Riviera vs Citadel: the battle for Lebanon Nadim Shehadi - openDemocracy - The Diigo Meta page

• 22 Oct 06
  

  tony curzon price

  33-day-war lebanon

  • The Riviera wants to revive the model of pre-war Lebanon, centred on Beirut as a cosmopolitan open society which relies for its prosperity on trade and services.
  • In the short term, Hizbollah – representing the Citadel project – has emerged victorious from recent events, not so much because of the military outcome but because of the political messages that flow from it. The Israeli military campaign and the US support for it has – wholly against their professed intentions – certainly vindicated much of the Citadel's argument and dealt a heavy political blow to the Riviera
  • UN Security Council resolution 1559 of September 2004, sponsored by France and the US, can be understood as an assault on the Citadel in response; it called for the disarmament of all local and foreign militias, including Hizbollah, as well as a halt to Syrian interference in internal affairs.
  • The end of eighteen years of Israeli occupation of the area south of the Litani river in May 2000 was a victory for the Citadel, but it also threatened to undercut its legitimacy by depriving it of a cause to struggle for; this made the issue of the Shebaa farms – a strip of territory on the Lebanese-Israeli border which Israel continued to occupy – a cause to maintain the project.

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