 A Hizb Allah cabinet minister has said Lebanon must respond to UN Security Council pressure to disarm the group by stating that it is defending the country against Israel, and is not a militia. On Monday, the 15-member Security Council demanded that the Lebanese government should disarm Hizb Allah's guerrillas in line with a resolution the council adopted 16 months ago. Mohammed Fneish, the energy and water minister, said on Tuesday: "This is a continuation of the American pressure to achieve the goal of enabling Israel to continue to occupy [Lebanese and Arab] territories and to expose Lebanon to Israeli schemes. It is an insult to all Lebanese that the resistance is called a militia.
| "It's... ummm... something else." |
"If we tell them this is a resistance and not a militia, it'll prevent such interference in our affairs."
"What's the diffo between a resistance and a militia?"
"Turbans. We got green turbans." |
Fneish's call is central to a government crisis that saw him and four other Shia Muslim ministers boycott cabinet sessions in December. They linked their return to a demand that Hizb Allah's armed wing be considered legitimate and not a militia that must disarm. The ministers, all pro-Syrian, suspended attending cabinet sessions over a cabinet vote calling on the UN inquiry into last year's assassination of Rafik al-Hariri the former Lebanese prime minister, to include other political killings. |