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and amid tough pressures on Lebanon to end its resistance, the south scored a high turnout which came as a popular and political umbrella to protect the resistance and its weapons,” said the paper.
The Al-Liwaa newspaper also noted that “the electoral machines of Hezbollah and Amal succeeded in turning the elections into a referendum for national choices, mainly the protection of the resistance.”
With the two groups also likely to secure other seats in other regions in Lebanon’s four-round vote, Amal and Hezbollah are expected to maintain a total of 17 and 12 MPs respectively in the 128-member parliament.
Hezbollah and Amal — which once fought against each others during the civil war — have maintained an electoral alliance in successive legislative polls since the end of the civil war.
Turnout for the two constituencies in southern Lebanon was around 45 percent, according to preliminary estimates on Sunday.
The first stage of the elections last Sunday was won by anti-Syrian groups headed by Saad Hariri, the son of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri whose February assassination triggered a massive political upheaval.
Sunday’s vote was held just days after the killing of a prominent anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir, which like the murder of Hariri is blamed by many on Beirut’s pro-Syrian leaders and their political masters in Damascus.
Lebanon has some three million eligible voters, 59 percent Muslim and 41 percent Christian, who are voting over four rounds for 128 parliamentary seats to be shared equally by the Christian and Muslim communities.
