Lebanon's Aoun says to run for parliament

By Nadim Ladki

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Anti-Syrian Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun said on Sunday he would run in Lebanon's parliamentary election despite difficulties in forging an electoral alliance with Muslim opposition leaders. The fiery retired general said talks on linking up with Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and Saad al-Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, had produced no agreement on a joint ticket for the polls.

He said time was running out for a deal between the three men, the most prominent figures in the disparate opposition that helped end Syria's 29-year military presence in Lebanon.

The Feb. 14 assassination of Hariri's father, former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, triggered a wave of peaceful street protests in Lebanon and intense international pressure that forced Damascus to withdraw its forces last month.

Tide of history will again break over Martyrs' Square

The Sunday Independent , May 22, 2005

By Robert Fisk

In Beirut last week they announced the winners of a competition to redevelop Martyrs' Square, which had once been Lebanon's civil war front line and on the edge of which stands the tomb of the murdered ex-prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.

There were two remarkable things about this event. The first was the brilliant decision by the redevelopment firm Solidere - in which Hariri held 10 percent of the shares - to announce the results not in one of Beirut's swank hotels, but in a war-ruined shopping centre and cinema complex that still lies next to the square.

The great cone-shaped wreckage - known as the "egg" to Beirutis - was washed out, shored up and carpeted so that when we arrived to hear the winners we had to walk between walls torn up by so many bullets they looked like Irish lace. Amid the literal ruins of war, we were invited to contemplate a new future.